The Weekly Screed (#753)

The Greatest Thing Since...
by David Benjamin

“Make a date today to see the U.S.A.
“And see it in a Chevrolet.”
                        — Dinah Shore

LAS VEGAS — Canned beer, go to your room.

Sliced bread, eat your heart out.

You have been eclipsed.

‘Cause Chevy has an EV!

(Electrified vehicle.)

This is big — so big that Bernie and Donald would call it yooge. I mean, YOOGE!

I’m wondering, why weren’t Bernie and Donald, Hillary, Ted and Marco here last week at the (huge) Consumer Electronics Show? They should’ve been because this is immense, colossal, presidential. (Plus, Nevada’s an early primary state.) It’s so big that General Motors chief Mary Barra — the First Lady of Detroit, Motown’s Big Momma, Empress of the EV — came all the way out to the desert, in the rain, to introduce the historic Chevrolet Bolt (that’s the Bolt, not the Volt, which is passé, last century’s semi-EV), to CES masses so massive that they snaked through the Westgate Hotel, stretching across the vast grounds of the Las Vegas Convention Center onto Paradise and all the broad boulevards of Sin City, and on, into the desert as far as Boulder City, Barstow, Marrakesh.

I mean, huge!

Even without Mary’s presence here, I could tell the Bolt EV’s unveiling was really, really ginormous from the sound effects. Mary was interrupted, repeatedly—  deafeningly — by seat-rattling eruptions of biker-bar Heavy Metal, crashing through the Westgate Theater and loosening the fillings in the salivating mouths of 500,000 eager, ready-to-believe CES pilgrims, including hordes of martini-bound Mad Men in their shiny gray suits and the eternally loyal legion of high-tech weenies in their ballcaps, Mohawks and flip-flops.

Above the roar of a hundred 50-foot woofers, Mary Barra boasted the unprecedented virtues of the miracle Bolt. Encomia poured from her lips like a pryroclastic flow from a Mackinac Island volcano-top. The Bolt has, tucked in its tummy, a humongous battery pack (it’s huge), seething with enough energy to propel this sucker 200 breakneck miles non-stop, after which a mere 60 minutes at the plug will re-charge it back to 80 percent of full strength. Overnight, and it’s ready for a fresh 200. Vroom!

And that ain’t all, Parnelli! This baby has flat floors (no hump), back-bumper video that feeds straight into the rearview mirror and a ten-inch touchscreen that guarantees both increased and reduced driver distraction simultaneously. You can actually crash into a bridge abutment straight ahead while monitoring everything going on to the left, right and behind, ‘cause the Bolt has cameras everywhere — and ten airbags so that when you hit that bridge it might not kill your family.

Wait. There’s more.

Bolt has a low-draw Bluetooth capability, enabling a Wi-Fi hotspot, and it has both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, making it a sort of teen-texting orgy on wheels. Plus, there’s On Star 4G LTE (whatever that is), a smartphone app that provides remote start, charge-state updates, climate control, service alerts and EV-centric mapping. And you don't have to be in the car to do any of this stuff. You can send your Bolt off by itself to play in traffic. Plus, this creampuff is only 30 grand (if you apply to Uncle Sam for a $7,500 tax green-energy tax bonus). Not only all that, but you also get “gamification,” the thrilling option that “pits Bolt drivers against each other for green driving awards or rankings.”

Whoa, Nellie!

No wonder the vast CES crowd sat numbed and silent in their seats and filed out meekly after Mary finally buttoned her lips and the turbo-throbbing trade-show synthemusic subsided, leaving behind only the piercing hum of falsetto tinnitus in 10,000 ravaged eardrums.

Or, maybe…

It’s just another car.

Electric, yes. But we’ve had electricity since Tom Edison’s bulb. And the Bolt’s electricity is likely generated by a coal plant spewing dark clouds into the ozone, or an oil furnace, or a salmon-killing dam a hundred miles away from a “green” garage equipped with Bolt’s special optional home-recharging unit.

A car with a 200-mile leash and then you have to go to bed and wait?

America wants this?

Maybe. But this is Dinah Shore’s USA, where every redblooded gearhead guy harbors in his heart the subversive dream of chucking it all, climbing into his Camaro and driving — all day and all night, 85 miles an hour, with Steppenwolf on the stereo turned All The Way Up — toward the far horizon, to end up sucking down rum punches with a beach babe in Key West, or matching boilermakers with Athabasca Dick in an Anchorage dive.

Is there really a demand, even among accountants and actuaries, for a “green-driving,” speed-limit, battery-life drag race? Are we all hankering for Hollywood to launch a series of Slow and Serious car movies?

Or was Mary in Las Vegas to warn us that henceforth we’re all going to have to look for our cheap thrills and macho validation elsewhere than behind the wheel?

Was it Mary’s job to break the news, with the accompaniment of stroboscopic explosions and HD Imax-video razzle-dazzle, that the front-seat party is over and the gearshift is no longer America’s most-loved, best-polished phallic symbol?

Is Mary stage-whispering to us that John Milner really is dead, his yellow deuce coupe has been recycled into windmill blades, and there ain’t nobody cruising anywhere anymore?

Did Mary come from Detroit to deliver the news noisily in Vegas — world capitol of excess, extravagance, waste and profligacy — that the time has come for every one of us to take our foot off the gas, lower our expectations and kick our smelly habits, lest we end up knee-deep in polluted sea-water, coughing up lung-chunks as we consume ourselves into Jurassic oblivion?

Does the Grim Reaper drive an EV?