A car can show you who you are

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/10/2018 (2861 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I am pretty sure I have said this before: I am not a car guy.

In contrast, my son — who was born sporting Italian leather driving gloves and making that “VROOM! VROOM!” noise with his lips — is wildly passionate about motor vehicles and joyfully recites their specifications the way I spew out my breakfast order at the McDonald’s drive-thru window.

When we have conversations about cars, it typically goes something like this:

Me: “Wow! That car is shiny and red. I’ll bet that makes it go faster.”

My son: “Um, no, it goes faster because it has a 3.5-litre DOHC 24-valve V-6 engine with 300 horsepower and 261 pound-feet of torque at 6,400 r.p.m. Also, it’s got performance headers, a continuously variable timing control system on the intake valves and even water-cooled nitrous-oxide injectors.”

Me: “Do you want hash browns with your Egg McMuffin?”

The point I am trying to make is that I have zero interest in cars, which makes it hard to explain why I felt a strange compulsion the other day to click on a computer link to a Popular Mechanics magazine story about, and I will quote them directly, “the most important car the year you were born.”

In a serious effort to avoid doing anything remotely productive, I clicked on the link and found myself immersed in a feature wherein they dished up little blurbs and photographs about all the significant vehicles for the past 100 years.

I know you are champing at the bit, so I will just blurt out that the most important car of the year I was born — which was 1956, the year after dinosaurs were blown up by a giant asteroid — was the Continental Mark II.

As you can imagine, my reaction to this vehicular discovery was something along the lines of: “Huh?”

This was because I had never previously heard of this automobile. Here is what Popular Mechanics had to say: “Ford’s Continental luxury brand created a true design masterpiece when it launched the Mark II personal luxury coupe. It was also hideously expensive, costing over $10,000 at the time if you opted for air conditioning.

The 285 hp, V8-powered coupe weighed nearly 5,000 pounds so it wasn’t exactly quick. But it was luxurious and assembled with the care and craftsmanship on par with the best in the world at that time. Less than 3,000 of them were built before production ended in 1957.”

My son would find that fascinating, but the only thing that I noticed was the fact this vehicle looked remarkably like a small hearse and it was photographed parked in front of a house that (and this is kind of creepy) looks almost identical to the house I currently live in.

At that point, my mind began to wander and, for reasons I do not fully understand, I began to ponder what statement a person’s automobile makes about them.

Without doing any actual research, I knew exactly what my car would say about me to other people.

It would say: “My owner is too (bad word) lazy to walk to the coffee shop and it’s just down the street.” And: “I am sick and tired of him losing me in the parking lot at the mall! It makes me feel very sad. HEY, IDIOT, I’M OVER HERE!!!”

Online, I found some revealing information in a feature by Men’s Health magazine describing the people who buy different brands of cars, including the Ford, which was the hot car when I was born and also the first car I inherited from my dad.

According to the article: “You (Ford owners) think of yourself as friendly but direct and you work in building or construction. You own a dog, and you’re either a Gen X’er or a baby boomer. You love football, beef jerky and pumpkin pie, and you don’t care much about ‘looking young’ or ‘feeling attractive’… You wear Converse and Dickies, and shop at Walmart.”

I was stunned by the uncanny accuracy of that description because — and this is the unvarnished truth — I really do love pumpkin pie.

Still, inquiring journalistic minds want to know more, so I then spent several valuable seconds on the computer trying to find out what kind of person drives a black Nissan Maxima, which is the car I currently own, because my previous car, which was purple, was T-boned by some unobservant motorists a few years back.

What I discovered was that Nissan recently did a scientific-type study about the correlation between the colour of a person’s car and their personality, because they don’t want drivers with orange personalities to be driving green vehicles, as you can imagine.

Here’s what it says about folks, like me, with black cars: “Individuals who pick black feel confident, even powerful, and desire sophistication.

“Black is the product of mixing every chromatic pigment together, so individuals with black cars often pride themselves on being achievers.

“We associate black cars with mysterious organizations and important individuals for a reason.”

If I was shocked that my car revealed my secret love for pumpkin pie, I was even more astounded that it knew — as I have been telling my wife for years — that I am both mysterious and important.

I feel so deeply moved that I am going to say “thank you” to my car right now — just as soon as I can figure out where I left it in this (bad word) parking lot.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca