The Jeep and the Racecar
This is a conceptual model that I think about a lot. It has to do with the complexity of use and the impact that has on design and utility. It applies to all facets of life, but I also think it applies to gear. Because I think it is so useful in evaluating gear, I thought I would present it here and reference it in the future in reviews as a shorthand. Here is what I mean by the Jeep and the racecar.
The Jeep Wrangler is a vehicle that has not had much change in its design since WWII. Sure you can get a new fancy radio or even a full electric drive train, but the configuration of the chassis, the nuts and bolts of the design have remained largely the same. I had a friend in philosophy grad school that liked adventuring at least as much as he liked philosophy and when he went to Central America he took a Jeep despite its less than comfy ride and the tremendous noise in the passenger compartment. He wasn’t going off roading either. But, as he told me, no matter where he was in the world, he could find parts for a Jeep and fix it himself. And, since the vehicle was built for off roading, it was robust enough to deal with even the shittiest roads. The Jeep never stopped working. It could take a hit and keep going. It was going to get you there no matter what. The Jeep is useful because it always works, because it is robust, and because it is simple. The Jeep is all about unsurpassed reliability.
The racecar on the other hand is finnicky, expensive, impossible for a novice to fix. It is fragile and often hard to use. BUT, and this is a huge point, when it does work, it is insane. The racecar’s peak performance is staggering and destroys what the Jeep can do. It is precise, agile, and focused on hyper performance. The racecar is all about performance regardless of the cost.
This concept applies all over the world in all different aspects of life.
In passenger aviation
Douglas DC6:Concorde::Jeep:racecar
The history of the DC6 is amazing. It was first built in 1946 and is still in service today, even being used as a passenger airliner in small regional outfits in Europe and South America. Despite being incredibly old 15 of the 700 are still doing real work today.
Art
Picasso:Michaelangelo::Jeep:racecar
While Da Vinci would be a natural first choice given that only 15 of his painting survived we have over 6,000 of his sketches and journal drawings, so it is actually Michaelangelo that fits best here. He has only 200 extant artistic works (though they include some really famous stuff). Picasso is one of the most prolific artists in human history with over 147,500 extant works. He died much more recently, but very few people could match that output even if they were alive today.
Baseball
Nolan Ryan:Sandy Koufax::Jeep:racecar
A full 1/3 of the seasons of Sandy Koufax’s career are better than Nolan Ryan’s single best season; the comparison is even more apt when you look at Don Sutton and Sandy Koufax, who were teammates in 1966.
Woodworking Tools
Table Saw:Japanese Hand Saw::Jeep:racecar
Table saw injuries are staggering in their impact. 30,000 people a year are injured by table saws and the annual cost in lost wages alone is $2 billion. By comparison there are roughly 16 shark bites a year in the entire US. You can love Jaws (which is a movie masterpiece and celebrating its 50th Anniversary this year), but the thing that should have poked out of the waves menacingly is not a fin but a 40T general purpose table saw blade. And if you have not used a Japanese handsaw, well you are missing out. Even cheap ones are wonderful, like my Suizan Ryoba I got for Christmas a few years ago.
You get the idea—the key to one is reliable ease of use and the key to the other is peak performance.
This has a huge bearing on gear. Some gear is painfully fiddly and complex. I look at things like some of the forged non-stainless steel knives or the Extrema Ratio lock-for-a-lock design and I am mystified as why they are so complicated. You’d think, given their reputations, that these items would be Jeeps, but they are, in fact racecars. Then you have something like the KaBar Becker BK16 and you have a classic Jeep.
This is not to say that ALL racecars in the gear world are a bad thing. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more racecar than a Busse big chopper. This is my Busse Forsaken Steel Heart and while it is as simple as it gets in terms of design and materials, there is a huge cost of ownership and use that is baked in to almost all Busses. You can’t even use it, really, in the condition it is shipped. I chose this to make a point about the Jeep—its not about being rugged, because the Busse has that in spades, but about being thoughtless to own and use. First, this is a $600 knife. That alone takes it out of Jeep territory. This is a premium item with a premium price and that makes ownership a chore. But it gets worse, when you have a sharp object that is long and heavy and you don’t ship it with a way to carry or store it, that about as racecar as you get. In reminds of a literal racecar where they have no way for the driver to start the engine and don’t come with a steering wheel. But the tradeoff for the Busse sheathless hassle is a knife that can chop through cinder blocks. I have yet to need that capacity, but it is nice to know that I will never max this thing out chopping down a tree. And yes, I did get a sheath made for it.
But some racecars aren’t worth the effort. I like TWSBI pens, but lord, are they a lot. I do find their nibs to be exquisite, but the pens seem to explode. They are hard to refill. They tend to crack around the caps. And unlike some of the Parker 51s I have used, they have a lifespan measured in months not decades. If I valued their writing performance, if it was that much better than, say, my Pilot Vanishing Point, then maybe. If nothing else did what they do, then maybe. But after four different models, including two supposedly simplified Ecos, I don’t find this particular racecar to have a large enough payoff.
And like with the Busse being an archetypical racecar, a SAK, like the Bantam in Alox above, is the quintessential Jeep. It is easy to own and use. It is sharpenable on pretty much anything—the bottom of a coffee cup for example. The steel requires almost no attention, after all you can send it through a dishwasher with no problem. My son left his in the snow for an entire winter and it was fine. SAKs just work for ever, hence their beloved status in the gear community. And, like my friend in South America with his Jeep in grad school, you can find spare parts—toothpicks and tweezers, just about anywhere.
There are times, however, when a Jeep doesn’t work either. In particular I have found that some of the traditional bags out there, with roll tops or simple organization, aren’t enough to be useful. Of course they have none of the problems with zippers, snaps, buckles, and so many pockets you lose stuff, but they are basically canvas garbage bags with straps. I want a bag with a SMIDGE of organization. The balance is admitted a preference thing, but there is a point where simplicity isn’t a virtue but, instead, a limitation.
Finding a balance is hard. And the design dilemma of Jeep or racecar is something that is fascinating to work out. Deciding whether a Jeep or a racecar works for you is also largely a matter of preference. But the most important thing is knowing what you need. Do you need something that simple to use and never fails or do you need something that has elite performance but lots of complexity?
And for the record, the VME is in the lead pic because it is that rarest of items—the Ariel Nomad—it is both a Jeep and a racecar.
Amazon Links