Friday, March 10, 2006
You know that old line about how boys never grow up, they just get bigger toys? I’ve a feeling I’m an example of that, despite my best intentions.
For someone who lives in a house with one car and five bikes, I think about cars a lot. If I’m driving (in the deeply unfashionable 1999 Honda CRV that’s our family’s ride), I’ll sometimes watch the cars that pass me and ask myself, ‘would I drive that?’.
Almost always, the answer is no, which is ironic because when I pass another CRV, I say no to that too. Partly, it’s that too many American cars are very ugly, and partly it’s that here in Santa Fe, there’s a preponderence of big SUVs. Which I really hate, for many of the reasons outlined in Keith Bradsher’s excellent book, High and Mighty.
When I’m home and grab a few minutes, I play Gran Tourismo on the Playstation, and think about cars some more.
Normally, this obsession is kept at manageable proportions, but currently we’re thinking about getting another car, so I feel I have permission to do piles of internet research, peer into the windows of parked vehicles and download clandestine episodes of Top Gear via BitTorrent (not that I actually do that last one, of course).
Like a true European, especially one who grew up driving Volkswagens, I’ve my heart set on a GTI (here they drop the Golf epithet for some reason). It’s plenty fast, practical, good-looking, not too big, and has a great ‘manumatic’ gear box wiith paddle shifters that will keep both Buendia and myself happy.
The four-door version is out here in the summer. So far so good. But that doesn’t stop me poring over reviews of the Mazda 3, the Audi A3, the faster Sube Imprezas and a few other cars that I’m pretty sure we won’t buy.
(The one distraction from the GTI is the funky ads for it that have started appearing on TV here. Clearly in the US the car is aimed at people much younger and less well-behaved than myself. )
At this point, I’m clearly not just researching cars because it will help us make a good decision, I’m doing it because I actually enjoy doing it.
I used to be bemused by Buendia’s inability to walk into a store and just buy something. Now I get it. When it comes to cars, the journey is as important as the destination.
(GTI image courtesy of VWVortex)