Word: gravel
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...Mercedes S-class sedans and the usual Porsches and Lamborghinis, so boring, there was a Lost Safari of Land Rovers, Ford Explorers, Grand Cherokees and GMC Suburbans, all tricked out with steel brush guards, roof racks, off-roading spare-wheel mounts, and black-leather car bras to ward off gravel and grasshoppers on the Paris-Dakar run. Cedergren flashed his perception to his clients: "Cars are now history. The future belongs to trucks...
...owners don't realize are, in fact, trucks? A good bet is that they are scampering away from the honk and fuss and double parking of the world that cars created. TV and magazine ads invariably show pickups and sports utility vehicles parked on a mountain spire or riverside gravel bar, with no pavement or other traffic in sight. Sure. Whether they can get you there in actuality is not important. Even if they are filling-looseners that drive like trucks on washboarded gravel roads, which most of them do, they are unbeatable fantasy machines. Land Rover, which encourages...
...territory is known to have oil and gas deposits that could make it the Saudi Arabia of the north. The area is one of the world's leading sources of diamonds, and Logan notes that 80% of the gold produced there comes from riverbeds and ancient gravel banks, an indication that the republic has barely begun to tap its underground veins...
Much of this trouble, as the Unabomber argues, stems from technology. Suburbs are largely products of the automobile. (In the forthcoming book The Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt notes the irony of Henry Ford, in his 60s, building a replica of his hometown--gravel roads, gas lamps--to recapture the "saner and sweeter idea of life" he had helped destroy.) And in a thousand little ways--from the telephone to the refrigerator to ready-made microwavable meals-technology has eroded the bonds of neighborly interdependence. Among the Aranda Aborigines of Australia, the anthropologist George Peter Murdock noted early this century...
...hard to enjoy the natural wonders, though, when ALVINN is behind the wheel, doing 88 km/h in the fast lane. First he lurches right, crossing both lanes of the blacktop and alarming bleary-eyed commuters trying to share the road. Then he careens to the left, skidding onto the gravel shoulder and nearly into a ditch. Finally Todd Jochem, 27, a graduate student at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, wrests the wheel of the four-wheel-drive Humvee from ALVINN while Dean Pomerleau, a C.M.U. robotics research scientist, makes excuses for their friend's driving. ``I guess...