One Fewer

I recently came across this nifty effort of one man in California to try to figure out what to do with his gas-guzzling Range Rover Sport. He has offered to leave it up to society to decide the fate of this eco-unfriendly machine. He even put a call out on Youtube asking for comments - the crazier, the better.

Upon reading up on some of the posts, I couldn't help but want to leave my own comment. Here's what I think he ought to do with the vehicle which, in my opinion, is better than flinging it into the Pacific.

As posted on OneFewer.com:
Let me preface this by saying that I have not read all of the comments posted here - that would take a very long time. So if any of this is redundant, I apologize. Redundancy appears to be a rather, well…redundant issue among many of these posts.

The idea here is solid - make a statement by being “One Fewer” inefficient vehicle on the road. We should all note that this is meant to be a ’statement’ to the public, hence the call for the most dramatic, off-the-wall ideas. Yes, donating it to charity, or recycling it, or giving it to a college or high school to figure out a way to make it green are all logical ideas, but do they really make a statement? Things like that occur regularly anymore. Hell, AFS Trinity (http://www.afstrinity.com/) recently unveiled a 150-mpg plug-in hybrid SUV. Yes, I said SUV (I believe it’s actually a retro-fitted Saturn Vue) so the ‘convert-to-green’ thing is being done already.

Don’t get me wrong, greening the vehicle is the best thing to do in my opinion. But I’m also reading posts bemoaning the impact the vehicle’s initial production had environmentally. So, in an effort to ‘make a statement,’ take the greening effort one step further:
Give the Rover to a company, institution, organization, or school and give them one year to develop a way to convert the vehicle to a plug-in hybrid, or fully electric one. But in so doing, mandate that they develop an assembly-line procedure to do the same to every Rover in existence, or even every big SUV out there. Maybe even give several groups the opportunity to do so. Make it a race to see who can get it done first. Film every group’s efforts and make it a “Monster Garage” like competition, with the winner getting a kick-back from the big investment the failing auto-makers would inevitably pay for the new technology in an effort to save their companies. Maybe even throw in the $300 MM John McCain suggests the government offer.

Whatever network agrees to make the reality show out of the effort would have to agree to donate a certain amount of money to future green efforts as part of the filming rights agreement. This effort being launched in California is very convenient since there is an abundance of media/network outlets close by that could pick it up.

Now THAT would make a statement to the millions of viewers that would tune into the new reality show across this country that these efforts can succeed AND would say to the auto makers that we as a country are ready to stop buying their inefficient vehicles that use ridiculous amounts of foreign oil and are ready to help them start showing profits again as soon as they give us legitimate alternatives. Retro-fitting existing vehicles would be a great stepping stone toward transitioning our transportation sector to renewable sources. And by developing assembly-line technology, we would actually be somewhat undoing the initial impact caused by the current vehicles’ production years ago.

Comments?