Congratulations on your forward planning! No one wants to buy a car, ‘Och Aye’ means ‘Nay’ and Tibet's treasure will rule the world!
Why...
Do Western Governments think no further than the next sound bite and company executives are unable to see past their annual bonus and the specifications on their next BMW? We need to understand that long-term planning is more than just remembering to set the TiVo or Skybox to record every episode of Homeland. Former Chairman of the People's Republic of China President Chou En Lai was asked once what he thought of the 1789 French Revolution. He replied "It's too early to say." Take cars. For my generation a car was aspirational on a number of levels. Along with total independence and the sheer exhilaration of driving was added the heady mix of sex and cool. We had no mobile phone, let alone Facebook, so you had to physically visit people in your car. When you did, normally the only chance of 'hooking up' was in the back seat, so 'the cooler the wheels, the sexier the heels'. My and millions of other's youth was full of parked cars that wobbled like jello and was why Lucifer had a bumper crop of souls from 1949- 1990. We gladly traded them for four wheels. Three generations drooled at the prospect of owning a car....and behind it all stood behemoths like Ford, General Motors and Chrysler down to (then) independents like Ferrari, Maserati, Lotus and Lamborghini. All employed a zillion people in their own businesses as well as the countless ancillaries from advertising agencies, tyre companies and design studios to the local gas station and body shops. Now everyone seems taken by surprise that the current generation are not really interested in cars; sales in the developed world are plummeting and we are heading towards automotive employment Armageddon. How could this be??????? A suggestion? Maybe something to do with the fact over the past twenty years successive Governments have made motoring as appetising as a waiter sneezing over a burger? All the fun and skill of driving has been replaced by mad costs, nannying computers and insane road planning. Roadworks stretch into the horizon and traffic police spend three hours investigating a mild knock of two cars in rush hour. Insurance companies treat kids with one minor infraction on their license as being as dangerous as Kim Jong Un with a migraine. George Orwell could not have imagined the level of surveillance, nor Creusus the level of tax on fuel and the Maquis de Sade would have quivered at the endless constriction of traffic jams. SPEED KILLS is flashed everywhere. Speed never killed anyone. Stopping does. The Government (and so mass media) took sex out of cars.......and are now panicking that no one wants to buy them. Did anyone for the teensiest moment think or say... "OK, environmentally we need to tighten things up, but maybe turning one of the largest employment sectors in the world into a pariah might make Mr. Magoo's short-sightedness look like 20/20 vision?"
