QOTD: Flee, Go Underground, or Give In?

They’re coming, and if you want to hang on to what’s near and dear to you, you’ve got to make a decision. And fast.

Well, maybe give it a few years.

As lawmakers and wannabe lawmakers go hog wild on proposed internal combustion bans in Europe, the idea has taken hold in North America. Different culture, different travel distances, different landscapes, but the same rhetoric. Same solutions. Same challenges, too, though there might be a few additional ones over here.

When they come for your car, what will you do?

Oh, you’ll still be allowed to buy a new vehicle, alright — it just won’t have any cylinders pumping beneath the hood. Under proposals issued by the Justice Democrats in the U.S. and the Green Party in Canada, all internal combustion passenger vehicles would have to disappear from new car lots in 10 years. A lot of other things will also have to disappear to reach the goals of both manifes- er, proposals. But that’s another matter.

Given the astronomical amounts of cash needed to fund the other policies stuffed into each plan like a legislative Kinder egg, it’s hard to imagine EV subsidies will be of the sky-high, I-don’t-care-as-long-as-I’m-getting-all-this-cash variety. The free ride will be found at your local college, not in your driveway.

It’s hard not to think of that Rush song at times like these. Frankly, I don’t relish the thought of having vehicular choice taken away from me any more than I like the idea of watching Jim Hackett try on a halter top and a pair of Daisy Dukes. It’s nice to choose between environmental stewardship and a vehicle that satisfies other needs, including versatility, range, price, and that visceral feeling of being in control of an amazingly complex mechanical beast. A vehicle with a throaty (or any) exhaust.

Maybe EVs will be everything we could ever dream of in a decade’s time. Maybe they won’t. But there’s a set of crosshairs placed over the ninety-eight-point-something-percent of new vehicles sold today by people who might eventually get what they want.

Sure, you might be able to keep your existing car come 2030, but driving it to work on the daily? Entering urban cores? This remaining fleet could be, as they say, problematic. Owners might find their movements severely restricted. Maybe these reviled relics will even become the automotive equivalent of a “wall hanger” firearm — something that, while nice to look at, is deemed unfit for actual use.

Should such laws come to pass, do you plan to go gently into that good, green night, or is your plan to rage against the dying of the (check engine) light? What form will your resistance take?

[Image: Murilee Martin/TTAC]