Pylimitics

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely accepted (especially by American boys whose dads had subscriptions to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics that in the impossibly distant twenty-first century, we would no longer be limited to tooling along roads and highways in our Chevys and Fords. We would have flying cars!

This morning, here in New England, meteorological events have conspired to finally solve the puzzle of why, 26 years into the annoyingly present twenty-first century, we still don’t have the flying cars we were promised.

First, there’s the snow. There is a lot of snow on the ground here. It’s been quite cold for the past two or more weeks, so there’s been very little melting. Except on the roads that have been treated with salt, which melts the snow and rusts the cars. Those are snowless, but many with wet brine. Which splashes around when you drive, helpfully coating your car from top to bottom, helping recycle it into iron oxide.

Second, today the temperature is up. It’s already a bit above freezing and it’s just 8:00 in the morning. It could reach 40°F today! This is good news…but remember all that snow? It’s going to melt. Well, a lot of it is anyway. So the roads are going to get even messier and wetter, leading to more splashy puddles and more spattering of cars.

Everybody who lives here knows that you have to get your car washed when it gets spattered with winter road grime. Besides affording a temporary respite from the rust-inducing brine bath, it can get so bad you can’t see out of your windows or mirrors. But in the winter it’s too cold to wash your car at home. Your hose is either stowed in the shed or frozen solid in the back yard. Under all that snow. So you take your car to the car wash. There’s one or more in every town, offering everything from self-service bays where you apply your own spray (but it’s very difficult to clean the critical bits on the underside) to automated systems that pull the whole car through a 360° shower. Those are better, and clean the bottom of the car as well as the top. There’s a drawback though, on days like today. If drive to the carwash, your car will be completely spattered again by the time you drive home. And those washes aren’t free. The top-tier ones around here can be $30 per. You do get the sprays including mysterious coatings and proofings though — you can tell they’re being applied during the wash because they come in neon-bright colors that never seem to appear in nature. But I digress.

I was talking about flying cars, remember? Well, a flying car would never get spattered with road grime. There are car washes all over the place, but have you ever even hear of an airplane wash? Of course not. Flying machines do get dirty, but far less than road machines. And there you have the solution to the puzzle of the missing flying cars.

Don’t see the connection? I didn’t either until just today, when I was contemplating the aftermath of the drive home from the car wash. If we all had the flying cars we deserve, “car washes” would be as rare as “airplane washes.” A whole industry would be wiped out as surely as the once-thriving businesses of ice delivery, chimney sweeping, and whatever those folks who cleaned all the horse manure off city streets were called.

The car wash titans, though, must have had among them a genius forecaster who saw the flying car promises from decades ago, put two and two together, gathered his fellow car wash barons, and formulated a plan. They must have assembled a powerful lobbying group that, for decades, has managed to stymie any real progress toward clean, never-washed, rust- and grime-free flying cars.

Never heard of this secret cabal? Ha. That’s just how good those folks are. Forget the Johnny-come-lately tech bros, the financiers, and the fossil-fuel fossils. It’s the car wash czars who’ve kept us all in the dirty mean streets all this time.