People still pay for this?
I'm not entirely certain who runs the show at Time anymore, but you'd think that somewhere in the organization, there exists an editor who thought letting some whiney, ignorant twit write this mess was an especially bad idea. But given the bowl-circling reality that is Time, they probably fired the guy for saying as much.
The "author" in question-- and given the eighth-grade grammar and composition of the blurbs in question, I use the term loosely-- manages to espouse what I can only imagine is a blend of the sort of automotive "experience" cultivated from sitting in the back seat when mom and dad went somewhere, combined with the requisite do as I say, not as I do mentality of your average "journalist".
Our less than informed author would have us believe, for example, that the Ford Model T was an evil, wicked little car, because:
Uh-oh. Here comes trouble. Let's stipulate that the Model T did everything that the history books say: It put America on wheels, supercharged the nation's economy and transformed the landscape in ways unimagined on the day the first black-only Tin Lizzy bucked and trembled off the assembly line. Well, that's just the problem, isn't it? The Model T — whose mass production technique was the work of engineer William C. Klann, who had visited a slaughterhouse's "disassembly line" — conferred to Americans the notion of automobility as something akin to natural law, a right endowed by our Creator. A century later, the consequences of putting every living soul on gas-powered wheels are piling up, from the air over our cities to the sand under our soldiers' boots. And by the way, with its blacksmithed body panels and crude instruments, the Model T was a piece of junk, the Yugo of its day.
One struggles to think of a worse vehicle at a worse time. Introduced shortly after 9/11 — an event whose causes were tangled in America's unquenchable thirst for oil — the Hummer H2 sent all the wrong signals. It was/is arrogantly huge, overtly militaristic, openly scornful of the common good.
"But I'm a car guy! I restored this MGA myself! I say all the right things about Lucas Electronics and all the stuff about the Trabant I know is true because I copied it from Wikipedia!"
... BEAT ....
<slap>