A Little Rally Car

If you drive on gravel roads, all wheel drive is your friend. Right up there with proper ground clearance and the necessary caution to not hit a rock and rip your transfer case apart. This is an expensive kind of mistake to make, and is only done safely if you travel with at least one other vehicle to pull you out. As soon as you convoy your 4WD, it stops being fun, unfortunately, and becomes a slog staring at the back of someone else's truck.

The solution to this is an enduro motorcycle, aka dual sport, because so long as you don't wreck yourself and get hurt, you can never get truly stuck because you can lift your vehicle out of the muck with your hands. The problem there, unfortunately, is that accidents on Enduro bikes go like this: riding, riding, riding, flash of color noise, on the ground. Its all very fast.

So 4 wheels are safer for the operator, only you risk getting stuck. I'm still interested in a scooter, and probably an enduro bike because they're cheaper than scooters and more cost effective backup transportation. However, so long as there are paved roads, fun little hot hatchbacks are great. When the roads stop being paved, you have to adapt. All wheel drive is probably a good idea, and a rally car is made for this. Your real choices for AWD rally cars are Subarus and the various other European AWD rally vehicles. I'm not aware of a serious Honda AWD, and Lexus AWD is rarely engaged. Audi probably has a decent one.

This is a Honda Civic Del Sol converted to AWD at Lone Pine, CA. Keep in mind this desert used to be lush agricultural land before LA stole their water. FY-LA! So yeah, any AWD suv can be lightened into a racer, and most passenger cars can have AWD installed, with the body sort of welded on top for looks. I think that's cheating, but whatever. There are options. These serious rally cars are monsters with 950 HP, and they can go wrong really fast. What are your non-race choices?

Well, those are 8 years of race cars.

Subaru WRX.

There's a list of cars, too. The thing about AWD is it doesn't help as much in Ice as you'd think. Its better than nothing, but you'll probably slip and wreck in ice. However, with roads losing funding for repairs due to the enduring poor economy carefully managed with laser-like focus, surfaces get worse all the time. You don't always notice this driving since you go over it quickly while texting about that funny kitten video your friend sent you, but if you're bicycling you can see the cracks, dodge the potholes, and feel every seam and bump and tree root and gap. These roads go bad pretty fast. And while it might seem silly to wonder about a rally car for driving on gravel when you have nice paved roads... wait a while. In a few years, unless you pay some big taxes, your roads won't be paved.

Still think a rally car is a toy? Gravel roads get drainage problems and develop mud bogs where line springs soften the surface during rainy season, making it impassible.

So facing that sort of surface, and still needing to cross it to get your groceries, a rally car or 4WD truck or van starts making sense. So much of our civilization, things like paved roads, are paid for with WW2 money, interest paid from the loans we made to the Europeans through the Marshall Plan.

Once those were paid off in the 1970's? Our income subsidies collapsed and we had to make money from work. And that meant 2-income families, latchkey kids, youth crime rates rose, drug abuse more common, teen pregnancy, cults kidnapping and murdering people. And the Vietnam War. The bad parts of the 1970's are glossed over, but I was there, man. I was a little kid. At least we had Star Wars and Tootsie Roll Pops. And Disco. Olivia Newton John was hot in her day. Things got pretty run down before deficit spending dumped a lot of money into winning the Cold War and fixing all the infrastructure. It lasted this long, only its finally worn out and the cost of fixing it right isn't being paid for because the new Vietnam is Afghanistan and THERE IS NO EXIT STRATEGY. So, roads don't get paved enough and before you know it, patches of bad pavement will become stretches of gravel road with patches of pavement instead. And neighborhood volunteers cutting back brush by hand, maybe. Or maybe not.

If they don't you get flooding and ignore the ladder fuel building up in the woods on the side of the road, which teenagers with no jobs find joy in arson. It sometimes sucks realizing just how horrible people can be. You start to expect the worst knowing that people are capable of it and inclined to it anyway. Goodness can be shocking. And sadly rare.

So a rally car with AWD is an acceptable way to get through this terrain, provided you and the neighbors can keep it smooth and clean enough to allow travel. That will probably become your problem, too. Could be worse though. It could be this:

How'd you like that? So rural even the bandits have given it back to nature.