My kid needs a car sometime soon, so I've been asking people their opinions about cars. This process has led me to one inevitable conclusion: people think their cars represent their inner being, so they make sure to buy a car that demonstrates exactly who they wish they were, but will never actually be. The end result is that the car serves to emphasize the person's failings instead of covering them up.
The perfect example is, of course, the minivan. Every college-educated, suburban, middle-aged, upper-middle-class, two-child woman is desperately trying to pretend she doesn't drive a minivan. Of course, she drives carpool on Tuesdays with five kids, so she needs a car with a third row. She has four different sporting activities and routine trips to some giant warehouse club store, plus there's that homeowners' association-approved garden she needs to keep supplied, so she needs cargo space. The minivan, however, sends her over the edge, somewhere past post-partum depression and into the realm of deep, existential angst over her lost, non-mom identity. And this is where car dealers make their money.
For $10-15K more than a minivan,you can get a large SUV with essentially the same exact features as a minivan, but -- this is important -- it looks different. Sure, it gets crap mileage, the safety specs are generally lower, and no one with the standard quantity of eyes in her head can park the damn thing. Yeah, so what if the only way to get into the third-row seat is via Olympic pole-vault maneuvers. None of that matters, because it is an SUV and not a minivan.
Note to research department: investigate the very real possibility that "SUV" is actually secret code for, "I totally wanted to give up my kids for adoption and go back to re-living my college days, but I knew my sorority sisters would judge me, so I bought this vehicle instead."
SUV moms are only the most visible of the Drivers with Yearning Issues. There's the whole group of people who wish they hadn't been born part of the species that will soon destroy the planet, so they buy the Toyota Prius or the Nissan Leaf (unless they have money and a gadget fetish, in which case they go with Tesla). There are the men who wish they had grown up hunting and fishing more than once a year, who invariably buy pickup trucks of improbable dimensions. And of course, there are the guys who never really were cool, but they can now afford the sharpest car on the lot. They buy convertibles. Every. Time.
None of which helps me with my soon-to-be-sixteen daughter, who -- through some strange roll of the dice -- appears to have arrived on earth as a person satisfied with herself, who needs no vehicular affirmation of any kind. Strangely enough, there's a small minivan that she really likes.
