Neil Young’s conversion

We never thought we’d ever say this, but Neil Young made a really good point about hybrid cars. “With all this talk about gas, people are saying we should go to small cars,” he told the Wichita Eagle recently, “but I love big American cars with power. He went on to say that “America is never going to be frugal. It’s too big; the roads are long, the people are big, they like big cars.” The occasion for this musing of his was the conversion, thanks to H-Line Conversions, of his 1959 Lincoln Continental into a hybrid electric car.

God only knows what plugging that beast into his power outlets will do to his electric bill, but he’s right in principle. With the exceptions of cell phones, iPods, and strippers, Americans prefer things on a grander scale. And beyond that, it’s often hard for us to accept function over form in our consumer products; it’s not enough to have an environmentally sound car that gets incredible mileage, we’re going to need something with a certain aesthetic cool factor, too. Seriously, how are we supposed to pick up chicks in this thing?

But we digress. Young is making/has made a documentary about his new electric land whale called Linc-Volt. We’ll be keeping an eye out for it, of course, and suggest you do the same.