Sunday, May 01, 2011

Times have changed

Its funny when I remembered the time, when I was 12, my father told me to learn up the diagram of how an internal combustion engine worked.

Because I was lazy, and more engrossed in playing Diablo II or whichever PC game was hot at the time, I came up with some lame excuse.

“When I get my license, they probably will not use petrol engines anymore, it would be something completely different.” I said.

I got my license when I was 18.

And lo and behold, I was driving a petrol engine. I am now 25, and all the cars Ive driven are either petrol of diesel engines.

Although there are some advancements such as the different variants of cam-timing, profiling, switching, I learnt about the different aspirated engines, H-4s, Inline 6, V6, V8 ,V10, V12, W16 and what not, the key principles are still applied.

Its only until recently when suddenly, going “green” is more hot than Diablo II that we see a new range of engines rolling off the conveyor belts in car factories.

Even so, the hybrid systems still use a petrol engine, where the 4-magic-stokes still apply.

The electric motors are nothing more than an oversized Tamiya engine. So, still not much has changed.

THEN, over breakfast a few days ago, my father said to me, “you need to relearn your mandarin, its going to be the lingua of the 21st century.”

And here I play the conservative one in a argument again.

In my head, “until the day I die, english will still be the top language of the world,”

Its funny how our perceptions change over time. Me, being the radical and forward thinking one when I was 12 said petrol engines would be out of fashion soon.

But now Im fighting to say english will remain dominant.

and my father, doing the opposite.

Except, today, I quite like the petrol engine. The sound it makes is distinctive, the feel, the pull.

And electric engine is, well, just another gimmick, to trick those who believe San Francisco is a country on its own, into spending more money to buy something they already have, that is if they already have an efficient car.

I’ll leave it at that.

1 Comments:

Blogger Richard Tan said...

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12:59 AM  

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