Performance

Abstract

Standards are changing all the time, in the way we live, in our morals, in our automobiles and in the performance we expect from them. Many a seemingly modest young lady will appear in public today in clothes that would have led to her arrest for indecent exposure fifty years ago. And so it is with the speed and acceleration of our cars. When the author, as a young schoolboy, first crashed through the magical one-mile-a-minute barrier as he crouched down in the passenger’s seat of his father’s Studebaker tourer, he experienced not only a great sense of achievement but a certain feeling of guilt. Was it right to travel at this speed on the public highway, even without another car in sight? Today this same middle-aged schoolboy has to move over in to the slow lane if he wishes to dawdle at 60 m.p.h.

‘Often think of the rapidity with which things pass and disappear.’

Marcus Aurelius