Last January I highlighted a strange mobile home design by GM for the future, called the PAD. Little did I realize they were tapping into a new movement in Texas, of all places, to shed the wasteful ways of the past and downsize into a more efficient living arrangement.

The AP reports that an RV village in Austin has become wildly popular as a better way to live, even for successful professionals and movie stars:

Some have moved out of big homes to join the community and rent sites that cost up to $370 a month, and they don’t regret it for one minute, Pecan Grove manager Robert McCartney said.

Some residents come and go because they work in multiple cities. Some would rather pursue pastimes such as traveling or rock climbing than spend time and money on a house.

Meanwhile, oddly enough, Dodge and Ford seem to be stuck in the waste-filled days of yore and continue to generate replicas of their most inefficient vehicles in history:

You may recognize the look of a 1970s Challenger. Apparently some people are still facing the wrong challenges. It is NOT impressive to create a 425 hp engine that gets 19 mpg on foreign fuel in 2006, especially as the old R-426 Hemi in 1970 sported 425 hp and only a few thousand sold. Relive the legend? The I guess they did not get the memo. Mustang sales were impressive in 2005 because it was a fashionable retro trendy thing, but unlike soft goods you can’t just shift production to the next fad twelve months later and so Ford is now facing a glut of retro muscle-cars that can’t compete with the skyrocketing success of the Prius. Dodge wants to make this mistake? This also seems like the same issue they had with feeding an SUV fetish. Sure it’s a pretty car, but it’s so short-sighted, it’s sad…it’s like American car manufacturers want you to accept that a weekend with a stripper is more sensible than a lifetime with a spouse, if you know what I mean.

Someone should take the Detroit elite out and let them stay in a village like the one in Austin. Let them come to terms with a system that provides fun and sustainable living. Or perhaps even better they should go for a ride in a hybrid sailboat and say “ok, let’s see if you can do something that can run on the power of waves, sun, and wind alone while transporting you safely for tens of thousands of miles in comfort.” And if they say “sorry, we only want to develop full-bore jet-engine wave-crushing speed boats that give thrills a minute on foreign oil because the margins today are best”, when they get back to shore put them on a race horse with diarrhea and tell them to enjoy another type of retro-ride home.

The real challenge is to work within the current and future limitations by generating more with less to achieve a higher standard of living (safe, quiet, efficient, sustainable, etc.). The new village phenomenon is a good sign that some people really get it, all over again:

The whole of this neighborhood of Brookline is a kind of landscape garden, and there is nothing in America of the sort, so inexpressibly charming as the lanes which lead from one cottage, or villa, to another. No animals are allowed to run at large, and the open gates, with tempting vistas and glimpses under the pendent boughs, give it quite an Arcadian air of rural freedom and enjoyment. These lanes are clothed with a profusion of trees and wild shrubbery, often almost to the carriage tracks, and curve and wind about, in a manner quite bewildering to the stranger who attempts to thread them alone; and there are more hints here for the lover of the picturesque in lanes than we ever saw assembled together in so small a compass.

That was written by Andrew Jackson Downing for The Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening in 1841.

More secure or less secure than suburban tracts of giant lifeless streets? I vaguely remember studies done at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the mid 1990s to show how more sensible towns and villages are for cost and sustainability (including safety), but I do not see anything specific now on their website.

Oh, and I’ll say it again, the VW GX3 is definitely the way to go for future design. Put a diesel-hybrid engine in that thing, and create a trailer and/or canopy option, and you will surely get 100+ mpg thrills that will last a long time…although many of the environmental sites recommend contacting VW to express interest, I recommend also contacting the North American manufacturers to get them to realize the error of their ways and to come up with a more sensible challenger to European, Asian and South American concepts. And no, I don’t mean just hiring Giorgetto Giugiaro redesign the skin of the Mustang…lipstick on a pig still doesn’t fix the waste issues.