There is a well known cliché that says, ‘never lend your wife or your car’. Now clichés are clichés because they are true. In this case the truth lies in the subjectivity of the statement; if you subject it to assimilated ownership and practicality i.e. Thus in retrospect, cars have achieved the status of life partners for men. A man and his car are almost as inseparable as a honeymooning couple. The newness of the leather, the factory finish, the virgin gloss of the metallic paint and the slightly detuned engine, all add to the novelty of the experience and sparks off the beginning of what could possible be a life – long relationship. It’s almost like discovering another human.
The advantage of course is that a car doesn’t talk back or turn around to slap you in the face. Instead it labours, sometimes with effort, for years on end, sputtering every now and then while craving for attention but not until a good ten years are done and the clocks have looped from the mileage. And it’s not just the reliability of the machine but the very feel of the matrix of moving parts that does something fantastical to our senses. Apart from the excessive adrenaline being pumped into your veins at higher speeds, just the sheer soft and steady locomotion of the automobile with you in it, lends to life an experience that was necessarily absent around a hundred years ago.
The introduction of a moving box on wheels must surely have bemused our mustached and bespectacled grandfathers and the engineers that lived then, gave fruition to the vision of a few. It started in the most humble form and has grown in sophistication and utility through the decades. From a rickety spine deforming carriage to a climate controlled, self aware (GPS) legion of horses. The car as we know it has come a long way and we often take for granted that which was once considered a device of the future.
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