Sorry for not replying sooner, I got busy.
I must say that this is exactly the reaction I expected from you guys. It really made me feel better, which was honestly the whole point in posting about it.
Definitely not a communist/socialist, and he's pretty much the opposite of an uptight, pompous ninny, LOL. You'd just have to know him to understand how funny that is.
He's also the opposite of a 'suit and tie' or 'fancy clothes' person (but still in good taste). He owns guns and hunts with them and eats what he kills, hikes and camps up in the mountains, and in fact he walked the Appalachian Trail some years ago (when it was still very challenging).
He drives a typical econo car that gets 35-40mpg highway, and from what I know, his house is practical and with only small TV's and cheap computers, etc. He cooks his own food, doesn't overeat, and rarely ever eats out.
I won't even get into what he thinks about our company, LOL.
Basically, he isn't a hypocrite, and IMHO he's very sensible in most of his ways, he isn't one extreme or the other. Honestly I was surprised when he made the comment about banning high performance cars, or at least making them 99% inaccessible, as it did have an air of tyranny to it.
I agree with most of you guys, and those are the same arguments I did make. Oh, and FWIW, it wasn't a "heated" debate, just an honest debate, albeit one that did make me feel pretty miserable.
His argument against having anything one doesn't "need" is invalid if taken in that context alone, and I think I made that clear by spelling out the points you guys have mentioned above in that regard... he does do things that he doesn't "need" to, of course we
all do.
His point on this subject is that there is needless
waste, in the form of gasoline, that is caused by high performance cars... when being used for high performance that is... and in the case of the bigger engines like all of ours (yes, even the V6), there is waste
all the time, i.e. during idle, acceleration, and cruise. His more emphasized point is that there is no
need for high-performance street cars because *actually using* the potential they hold is
dangerous for
everyone, therefore no one
needs what they shouldn't
use anyway, so nobody should be
allowed to have it.
Therein lies the problem, as many of you have pointed out.
The idea that people
shouldn't be allowed to have what they
don't actually need does indeed lead straight to dictatorship, which goes against everything I knew about his ideals. That's why I was surprised. Of course, I also never knew that he was so
vehemently against pretty much all of the cars I've ever owned and everything I've spent a GREAT deal of blood, sweat, and tears on and put a LOT of heart into over the last 15 years. If I had known that, in the entire previous 2.5 years I've worked with/for him I would have saved myself a lot of breath and the eventual embarrassment.
To continue,
Saying cars kill people is like saying spoons made Rosie O'donnell fat. Saying faster cars
automatically alter the drivers' perceptions so that they
always drive more dangerously is like saying
bigger spoons made Rosie O'donnell even
fatter.
That's total horse poop. If there's anyone who can tell you how I consistently drive, it's my wife, and she very clearly stated that I drive the same way in the Civic as I do in the Camaro, with the obvious exception of those relatively few times where it's even
possible to use the Camaro to its potential anywhere around here. In other words, with both cars, yes I do drive faster than the average driver, but I am also more courteous then the average driver, and I pay MUCH more attention and have a MUCH better awareness (red-light runners notwithstanding) than the average driver.
I've made my arguments and he's made his and neither of us are going to budge so there's no reason to rehash and "heat up" the debate. I just need to find some way of keeping the "car chat" inside my head again. I've been doing that for a long time now so it shouldn't be too hard.
I appreciate that I can vent my frustrations on here to people who 'get it', it definitely helps sometimes. Thanks camaro5!