Humvees in Surrey

I saw a Humvee, or its wanka non-military equivalent, for the first time last week. It was in Richmond, Surrey (there's aRichmond up here too) and it was even huger, uglier, stupider than I had imagined. A stretch limo is a hideous thing, but a Humvee is hideous squared, an engineering monster stretched out of all functional proportion in not just one dimension but two. The reinforcing required merely to keep its belly off the ground must equal the weight of a European saloon.
The skill required to use the full performance of even a modest car, a Ford Focus say, is beyond at a guess ninety nine percent of the population, who are good at max acceleration and braking between traffic lights or sitting in virtual stillness at one fifty kph on motorways but become correctly cautious on bends. The rest of the performance of a modern car is metaphor, and there’s nothing wrong with that. My summer road bike is titanium, Campagnolo, Ksirium, Look carbon, skn, with a 53-11 top gear, and most of that is metaphor too, for the fiction of myself that is one of my main occupations in life. Metaphor is what we humans do. Dogs aren’t much into metaphor, and no known dogs could have built the Basilica in Ravenna. Nonetheless I think we need to ask what the ninety five percent of the peculiar potential performance of a Humvee in Richmond that the owner can’t actually employ is in metaphorical terms.
My most admired vehicle of the moment is what I think is a `chhakda`. According to Pavan K Varma “the contraption, which puts together a Bullet motorcycle, the wheels of a Fiat car and a diesel pump used to draw water, can carry up to thirty passengers and run for 35 kilometres on a litre of diesel. Only recently recognised by the authorities as legal, the `vehicle` has now interested buyers in East Africa and Bangladesh.” I may have got it wrong and this may not be a chhakda, but whatever it is it is clearly welded by hand and for the operators is only around 0.001 per cent metaphor.