The Daily mail

The daily mail, bringing it every day, rain, snow, sleet or shine.

I read an article this morning over on petrolicious.com that reminded me of a conversation I had about a vehicle.

The daily driver, I love the hotrods, classics, restored,  modified, vintage, really everything thing that looks fun and cool. The old ones that we labor on to keep going and get going.

However it's the one that we spend our day in traffic getting to the store and work  that gets more of our time. The new car as some may refer to it as.

For me the new car is twenty years newer than the old car, and at that it's still forty years old. I think it's in better shape then me for kicking around the upper hemisphere for four decades. It's loud, heavy and strangly dependable. It has issues and leaks, but hey, it's middle aged. It's only left me stranded a few times and every other time it's got me where I needed to be.

It lacks the refined interior of a newer vehicle, but nothing a trip to the local wrecking yard and a little creativity can't overcome.

What got me thinking about all this was having to get new tabs and the taxes that go along with that.

My heavy metal box pays a weight charge while an electric nightmare of bad driving gets a tax break. And in that thought I had another thought, this is usually how things get out of hand for me.

I know no one is saying it, but I'm pretty sure someone is getting a kickback on the whole lithium ion battery thing. With that poses the question, are these things like the rechargeable batteries I had in every toy growing up in the eighties?

Will they eventually where out and need to be recycled? How long will they last? What if one of these batteries leaks while your taking your children to school?

The real question is what will happen with these cars in forty or fifty years? Engineered obsolescence, nothing is built to last, they built to sell.

They tell me that the environment suffers because my truck has been driving for forty years. I think that more people should update old cars and restore them, in essence recycling them instead of throwing them aside to get the next new thing.

I've kept forty cars from polluting the roads and counting.