The Many Types of Death Vehicles

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is the tour for all those with a certain itch for things pertaining to collapse, where we note the locations and things that significantly impacted species 947's destruction (947 were also known as humanity [hyoo·ma·nuh·tee]). We discuss the complex locations, tools, and items that contributed to humanity's untimely end on a tiny planet called Earth in the year 90,423 XE (what humans may know as 2XXX AD).

Today, we are looking at death vehicles, colloquially known as "cars" [kaarz]. These were metal boxes that 947 used primarily for transportation. It’s debated whether humans religiously revered cars. More space was made for cars in human society than for people themselves. It’s highly possible as humans covered their fragile planet in concrete pathways known as roads [rowdz], which operated as moving altars of worship, and every year, millions of humans were sacrificed to the roads in rituals known as "car accidents" [kaar ak·suh·dnts].

Like everything that people did, these cars were heavily pollutive, not only because they released combustive chemicals to move their feeble wheels forward but also because the roads themselves, made of a substance known as Asphalt or bitumen, released harmful death chemicals of their own. The released death chemicals were all carbon-based and were more likely to be discharged when subjected to higher temperatures: the very thing climate change was increasing.

It's easy to be baffled by the car-based religion humans worshipped, and still, not all of these religious totems were created equally. Some of them emitted far more in terms of greenhouse gases overall, dwarfing their more fuel-conscious cousins.

And so today, we are going to catalog the worst of the worst in the year 2023, considered by scientist ReUechurd W'elf to be the tipping point of human civilization before REDACTED.

Pickup trucks

Large slabs of metal, with an open metal box in the back, called a bed, these death vehicles initially served a purpose, or at least that is how they were advertised by car-producing Resource Mongers such as Ford. Xeno-anthropologist Roileen Benz, when looking at the early mythology of these religious symbols, claims that pickup trucks were about "blue-collar" [bloo kaa·lr] workers transporting their materials to a "job" [jaab] — i.e., the thing members of the lower castes had to do to obtain subsistence tokens so they could live. These jobs were called things such as "handy" men and contractors, and while not glamorous, they had a certain nationalist appeal.

However, somewhere along the line, the pickup truck became a status symbol for members of the aspiring Resource Monger class. The vehicle was seen as a more upscale good, and in the process, the open metal bed, which blue-collar workers used to transport goods and materials, became less and less critical to its overall driver base as the death vehicle's new affluence disconnected it from the demographic that it once aspired to serve. As a result, they became sleeker, bigger, and deadlier.

It should surprise no one that these trucks generated many death chemicals. Even electrical vehicles (ones that drew on electricity to run rather than hazardous chemicals), although better than their fossil fuel-powered counterparts, had batteries made of substances such as cobalt and lithium, which could be quite harmful to the environment.

The Ram 1500 TRX off-roader was probably the most pollutive death vehicle out there. It was built in the beautiful Stellantis Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in the town of the same name on 38111 Van Dyke Avenue.

Large SUVs

An SUV, or a "sport utility vehicle" [sport yoo·ti·luh·tee vee·uh·kl] was supposed to have a combination of "off-road" and "on-road features." SUVs were for those who loved the idea of worshipping their car Gods in the wilderness and yet had a job that forced them to be on a highway every day to obtain subsistence tokens. In my language, we would call such people "basic," which roughly translates to "those stuck in a mundane routine, clinging to meaningless garbage to feel special."

“Brands” (the 947 term for a good or service owned by a Resource Monger) advertised the SUV as being perfect for people living in the "suburbs" [suh·brbz]: an inefficient community that required a death vehicle to get a passenger almost anywhere. The roads were often not laid out efficiently in the suburbs, as it would interfere with religious worship. When we asked xeno-anthropologist Roileen Benz about what they thought about suburbs, they told us, "I have been studying primitive cultures for hundreds of years, and this is the worst way to organize habitat modules. We are not surprised 947 destroyed their ecosystem."

Large SUVs were big, with plenty of space for passengers and storage, and with that came more significant fuel usage. SUVs were perhaps one of the most popular types of vehicles sold then, with their collective emissions emitting more death chemicals than in most human countries.

Those who want to see such vehicles in the wild can visit the BMW Spartanburg Plant at 1400 SC-101, Greer, SC.

Sports cars

From the Ford Mustang to the Chevrolet Camaro, these vehicles put the vroom-vroom in accelerating-death-machine. They were metal boxes that went fast and were generally lower to the ground. The Chevrolet Camaro could go 198 miles per hour. You would think such a vehicle would be banned on roads where “walking-humans” (i.e., a lowly subcaste known as "pedestrians" [puh·deh·stree·uhnz]) walked, but you would be mistaken. Remember that would interfere with the ceremonial car accidents, which, given humans' general ambivalence, must have been considered a great honor to participate in.

The old stereotype was that those who drove sports cars were overcompensating for subpar genitals, which would not be the first time an insecure gender decided to pour its resources into wasteful machinery (see the Little Wee Wee Tyrants of Megaplex Prime). While some car hobbyists may have had strict definitions for what a sports car was, restricting it to any vehicle that seated two, had a soft top, and could be used for competition (humans do love their arbitrary definitions), there was no standardized one.

And while car worshippers bickered about this detail, the collective emissions of sports cars could be quite high when considering that until the early 2020s, elite car makers were exempt from emission standards in Europe. US standards were actually more stringent at the time, but many car lovers actually went out of their way to defend the more pollutive engines.

For the Ford Mustang, you can check out the Ford Flat Rock Assembly Plant to see how a sports car is made at 1 International Dr. in Flat Rock, Michigan.

Luxury cars

Rarely driven and reserved for the highest members of 947’s caste, these cars were effectively toys. For brands like Buggati, only thousands were made at a time. They were quickly picked up during release and then placed in massive garages, mostly unused.

Luxury cars were highly stylized. Their sleek, angular lines are speculated by some xeno-anthropologists to be a mating call, signaling to those interested that what the driver lacks in personality, they more than make up for in hoarded wealth. The luxury driver could be deeply insecure about, well, everything, so discretion is advised when approaching one in almost any environment.

The assembly of your traditional Bugatti can be observed at their factory in Croatia, address: Ul. Velimira Škorpika 26, 10000, Zagreb, Croatia.

A speedy conclusion

It is a mystery why more humans did not destroy these vehicles that were wrecking their environment, especially religious atheists (i.e., non-car owners). As Earthling John Lanchester noted in their article Warmer, Warmer:

“It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time. Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets. So why don’t these things happen?”

Unfortunately for species 947, we will never know, as the last of their scientists were all swallowed by REDACTED, and we have been just too bored to check.

For our temporal visitors, see how many of these deadly vehicles you can find in the wild. We encourage you to do some research of your own, finding other "brands" we have not had time to go into detail, such as the Ferrari.

Remember that cars were inherently dangerous, as any piece of metal moving at high speeds could be. It's advised that you proceed carefully when interacting with these death machines and set your rayguns at their highest possible levels.

Note — for the humans who have somehow bypassed our encryption protocols, take comfort in the fact that this is a joke from a normal human and not a retrospective on your species' imminent demise.

DO NOT use this information to stop this future because that would create a time paradox and go against your people's laws, as well as Medium's ToS, which I'm told are very important. I AM NOT encouraging you to take the law into your own hands, something I cannot do as an appendageless species.

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