KEY POINTS:
Americans are finding ways to keep their love affair with big, fast automobiles alive in the era of US$3-a-gallon petrol and concern for the environment.
This week singer Neil Young, who is an enthusiast of 1950s vintage big fantail cars, is making his way to Wichita, Kansas, in the heart of the United States.
The car he's driving is a Lincoln Continental Mark IV, one of the greatest gas-guzzlers of them all, and one of the largest cars ever to hit the open road. Immensely stylish with a wide front grille and neo-deco bumpers at either end, it is also one the most polluting vehicles to have ever graced Route 66.
An avid collector of vintage American cars, Young - who once endorsed Ronald Reagan - has only recently turned to environmentalism. With the release of his new album, Chrome Dreams II, he is on an odyssey across America, documentary film crew in tow, figuring out how Americans might keep the romance of the open road while caring for the environment.
Young and his crew are taking the car he calls Linc-Volt to Wichita, where it will be converted into a 160km/h diesel-electric hybrid running on renewable fuel. Motor enthusiasts say it is like putting a Toyota Prius on steroids.
"It's the story of the resurrection and repowering of the car that represented the American dream," Young recently told the writer Burhan Wazir.
"So the car has to go to Wichita to have its engine replaced with a giant electrical engine. It works off the grid - you plug it in at night. So it has very low emissions and a lot more power. It's a lot faster - it does 0-60 in six seconds. It's part of the spirit of the country. America is never going to be frugal. It's too big; the roads are long, the people are big, they like big cars. So there's a challenge to figure out how to retain all those things and be clean."
Behind the rock star's conversion are some quietly spoken visionaries with a welding torch. They have married environmentalism with an unquenchable love of burning rubber in a Pimp My Ride meets National Geographic sort of way.
Now they are showing the beleaguered US car industry a way out of its doldrums.
America's big car manufacturers want to stop Congress raising the target for cars to 35 miles a gallon on the grounds that it could wipe out the industry. They complain that Americans won't buy fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel cars because they are too cramped and meek.
But the gas-guzzling US car industry is suddenly being attacked from inside as more than a dozen states have enacted laws requiring dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions by cars.
Larry Urry, who is soon to tackle Young's car at his mechanics shop in Wichita, will only say that "it's going to be a super-efficient two-tonne vehicle. What's really nice is that we can combine huge horsepower and efficiency in a beautiful car, unlike all those hybrids that are ugly as sin."
Young is not the only celebrity driver on the books. In the corner of the workshop, a 1987 Jeep belonging to the California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is being converted to run on used chip fat.
Urry's workshop is filled with Hummers, Jeeps, Hi-Luxes and Yukon XLs in various states of being dismantled which his mechanics are busy turning into environmentally acceptable muscle cars at US$5000 a pop.
- Independent
