Hey! Get Out of My Car!

 

When I finished my undergraduate degree in the early 1980s, I knew what car I wanted: a Porsche 911 SC. I even had the color picked out (white, with the black trim. British Racing Green would be okay too. Everyone seemed to do this car in red, and the purple, black, and yellow ones were right out). Besides its legendary performance, perhaps a small piece of this car’s attraction to me was that it had a reputation for being highly attractive to girls, to the point that there were stories of pretty but rather forward girls actually jumping into the passenger’s seat of 911 SCs, without actually being acquainted with the owner. I may have thought about what I would say to such a forward woman, with the “winning” line being “Hey, beautiful. Want to go somewhere?” (This alone may have been sufficient reason for the exotic car gods to deny me Porsche ownership.)

Of course, reality had other ideas. The price of a 911 SC in 1982 was $39,500 USD, which is $97,807 in today’s money, and would have taken about two year’s wages for me to purchase. Besides, the girls I was dating at the time were fairly well educated, and weren’t the type to spontaneously hop into a stranger’s Porsche, even if it was white with black trim.

Flash forward to 2016, and my familiar sedan finally needed replacing after 290,000 miles. I decided on a Honda Accord, with a 6-cylinder engine. I did some research into how it compared with the Porsche, which was when I found out that the Honda out-performs the SC. No, I’m not kidding.

It’s faster 0-60.

It’s faster in the quarter-mile.

The Accord has more horsepower (a lot more, actually).

It even brakes better.

If you’re wondering how that’s even possible, it has to do with the intervening 34 years of technological advances. P.J. O’Rourke once asserted (I’m paraphrasing) that the things that were considered outrageous luxuries fifty years ago would hardly do on a camping trip today. Imagine, if you will, the looks you would get if you were to insist on back-up cameras, curtain air bags, and automatic obstacle-avoidance braking on a 1980s Porsche. The salesman wouldn’t know what you were talking about, even though each of those things (and a great deal more) are standard equipment on many 2016 models. In 1969, Seiko offered an analogue chronometer (clocks or watches accurate to within -4 or +6 seconds per day) for $175 ($1,142 in today’s money); today, however, digital watches that accurate are now available for under $10. For those keeping score, that’s more than a 99% reduction in price.

Also in the 1980s I received my first instruction in Earned Value and Critical Path Methodologies. Back then companies doing business with the U.S. Department of Defense would purchase forms printed by the Government Printing Office, roll them into our IBM Selectrics, and type the budget, earned value, and actual costs information onto the forms, and then either hand-deliver them or snail-mail them to the customer. Today, networked PCs perform almost all of the functions of project cost and schedule performance reporting, from the processing of the original estimate, through the time-phasing of the budget and collection of data from the general ledger, through pulling status and re-calculating projected end dates and at-completion costs, wrapped up by transmitting electronically, instantaneously. All of this used to require several (if not many) people to perform, at least some of them with advanced expertise. Now, if your estimating software doesn’t seamlessly pass its data to the critical path scheduler for time-phasing, which then passes the budget and the current status to the cost processor, which automatically accepts data from the general ledger, then your system is very, very close to being obsolete. By today’s standards, even the high-end project management information systems from as recent (?!) as the 1980s would hardly be perceived as acceptable today. But keep in mind, this effect is cyclical: in 2051, those PM specialists will, no doubt, view our gee-whiz systems as wholly inadequate; and, if we somehow know what those systems will be like, we would be amazed (1950s-era PM: “What’s a ‘Selectric’?”)

As for my own anachronistic response to pretty women jumping unbidden into my Honda, I think my responses will include:

• “You may have – entirely understandably – mistaken me for Brad Pitt.”
• “You either have an advanced knowledge of car performance parameters, or else are in need of an eye exam.”
• “Hey! Get out of my car!”