Today, I kept finding myself returning to a thought. A thought I probably wouldn’t dare verbalise out loud, at least not outside of this audience, as I don’t think many others would understand. Maybe it’s the fact I just had an amazing day driving my Suzuki Cappuccino around Curborough with friends, but I keep thinking about that particular moment when you fall in love with a car. The very instant when the collection of plastic, metal, rubber, nuts, bolts and often rust stops being just that and turns into something far more meaningful than the sum of its parts.
Even through my dullest days at work in the automotive industry, I’ve always had this very romanticised idea of the automobile. I see cars as vessels to adventure, providing the freedom to drive to new destinations, allowing us to cover the distance between where we are and where we want to be with our loved ones. Long before I could sit behind the wheel, which in Portugal only happens at 18 (so I had to make the decision to go to university and make a career out of them before I’d even driven one…) I have always found cars joyous to be in or even just to see.
I know now there is a lot of very deliberate work to make it so. Manufacturers craft their products to appeal to us. As part of my job I get to peek behind the scenes in many of the departments that transform the product from a sketch on a piece of paper to the real life-sized thing you see on the roads, perhaps years later. And yet, we don’t fall in love with every car. In fact, over the years I’ve owned many vehicles that, despite being extremely competent at their intended use, felt soul-suckingly dull. So, what is it that makes some cars different?
