Your car: zombie ride or happy place?

“And I’ve got too much on my mind/I think it’s time to take a drive and leave it all behind. I’ve got a song that’s halfway there/I think it needs the ocean air/I’m gonna grab my guitar and get in my car.” -- The Fisherman Song (We All Need Love) by Mae

Indulge me. Say this, with feeling: Ah, our enduring fascination with our cars!

A good writer-friend once asked me, tongue in cheek, how motoring scribes could find so much to report about our beat, and went on to to posit that vehicles are simply a means to get from here to there.

I most vehemently disagree. On the contrary, I am deeply convinced that no invention or contraption has the ability to evoke such an intensity of passion and a whole range of emotions than our four-wheeled wonders. Far from being just a sofa on tires, cars are relevant in our lives for a variety of reasons. To wit:

The car as zombie transportation

If you really get down to it, the usual weekday grind reduces the lot of us to veritable zombies punching in and out from a life of corporate servitude. Come to think of it, the undead’s fascination and singular (and unending) need for brains is the perfect metaphor for typical office life. Must... find... intelligence.

Are cars then, in the final analysis, ferries through the River Styx – transporting us from the comfort of our homes into the netherworld where horrible sprites lie in wait to suck out our humanity?

The car as happy place

On the other hand, cars can be viewed as our happy place – a cocoon of safety that assures us there is more to life than our destinations. We venture out into the world ensconced in its air-conditioned, protective embrace that largely keeps the bad stuff – the noise, the pollution, the irritants of every day – outside our comfort bubble.

Singer/songwriter Chris Carrabba apparently believed in the cathartic value of his ride. In fact, he named his band Dashboard Confessional. In his song The Sharp Hint of New Tears, Carrabba narrates: “On the way home/this car hears my confessions/I think tonight I’ll take the long way.” I surmise Chris would agree that purging emotions in the confines of a vehicle is a pretty common phenomenon. Oh, if only our cars could talk, what awful and cringe-worthy tales they could tell!

The car as power

Cars are an enabler. They give us power. Why do you think vehicles are often considered more necessity than luxury? And despite the pragmatic approach of some about its ownership, I believe that this is one big-ticket purchase we are only too willing to sign up for and submit our finances to. Why are we often perfectly okay with blowing the budget just for a spiffy ride? Realists be damned; we will have our sweet ride at any cost.

From the standpoint of the corporate zombie, at no point of our servility does power come so firmly in hand than in the moment you drive your boss in your car. You become responsible not only for his job (we already knew that), but his very mortal existence. Think about it. That’s why we despise the narcotics-using bus driver upon whose drug-addled hands rest our life and limb.

The car as competition

Whether we want it to outshine, outlap, or outbling, the car is invariably an extension of our ego. Men have been intrinsically competitive from the moment we learned to wield a club and vie for the attention of the opposite sex (yes, the art of communication was apparently lost to our male forebears as well). We race, we detail, we tinker. That’s what we do, and the car lends itself most nicely to our natural compulsions.

The car as bachelor’s pad

How about this: I have a suspicion we guys look at cars as a bachelor’s pads that are never meant to be outgrown. My wife still occasionally jibes me about how I used treat my car like my room. Clothes would litter the back-row seat, bare clothes hangers dangled from the overhead grab handle (a particular pet peeve of hers), and the trunk was usually conscripted as a mobile laundry hamper. Domesticity slowly (if not decisively) put a damper on that notion, but I believe that I would easily revert to blessed, carefree days of yore without the consternation of my better half.

This is the car as a domicile – an extension of the most personal of spaces (one’s bedroom).

The car as toy

A popular shop (now shuttered) was called Toys for the Big Boys. It was an appropriately christened establishment that hawked anything from luxury cars to small planes and helicopters. More important than its array of big-ticket temptations was the notion it reinforced that, indeed, the difference between boys and men is just the price tag of their playthings. It’s about graduating from Matchbox replicas to the real kahuna; from smaller-scale representations to full-size perfection.

The car as cultural barometer

Cars have changed in concert with how people live. A time traveller from the 1800s would barely recognize today’s daily driver – much less appreciate and understand the myriad of gizmos that now come standard with it. The start-stop button has started to become a common feature. Keyless entry is now an expected extra, along with Bluetooth phone pairing, iPod connectivity, and a host of other niceties. What would that motorist from two centuries ago make of rear cameras, or the ability to change driving characteristics?

You wouldn’t be far off the mark if you said the only thing a classic Ford Model T shares in common with a particularly tasty Audi R8 is the shape of its tires. Our convenience-, safety-, and power-obsessed society has evolved the car into a showcase of technological acronyms: ABS, CRDi, EBD, etc.

Which brings me to my original point: cars are an intimate reflection of us and what we hold dear. If they were primarily meant to be a point-and-shoot, A-to-B affair, then we’d have one kind of car which was priced dirt-cheap.

The car as expression

There’s probably the rub. We are so enamored by cars because they let us show our true colors to the world at large. Our choice in them not only reveals our social class, but our taste (or lack thereof). Cars are very personal propositions akin to the very clothes we wear on our back. They let us be ourselves; they let us become what we aspire for. That’s why people never take buying vehicles lightly: their first choice isn’t usually the last one, and they do every last bit of cognitive dissonance-removing research.

If only we were as fastidious about our jobs and bosses, then we wouldn’t have to turn into zombies each working day.