2015.03.23 More Car Metaphysics

From RooKwiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Let me take a slight detour from my usual conversing with my future self (my primary audience), and make some clarifying comments for my secondary audience (my kids, probably trying to remember what their dad was like).

There are different axis of experience in interaction with vehicles. The most fundamental of which is as transportation, and which most humans meaningfully exist in while driving - usually commuting. There is also an aesthetic axis, in which design-as-art and the interplay of form and function exist. And then there is the interactive axis, all about driving.

It's funny how my interaction with these axis have progressed over the years. For a while, the thrill of driving was all I cared about. Unreliable and ugly didn't matter just as long as I could maximize the experience of some immersive driving. The easiest way to imagine this extreme is to go play in a go-kart. Later, as my technical and artistic skills unfurled and intertwined, the beauty of some vehicles became extremely important. Especially as I grew to realize how the aesthetic could profoundly interact with the driving. Finally, as I was grudgingly forced to grow up and become responsible, I've also come to seriously consider vehicles in terms of their pragmatic capabilities - especially reliability, safety, and plain old utility.

Note that I don't talk about "value", because that measure is not easily interpreted for anything outside the pragmatic. How much is beauty worth? Or fun? So, let's just not go there.

After years of thinking too much about cars, this multi-axis model of considering vehicles has worn some prejudiced grooves in my mind. If a vehicle is not good transportation, not pretty, and not fun to drive - pretty much worthless to me. A functional car that's good-looking and fun to drive is very appealing. The sorting and juggling among those axis was relatively linear and easy to ultimately classify a vehicle.

For example: I sat in a new Mercedes C-class. Now, I'm very familiar with the previous-generation of C-class - I've had two. The driving axis is unlikely to have budged much - technically capable, but numb-feeling (I haaaate torque converters). And they're less-handsome on the outside (translation, I'm old and like the older stodgy styling better). But the interior - daaang, it was nice. It was substantially similar to the 3-times-the-price S-class.

What does this mean? It means that Mercedes target demographic, probably for the majority of their product range, are people who like quality, prestige, and whose interactive focus is on the experience of being in the car rather than driving the car.

It also means that you need to know what you want, and to see how a vehicle actually compares to the gestalt of your metaphysical ambitions in order to achieve the sort of zen vehicular partnership I aspire to.

So, in conclusion: I need a Tesla or a Porsche.

 

 

SURPRISE