Swan Dreams-2 (Porsche ''Ugly Duckling'' syndrome)

Very recently, I stumbled across a lengthy enthusiast magazine paean to the boundary-stretching 2015 Porsche 918 Hybrid (Weissach) Spyder, that dual-motor rocket on four wheels that began as a concept car but was eventually produced in a limited run of exactly 918 copies (so I am told).

While reading this, I, a person who has all of my life struggled with a contradictory dual-nature…half technophile and half Zen monk…suffered a brief moment of apostate apoplexy, carefully refrained from swallowing my tongue and paused to consider the enormous ramifications inherent in the ‘making available’ of such an outrageously advanced and technologically complex ‘street machine’ to any member of the consumer public willing and/or able to fork over a cool one-million, two-hundred thousand or so clams to tuck said machine into their personal stable.

Having been a driver since I was 16 (a date now some 63 years or so in my past) of both motorcycles (Japanese bikes only, thankew furry moosh) and automobiles, as well as an enthusiastic SFO Region member of SCCA, turn marshal, race-worker, club racer and marque devotee (Fiat Abarth and Porsche) with street experience on the roads of a dozen or more different countries (including China and Saudi Arabia), I am sufficiently confident of my automotive street creds to pontificate a bit on certain subjects, hence...

Back in the 70s, whilst an internee in what is today’s People’s Republic of Berzerkeley’s Concentration Camp for Leftist Progressive Kids (UCB), I found myself particularly drawn, as were many of my peers at that time, to the socio-economic philosophy of English economist E.F. Schumacher. Schumacher, who was born in Germany (Bonn) spent most of his professional life in England, after relocating to Old Blighty just before Winston and Adolf came to first blows. His sister, interestingly, was the wife of famed German theoretical physicist Wernher Heisenberg, but like all things Austro-German (including, most especially, the Germanic tribes and their Porsche cars), Ernst Friedrich Schumacher’s attitudes and special-interest foci in life mirrored that no-nonsense, exactitude of behavioral expectation that centuries of Germanic culture have instilled in the indigenous Celts of that mid-European region.

Schumacher’s contributions to human society were diffuse and diverse in many disciplines, throughout his life, but today he remains chiefly notable to most as the author of a singular volume titled ‘Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People mattered.’ In the thesis of his selected title, Schumacher questioned some basic, bedrock assumptions of American life, notably those that one finds most firmly entrenched in the Great State of Texas today: that BIGGER is BETTER.

As an impressionable young man (who isn’t when they’re young?), I was quickly drawn to this seminal work of his, with its ‘critical questions of size.’ Chief among his arguments put forward was that ‘bigger is in fact not better’, affirming his studied belief that smaller units work far more effectively and efficiently than larger ones…up to a certain definable point…and that anything whose size, substance and/or nature outstrips the basic requisites of human existence is merely wretched excess. [Take that, Hummers, Cadillacs, car and real estate flippers, and investment speculators!]

Without belaboring or needlessly delving into the specific core of Schumacher’s philosophy, everything that exceeded our immediate needs was merely superfluous ostentation and amounted to little more than needlessly vain ego-display.

I mention this here, mindful of that stunning Porsche 918 Spyder that with its dual-motor configuration pumps out raw power ranging from between 700 and 800 BHP, and enables the car to go from standing stock-still to 60 MPH in less time than it takes to feel a cigarette burn on one’s fingers (not that I smoke, mind).

While that mind-boggling proof-of-concept supercar was indeed just that (mostly), its influence was reflected on the continuing quest by Messrs. Porsche for what to me is most often an absolute, wretched exercise in automotive masturbation: a shared obsession among both the industrial caterers to the wealthier consumer public and those who are able to afford these ever-more outrageously powerful and fast road rockets. In my Schumacherian view, it is a mind-altering disease that we can no longer afford to tolerate in the world, as sheer propagative density effects of more and more human progeny accumulates.

Contra-thetically, a review of Western behavioral characteristics readily reveals that “If you build it, they shall come.” So regardless of whether owning a (for example) $200K Porsche 718 RS, once it has been loaded up with ALL the ‘available’ goodies, or a rare copy of the roughly $2 MM 918 2015 Weissach Spyder, any time there are gobs of power to be availed (irrespective of cost), a certain segment of the public will predictably plunk out obscene amounts of money for it!

I recently had a modest, closer-to-home example of this experience when, after years of accustomed familiarity of my daily, general purpose automotive ‘mule’ (a 1995 Hyundai Elantra GLS Wagon), with its modest 1.8 liter, 4-cylinder FI engine, I took my 2005 Hyundai Santa Fe (with its 3.5 liter V-6 engine) out for a tune-up. The comparison, even if among these two modern VW Bug simulacrums, is apt, since despite my avowed need to stick to a modest mode of daily transport (the 1995 Elantra), I found the gobs of extra power fatally alluring. I can’t even imagine what sitting behind the wheel of a 2015 918 Spyder on the Nürburgring would do to the mild-manner little old Schumacher devotee that I am.

But, mindful of the Jekel/Hyde transformation that such situations impose upon on just about anyone who suddenly finds oneself in an immensely powerful vehicle, it is no great mystery why speed limits in today’s America are worse than a poor joke. I mean, these state-of-the-art vehicles are so engineered for unmitigated power that it’s actually difficult deliberately TRYING to keep one’s speed down in one!

OK, enough preachy blathering here. After reading all about that 918 Weissach Spyder today (and canvassing all of the top-of-the-line Porsche ‘streetables’ being sold this year) and despite my Schumacherian mode, I felt a strong need to retreat to the peacefully cloistered sanctuary of my car, ‘Jezibel’, to masticate over all of this awareness in the quietude of its stall. Although it now has closer to the pumped-up power and capability of an ‘improved’ 2.0 liter, with all its little engine mods (courtesy of the previous owner), it is still a reasonably mild mount and one that I drive constantly aware of the automotive social contract that dictates the need to be ever courteous and considerate of others one drives among, but also of pedestrians and unpowered vehicles that must safely ‘share the road’, according to Caifornica’s skewed determinations of vehicular safety.

Sadly, I look around (figuratively speaking) at today’s consumer public and continually find examples of the unthoughtful and unmindful who aren’t happy until they’ve gone into hyperdebt overdrive to get one of Porsche’s latest water-cooled mini-street-rockets, and mourn the long-past days of sportscars that, while ‘just enough’ in the power context, aesthetically mirrored that wonderful age of reasonable expectations that was the post-war era of the 50s, 60s and 70s (hello Porsche 550A and 356). at such times, I find myself reassuring my modest little 914-4 (non-verbally, of course) that it should feel proud that it is a direct offspring of those formative days, and also, I further remind myself, a purer ‘direct’ ancestor of the beautiful, mid-engine Boxter and Cayman machines that are such pleasing eye candy, than the most expensive Porsche Dihydrous-Monoxide-cooled models now available!

It wasn’t the poor, much maligned ‘POOR-SHE’ 914’s fault that it didn’t benefit from the current, constantly improving (and serenely beautiful) Boxter/Cayman effect but rather a hardly predictable socio-political fluke of the 70s that had eventually consigned it to undeserved obloquy. Had the car indeed been given a better chance (particularly the delightful 914-6) to survive the decades and overcome the snarky disdain of self-described ‘Porsche purists’, who knows what it would be today!

Meanwhile, back to the usual safe-refuge of Swan Dreams that ‘Ugly Ducklings’ are so noted for, as our mutually quantified, mixed molecular cells (Jezibel’s and mine) run screaming for the hills, as America continues to spiral down from its formerly higher world regard into an obloquy of a different sort…