Wheels

[prawnwarp]

I'm shopping around for a new car. My current car is twenty this year, so "new" to me means something made this century. It's probably going to be a secondhand fleet sales Corolla with a year left on the warranty: something smallish but with a little room for expansion, since I want it to last till the girls are all in their teens

Comments

[prawnwarp]

It's not cars per se that get me going. They are very useful, especially when trying to shift three kids around, and my shared custody arrangements would be a lot more clunky without a car.

And driving on freeways is a lot of fun; even driving around the city has its satisfactions. I'm actually really looking forward for ditching my old banger for something more comfortable and reliable.

It's the culture surrounding them that gets me riled. Next to houses, cars are about the most expensive things most people purchase - yet the media surrounding them seems to base its judgements on the attitude of a 16 year old idiot. I find this especially vexing in its bourgeois forms, like Fairfax's Drive, which feels to me like a perpetual mid-life crisis, always going on about values ("sportiness" and "performance") which most people, let's face it, can't afford to care about.

I can even understand the appeal of Top Gear; it's a form of fantasy and probably acts as a release valve of some kind. My distaste for it is visceral - I've never known TV to rub me so firmly the wrong way, it's like a neurotoxin.

[ataxi]

Fair enough on the distinction between cars and "car culture".

My coping mechanism when it comes to Australian car culture is to mutter obscenities under my breath every time someone guns it past me in what I refer to as a "penis ute", especially if lives are endangered in the process.

Top Gear's not a great show by any means, nor politically sound, but it doesn't evoke a neurotoxin-ish response in me (and there's plenty of TV around that does - sitcoms, commercial current affairs, lifestyle shows, etcetera).