Car Owners

I should tell you first that I am not a car guy.  I drive my car a lot, but many of its details remain a mystery to me; details like the displacement of its engine and the location of its wiper fluid.  While I understand most of the pedals and knobs at my disposal, I view the hood, and all things beneath it, as off-limits.  I don't go to car shows, I don't know the model numbers of cars I can't afford, and I've never understood paying money for a car that doesn't run.

What I do know is design, and I know quite well how humans tend to interpret their purchases.  I know that trying to sell a sedan based solely on the fact that it's taller than other sedans is a stupid idea, and that naming a sedan "Five Hundred" is stupider still.  But mostly I find it fascinating to discuss what we can discern about a person by their choice of automobile.  Personally, I divide car owners into the following categories:

The Practicals
The Practicals are the type of people who won’t purchase anything over $50 without first consulting Consumer Reports.  Most likely, they've never changed their own oil, participated in a street race, or picked up members of the opposite sex from the driver's-side window.  These morons will recite from memory the fuel economy and crash test ratings for each the five top-selling minivans, even though they would never recognize the vans in traffic.  These morons won't let anyone but an authorized dealer work on their car, even though they know this practice costs them three times as much as it should.  And these morons include amongst their ranks a man named Jason Looney.

The Car Dorks
These guys like to call themselves "gear heads" much like computer nerds prefer the term "software engineer."  Whatever.  The Car Dorks love the inner workings of automobiles moreso than any visible feature of a particular model.  They are the ones at parties who talk of mundane things you could never understand, such as how smart Volvo was for putting their transmission in a Gossamer and Bentley carriage, or how elegant the hose design was on the 83 Corolla.  They will purchase the burnt-up shell of a Karmann Ghia at auction just so they can run home and cram the old Buick engine in their garage into it.  They fervently believe that the automobile is the most magnificent machine ever manufactured, yet they ride a bike to work since, naturally, they don't own a car that runs.

The Gays
To be one of The Gays you don't necessarily have to be homosexual, you just have to love design over everything else.  The Gay only cracks the hood of his car occasionally, and even then does so merely to marvel at the layers of plastic hiding the ugly utility of automobile innards.  They keep their cars immaculately clean, they invented the phrase "clean lines," and they are among the only ones to know the official names of automobile paint colors.  ("Did you go with the Misano Red Pearl Effect, or the Canyon Red?  Please say Misano!!")  In some cases, The Gays are also homosexual.

The Women
Much like The Gays, one doesn't have to be a woman to fall into this category (and certainly not all women do).  One simply has to know absolutely nothing about any car on the road, including the car one is currently driving.  When The Women talk about cars they've seen and liked they call them "pretty."  And when asked what model the pretty car was they say "blue."  These are the purest and most admirable of all car owners: they simply want something to take them from point A to B. 

The Minorities
(Hmm… At this point in the blog post I'm thinking perhaps I should have come up with less offensive names for these categories.  But, hey: Those of you who know me know that I’m a lover of all people, and those of you who don't know me should read my blog more often.  Also: I was a gay black woman for Halloween last year, so, you know, I get it.  Now back to the gross categorization of human beings…) The Minorities are those who buy cars for the sole purpose of gluing chrome junk from Western Auto to them.  They will remove a car's suspension and add low-profile tires -- two things that make for a lovely and soothing ride -- purely for aesthetic reasons.  For these folks, a car isn't transportation, it is a personal statement.  It is a statement of freedom, individuality, and, most of all, one man's love for neon lighting.

The Muscles
Every man is insecure and frustrated, and with many of us, these flaws present themselves as cars with more power than aircraft carriers.  We hold on to the notion that a faster car will make us superior to our contemporaries, that it will make our commute more bearable (if not illegal), and that it will make us infinitely more desirable to the opposite sex.  Of course, to some extent a fast car will do all of these things, but not nearly as efficiently as large piles of money.  A quick way to large piles of money would be to stop wasting so much of it re-fueling four hundred horsepower engines, but The Muscles don't think this way.  All they know is that the faster they drive, the easier it is to forget about their inadequacies in their underwear.

The Poor
For many, many years I drove an old Pontiac Bonneville.  Why?  Because my mom sold it to me for $3.  After that I drove a Geo Prizm for several years.  Why?  Because my mom sold it to me for $3.  It's only recently that I've had the opportunity to become a Slightly-Gay Practical, and frankly, I can't actually afford that.  It's just my mom stopped selling me $3 cars when I turned 30 and now I have to fend for myself. 

So today I drive a paid-for 98 Camry with Ruby Pearl paint, hand-tuned FBCI converters, pretty fabric, and two big black dice with skulls for dots.  And I drive it, most of the time, with the "overdrive" off, to give me that extra edge.

So let me ask: What kind of car owner are you?