When will it extinct?

Have you ever get the feeling that, in the near future, some of the things we see around us might not exist anymore? May it be things that are good or that are bad.

Paper lanterns were once seen all over the streets during my childhood days. Beautifully coloured and in all sorts of funny shapes and sizes.

But at one point, a kid gets burned and people start making battery-operated lanterns and the availability of paper lanterns slowly decrease. Not those made of full paper and in a cylindrical shape, but those with shapes using clear coloured paper.

Now, when I look at the automotive industry, I feel the same sense of extinction happening.

A lot of people, with deep insight into the industry, predict that one day supercars and hypercars will no longer exist. And they based it on the situations around the world.

The economy crisis. The environmental problems. The endless war on speed. All these factors would one day, in one way or another, contribute to the extinction.

Fantastic machines that push the boundaries of what is possible; in engineering and design.

But as much as we disagree, outside factors can and will influence the development of technologies.

Nowadays, we see manufacturers pushing for green car projects, bio-fuel, electric motors, hybrid engines and solar powered vehicles.

There’s nothing wrong with those developments. We can always be more environmentally conscious. But humans should never stop pushing the boundaries of speed and technology.

But how do you tell that to a parent who has just lost his/her child to a speeding offender and, in the midst of grieve, went on a war path to protest against fast cars and to force the law to lower speed limits. They will obviously win the sympathy of the public. How do we go against such a situation?

Manufacturers are beginning to downsize their vehicles in order to penetrate the much more dense compact car market. And what causes this? The economic crisis drove people to limit spending and space constraints in urban areas make smaller cars an ideal choice compared to, lets say, driving a Ferrari.

People are becoming very practical. And practicality is sometimes bad.

Supercars and hypercars are NOT practical. It’s not meant to be practical. It will not do a perfect reverse park manoeuvre nor will it take a U-turn properly. It will irritate you during traffic (if you’re not good at controlling) and will kill you if you pushed it to the limit and lose control.

Those stiff racing suspensions will give you a sore bottom if you’ve been sitting in it for hours on end on roads filled with potholes and for some hypercars, a radio and air conditioning isn’t a given option. You get fewer luxuries than, lets say, a Mercedes C200 but you pay up to 10 times more.

But a lot of people love that. They love to be insane for that few hours when they walk into a dealer and purchase a really fast car. The speed limit on a highway is 110km/h? Who cares. We’ll do a 220km/h, on third gear.

It’s the adrenaline rush of pushing the finest machines to its capabilities. Much like they do with bullet trains.

If a kid decides to trespass into the tracks and gets killed, will the parents protest to ban trains that travel too fast?

So I say, let some insanity live in this world. Let us not take away things that we have once seen and experienced and leave the future generations without any of such an experience.

Slowly, good things will come to an end. And we are the ones who will bring it to its ending.