The word "car" was mentioned four times in President Barack Obama's speech to Congress last night. He said... The ability to get a loan is.... The word "car" was mentioned four times in President Barack Obama's speech to Congress last night.

He said...

• The ability to get a loan is how you finance the purchase of everything from a home to a car to a college education; how stores stock their shelves, farms buy equipment, and businesses make payroll.
  
  
• When there is no lending, families can't afford to buy homes or cars.
  
  
• And then those workers will have money to spend, and if they can get a loan too, maybe they'll finally buy that car, or open their own business.
  
  
• And to support that innovation, we will invest $15 bn dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.
  

But the most unnerving words came when he used the word "automobile."

As for our auto industry, everyone recognises that years of bad decision-making and a global recession have pushed our automakers to the brink. We should not, and will not, protect them from their own bad practices. But we are committed to the goal of a re-tooled, re-imagined auto industry that can compete and win. Millions of jobs depend on it. Scores of communities depend on it. And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.

I'm not going to be too hard on the president for not knowing that America didn't invent the automobile, I'd venture that if the answers to the multiple choice question "Who invented the automobile?" contained Henry Ford's name, most respondents would choose that answer.

I'm also not going to criticize the efforts to protect jobs.

I think the phrase "communities depend on it" probably also refers to jobs rather than the fact that scores of communities are dependent on the car because they aren't designed for transit. Nor am I going to be critical if what the President meant was that communities depend on the car for their livelihood.

I do want to challenge that final segment of that final sentence, however, that America can't walk away from the automobile.

Mr. President, had you said "America can't just walk away from the automobile," I'd tend to agree. For the better part of a century, most of our communities have been built around the automobile, and we can't change that over night. Yet we have to (and are) moving away from our complete and unchallenged reliance on the automobile.

We have to.

Even the cleanest car will require concrete highways and encourage strip mall-type paving of the earth. I also don't expect cars to ever be as fuel-efficient (or as safe) as trains and pulbic transit. Life in the suburbs, where people are divided by parking lots, windshields and miles, will never be as efficient as being together in traditional communities. As demographics and consumer preferences change, as we pass Hubbards Peak and move down the oil production slope, as the effects of global warming accelerate, the car will become less central to the American Life.

Mr. President, we can walk away from the car and we must. For our lives, our pocketbooks and our planet.