Daily Dose of English 152
Cars
Daily Dose of English 152
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short and simple podcast that you can listen to, well, every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking a little bit about cars. How interesting. Cars are certainly one of the biggest inventions probably ever, being very close to things like computers in general, because they're so, so ubiquitous and common and a major part of a lot of people's lives. especially if you live in a country with a lot of cars, you very well may spend hours and hours of your life every day or every week in a car. And so because of that, they're pretty interesting in a lot of ways. But I also want to start out by saying that I don't like cars. I really don't, honestly. I think they're kind of cool, and some of them definitely look really neat, but everything else about them I just don't like. There are so many things that I personally don't like about cars. However, they are also a useful tool and in some places a necessary evil. But I'll maybe talk a little bit about my own views. So first, cars have a lot of vocabulary around them. There are tons of different words to talk about the car itself, the types of cars, the people driving them, so many different things that you can talk about. And I wanna talk a little bit about just starting in, I guess, learning how to drive and cars in general in like my childhood. So as you might know, the U.S. is a very car-focused country. A lot of the cities are... pretty much all but one city, which is New York, pretty much all the cities are built around the idea that people will drive. The U.S. is a pretty new country, broadly speaking, and so a lot of the cities were able to be designed around cars because they weren't super old and super hard to tear down, essentially, when cars came around. And a lot of the space that used to be public was just converted to car space. And then that became the norm and then everything else just exploded from there. So there are many parts of the country that were only really built with cars in mind. In fact, there's a lot of small towns that you can find that are not like super new, but they're relatively new. And it's just very clear that it's only meant to be for people driving around. Um, but a lot of that was a choice, right? It wasn't a forced decision by anybody, right? It was the choice was that, okay, there's a lot of these cars. We want to support them and pay for public infrastructure that supports these, this private property, which is probably one of my biggest issues with cars is the fact that they are private property. There's like, it's somebody's thing. So it's your car, my car, whoever's car. But there is so much public infrastructure made for these cars that they are heavily, heavily subsidized. The government basically says to a lot of people, anyone that drives, here's a bunch of stuff just for you, basically. Have a ton of public space, that's fine, that doesn't matter. A really good example is parked cars in a lot of cities. Parking outside your street is free, um, right outside your house, but that is on a public road that is not part of your house. And that's a very normal thing. And so a lot of people do that for a long time. They, it's just, it's not really a fair or just thing to do for this private piece of machinery that you bought. Anyways, I'm getting off topic already. I wanted to talk about my experience because I grew up in the U.S. and so driving was a very normal thing. You drive basically everywhere. like going home from the hospital as a baby, right? Like I went in a car. Everything like that is all car focused. And I grew up being driven around, right? Because I couldn't drive as a child. So we would get driven around. I don't really remember like the first car that my parents had. Um, but one of the ones that stuck in my mind is a Mercedes, like an old Mercedes from like the nineties or something, maybe the early two thousands. No, I think it was from the nineties cause it was, I think it was a bit of an old car when they got it, but it had these seats in the very, very back that faced backwards. And I always loved that as a kid, that was so cool to me. There was the normal driver's seat, passenger seat, then there was the seats behind them, and then there was the trunk that also had these like seats that you could sit in and look out the back of the window. And that was super cool, I loved that. And yeah, there's, I don't, I'm running out, there's not very much time in these episodes, oh my God. There's things that I wanna say. I've driven in lots of different cars, but I actually wanna skip forward to learning how to drive because this is something that's a little bit interesting in the US because you can learn how to drive when you're 15 years old in the city and in lots of like smaller towns or farms, you can learn to drive when you're like 14 or younger because it's like, oh, you're helping out on the farm or whatever. But legally, you can learn to drive when you're 15 and you can get what's called a learner's permit. And that's where you are allowed to drive the car if there is, I think, your parent next to you who has had their driver's license for a certain amount of years or whatever it is. And so you're legally allowed to drive a vehicle and be the only driver if you have somebody next to you who knows what they're doing, basically. Um, which is, and actually once you've had it for six months, so once you're like 15 and a half, you can drive yourself around or you can drive your sibling around. You can't have your friends in the car yet. That's illegal. You have to be 16 to do that. Yeah. Don't, don't go too fast. You have to be 16 years old before you can get your actual driver's license and drive your friends around. And so there's these steps you can go to, but essentially you can be a driver when you're 15 years old, which is crazy in the US. And when I was 16, I got a car. Well, my dad got a car because a friend of his at work was selling a car and he's like, okay, well, Ben wants to go to school and I don't wanna take him, so I'm gonna get him this. It wasn't that expensive. I think it was like 1200 bucks. And it worked great for a while, and then we were able to sell it for like $900. And so it was like renting a car for like two years for really cheap. So it actually ended up being great. But it was an old Toyota Camry from like 2006. And that must have been like 2015 when I got it, I think, maybe 2014, something like that. And that was a nice little car. It was very simple, it was easy to drive, it was not nice, but it was very functional. And so I definitely like those types of cars if I were to get a car. I don't own a car and I don't want to own a car pretty much ever. Which I think is how I'm gonna end talking about this because I really don't wanna own a car. They are expensive. There are many estimates that they cost around 800 to $1,000 a month, depending on what kind of car it is, like maintenance costs, gas. Gas is really expensive now. And all these things you have to put into a car make it an expensive thing to have over the course of time. And also like, well, because like they also are expensive things. They're cars. It's like a big complex piece of machinery. And I don't want to own one. That doesn't mean I don't want to drive them ever. They're very useful for like if you want to go on a vacation and that's like at a smaller place or you want to go to the coast or a specific location or road trips are really fun. That sort of thing I think is really interesting. I also might be interested in having some kind of van, especially some older Volkswagen vans. I think they're really nice and beautiful and cool. My dad had a 67 Volkswagen for a while. That was one of his dream van. And those are really cool for like camping or going out on trips, but it would not be a driving around the city thing. Because I also just don't like to drive. I think I've mentioned this before I don't see great at night it's kind of stressful and I really really don't want to hit anybody or anything because if you hit a thing first you have to pay a bunch of money for the thing that you hit and fix your car if you hit a person you hit a fucking person like come on that's not cool I I don't understand how traffic safety is so unimportant in kind of a lot of countries, but especially in the richest country of all time, the United States. It just is not an important thing. There's so many videos of cars crashing through schools or buildings or coffee. It's crazy that that is not seen as a massive problem when a random person can just hit somebody and kill them. Like that's that's insane that there was a couple of weeks ago. There was somebody in I think Philadelphia who was a biker who was hit and killed by a driver because the driver just didn't stop at the turn. They just tried. They took the turn as quickly as they could, which has been a known problem. Somebody else died that exact same way in that exact same spot before and like the city just doesn't care. And that's so common in the US. And so that's kind of my reason. my general reasoning for why I don't like cars. I can't really get into it much more but I'd be very curious to know because I don't have time. I'm running out of time. It's already 11 minutes in but I'm very curious to hear your thoughts. Do you like driving? Do you like cars? Do you wish that you didn't have to drive and that you didn't have to have a car? Or I'm very curious to hear your thoughts from your point of view from wherever you're from down in the comments below. So don't be afraid. Write me a comment. I'd love to hear. And I'll read them all. But I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a great rest of your day. Bye.
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