Damn you Jeremy Clarkson!@&^&^&^&^%#&@!!!

I managed to get through the first fortysomething years of my life blissfully unaware of and uncaring about cars. My automotive expertise was limited to a rag bag of eclectic trivia:

1. To stop a Valiant Charger fishtailing, my schoolfriend's brother would load a sack of Briquettes in the boot 
2. The Blues Brothers film includes a couple of good car chases
3. Ralph Sarich's Orbital Engine was always going to annoy the oil industry
4. Rod Stewart had a fondness for leary Italian sportscars - I knew they were Maserati because he mentioned them in the lyrics of Italian Girls on "Never a Dull Moment"
5. My mother would only ever be pulled over for speeding when the vicar was in the car with us

I had always thought of cars as a way of getting from A to B. End of story. Or so I thought. And then I discovered Top Gear.At first the effects were subtle;

• I realised that the interior of our Subaru Forester was a bit too plastic
• I discovered that the exciting car chase in Ronin included a maneuver called a four wheel drift (often considered to be the best ever filmed)
• I began to notice vast numbers of silver Mercedes in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne
• I started looking up prices on the Audi website
• Then I found I was starting to memorize model numbers of numbers of BMW's!!!!!

 

So it was really no surprise to me that I took some interest in the types of auto on the road in the US. Again, it began with curiosities; I was interested to see that Coca Cola has a fleet of hybrid electric delivery trucks. 

And I had a Sesame Street moment when I saw my first American School Bus in real life (outside the Seattle Art Gallery).

In general though, most American cars seemed pretty dull; all those Chevy sedans, Pontiacs and the occassional lumbering Lincoln Continental.

That was until we got to Arizona, Four Corners territory, the Navajo Nation, domain of the pickup truck. Everywhere you looked, pickup trucks, massive GMC's, huge Chevvys and most gigantic and popular of them all, the DODGE RAM! The name deserves capitalisation, somehow everytime I saw one (and to John's consternation), I felt compelled to shout the name out loud. We were driving a Chevvy Equinox SUV, which was a vast, heavy tank of a thing compared to Australian 4x4's; but seeing the chrome ramshead logo of a DODGE RAM! in the rear view mirror as it roared down on you was a fearsome sight indeed. 

Now the average Navajo is not wealthy, in fact the Navajo Nation is a region of quite obvious poverty. But the amazing thing about these herds of pickups was that they were mostly bright, new models, rather than the rust buckets you would expect in poorer suburbs at home. Driving through the Four Corners country you could also see that most families had more than one pickup often as well as other cars - in one case I counted 27 parked up around the same property(admittedly they were in various states of decay).

But how can this be? How are these shiny new titans acquired? And the answer may go a long way to explaining why car companies in the US are going to the wall. Dodge are offering buyers of the new DODGE RAM models the most amazing terms; No deposit, O% interest for 5 years, no payments for 2 years, plus $2,000 cash in hand to the purchaser. GMC have a similar deal, although they are offering $4,000 cash back! Of course, once you have one of these mighty beasts in your clutches, you need to feed it huge quantities of gas - depending on the model the DODGE RAM promises 12-19mpg, and that on good roads. Roads on the Reservation can rarely be said to be good, more likely quagmires of muddy red ochre in winter and sandpits in summer. Still, the memory of tiny, tiny Navajo women peering through the steering wheels of their pickup trucks in Window Rock and Kayenta was truly memorable.

So here is my Pickup Truck Parade of the South West, the top ten tonners on the road. (Interestingly, I noticed that if you leave Land Rovers out, the order of the list reverses as you drive closer to Pheonix and suburbia.)

South West Pickup Parade (4x4) 

1. Dodge Ram (Gigantic!!!)
2. GMC (Monsterous!!)
3. Chevy (Just huge!)
4. Ford (For pussies)
5. Jeep (For tour guides only)
6. Subaru(Dwarfed by everything else)
7. SUV's (Tourist hire cars)
8. Land Rover (Rare)
9. Town cars (Extremely rare)

====================

10. Toyota (on recall, the pickup that dare not speak its name...) 

Damn, you Jeremy Clarkson!

Edited to add: Sorry folks, I still don't get it about F1!
AND I still love my little Honda Jazz