The Twenty-First Century Car - Essay Example

However, the problem with such views is not that they overstate the car’s imagery, nor even that they undervalue its function. It rests in the bogus criticisms that the critics make between utility and imagery, reason and want. If cars were adored, and at times flaunted in lavish ways, it was mainly due to the fact that they give actual benefits and enhanced the lives of their owners in greatly prized ways. The liberties that go together with the car were actual liberties. They can merely be grasped if we first make sense of the narrower and more controlled reality from which the car transported us.

Some people, especially those living in their own practical worlds, at times laugh at the enjoyment of individuals with their cars. However, it does not give benefit to the goal of environmentalism or healthier urban areas to indicate that large numbers of people can surrender their cars and just use the services of public transportation, and suffer no great loss in individual happiness and comfort. Physical mobility, the freedom guaranteed by the car to travel anytime, anywhere, may be in the end self-damaging and unhealthy.

It may have to be reduced for the sake of our children and the world’s wellbeing. However, it is useless to attempt to inform those who will endure that drawback that it is actually no loss in any way. Hence, if we would like to make sense of people’s love and adoration for their cars we should initiate a sincere and unbiased analysis of how cars have improved and, at the same time, weakened our lives. We should defy the drive to put together a profit and loss account until we have enabled all the points of view that revolve around the car to express their familiarity, and voice out their frustrations and ambitions, their pains and delights.

Similar to an interpersonal relationship, our relationship with the car opened out, steadily, from its initial moment of isolated wonder through informal contact, obsession and profound attachment to undervalued acquaintance. At times, unfortunately, the relationship weakened or disintegrated into clashing differences. By emphasizing the imagery of cars some people think that there was something illogical, or too much, in the attachment of people to their cars. This kind of love only seldom pays heed to rationality.

Cars are useful items, but they do not interest reason. Since the crisis in oil supply, when cars were viewed as foes of the public, it became usual to see car owners as the fool of car makers and oil firms. By attractive promotional campaign and designs, they had convinced some people that without a car they are insignificant people. People who dislike automobile usually take on a disdainful, sarcastic attitude towards car lovers. They move effortlessly from appraisal of the stylistic exaggerations of some people and the mental overtones of car ads to wide generalizations about self-centeredness of the average car owner.

They usually confound the imagery employed to sell cars, or to heighten the attractiveness of a specific model, with the charm and function of the car itself. Humanity’s history is presented not just in words or speech, but also in objects. Our world is a materialistic one, and a great deal of our lives is filled with the quest for material things. However, every era revels or rejoices the things it creates, and furnishes them with more than physical value. Ancient people created cathedrals; the emergence of the state was actualized in