What We Talk About When We Talk About Cars

The other day an old friend said that although they dislike cars and often disagree with me, they have nonetheless enjoyed my articles over the years.

Knowing this friend and their engagement with politics better than I know how to take a compliment, I said this could be because cars aren't just cars, but a physical manifestation of industries, policies and systems of state administration that must be engaged with either wittingly or unwittingly. 

The three concurrent systems of road tax a driver in the UK can contend with exemplify this. The first of these requires knowing the cubic capacity of car's engine, the second followed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and requires knowing its CO2 emissions, while the current system is based on a car's CO2 emissions, its price when new, if all or part of its propulsion is powered by electricity and, if it runs on diesel, whether its exhaust system meets European RDE2 test criteria (quite).

Most people don't care about such details, and understandably so: better to look at an advert to determine a car's tax implications, just as it's preferable to choose biscuits based on what one fancies and how much they cost rather than muse on market prices for cocoa and the 1991 VAT tribunal that deemed Jaffa Cakes cakes.

A lot of the people in my life don't like cars, and that's okay. One friend's default response to the topic is to say "it's just a car" but he loves football, a sport that leaves me cold. We each think the other's passion daft, yet chat together in our foreign languages.

Even amongst those who do like cars vast differences exist. Some love electric vehicles, others are more sceptical; many wax lyrical over aesthetic beauty and alloy-wheel designs, while the next person might care little for these but have a deep affinity for cam profiles, thermodynamics, electrodynamics and aerodynamics. Market movements, active Vs passive safety, handling, supply-chain logistics, online algorithms, consumer behaviour in the purchase 'funnel' (spare me) – as the most complex and expensive item we encounter regularly in our lives, it's little wonder a lot can be said of cars.

Emotional responses

Such topics are a little dry, though, and more emotionally rich car seams exist: memories and people.

To take one, my old man was a car enthusiast, and you would have liked him – most people did. His nickname at work was 'Mr Morals' and he moved from head of sales to head of HR towards the later stages of his career – an interesting pivot with a good story behind it but one, alas, that I cannot share. I can and do share his love of cars though.

He was a good driver, once drawing a crowd then a round of applause for paralleling into a tight Parisian parking spot. He bought the Jag XJR you see at the top of this article at a time when texting was charged by the message, but I think he thought it was charged by the character as he announced his purchase by sending "Would you believe XJR". Either way he once arrived at a university to give a lecture and made such good time his host declared he heard the "sonic boom" as dad approached. One of the deciding factors when choosing a car was whether an ashtray would accommodate his pipe.

I know almost every single one of the cars he owned, and some that he didn't. When he was 17 he wrote off his old man's Ford V8 Pilot by taking a corner too fast and crashing into a tree. This was in the days before seatbelts and he was flung from the car, only to lie on the ground, stunned, watching the Pilot roll once, then twice, coming to rest just before him, thinking, he said later, "oh". He clearly lived to tell the tale, no doubt in part thanks to a doctor who happened to be passing. My mother tells me his father's words on learning of the crash were "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune", which I learn is Bacon.

He later had his own cars. His first was a Ford 'Special', which was actually a van with a two-door roadster body plonked on top of it – a not uncommon practice back when money was tight and chassis simple. He and my mother met at university, and when she got her first job she bought him a Jag MkII as a birthday present.

After university there was a Frogeye Sprite that someone drove into the back of on the motorway, shrinking the tiny car even further, almost ending both him and my mother as it concertinaed.

Later he got into company cars, the first of which was another Ford, this time a MkI Granada that nobody else in the pool wanted partly as it had an automatic gearbox back when such contraptions made cars lethargic and uneconomical; he nicknamed this 'The Pig'.

The first car I remember him with was a bronze MkII Vauxhall Cavalier company car; I can still recall watching from the sitting-room window as it was dropped off in the layby opposite my first home.

Later came an Audi 90, which he liked though said felt a little light and susceptible to crosswinds on the motorway. Summer holidays usually involved driving 12 hours down to the south of France. One year late at night on the way down when he thought everyone else in the car asleep I witnessed him overtaking on the autoroute at speed, bashing the top of the steering wheel and shouting under his breath "Go baby go!" as he gunned the 90's motor. Whatever the car, the end of each of these holidays was marked by a competition he seemed to hold with himself to see how many half cases of wine he could cram into a car for the return journey, kids' legroom be damned. It was cool; I had a Gameboy, juiceboxes, Automatic for the People, Now 10, a Walkman and good batteries.

Later there was a brace of Vauxhall Carltons and an E34 BMW 520i, plus a couple of 'holdover' cars when his firm's fleet was between leases. A manual Mercedes 190E wasn't a great success partly as it was metallic purple and partly as the seats were like "jelly on springs", but the MkIII Ford Granda cleared the blotch left by its forefather partly for being extremely competent and comfortable, and partly for not batting an eyelid for the entirety of a four-hour traffic-jam nightmare in the St Gotthard Pass tunnel during the height of summer.

I guess it's not surprising I moved into automotive journalism. As my career progressed and the cars I took home became better, I once got to take him for a spin in a Mercedes-AMG E63 wagon ("You must be doing something right to get that for the weekend"). I'm afraid I can't publish his comment about superlative numbers as we dawdled down a straight bit of country road.

Sharing all these memories might seem awfully self-indulgent, but if I don't write them down they'll eventually be lost forever, so I might as well.

Later came sadness, but still cars were there to help fix my memory. Three weeks after I learnt he had months to live I got a call to say I should get down to him pronto, and the only car available at work was the boss' Mercedes-AMG G63, given without question, and ironically in a similar shade of purple to the 190E he loathed – but a memorable car in which to make a death dash.

We were lucky enough that he was able to die at home, and while details of that are for another time (though a BBC podcast has more on them), I don't think he would have objected to the undertaker's car that collected his corpse in the night being a Ford S-Max, as they have a decent reputation for handling. I won't ever be able to hear Ford's three-note door chime without thinking of standing on the gravel and watching that black tailgate close in the floodlit rain, though.

As an aside, if you are ever in a comparable situation and doing so is possible, try to make a recording of your loved one's voice. I didn't ask dad to say anything in particular, but left a dictaphone running for half an hour while we chatted.

Away from maudlin matters, it's not just me that thinks like this, at least in part. A friend of mine came out from the passenger seat of a car because "you don’t have to make eye contact with the driver". She couldn’t give a fig for cars but I bet she could tell you the model.

I don't have an off switch on these things, but can just about stop myself describing in close detail the first time I encountered air conditioning in a Fiat Croma around Milan; or when I got double-thumbs-up from the cop in the shotgun seat of a panda car with blues-and-twos on after I backed up at the top speed reverse gear allowed me in order to clear a passage down an urban dual carriageway that the police were driving the wrong way down as the right side was blocked; or the Coke can wrapped with coathangers around the CRX muffler – all this for another time.

For now, if you've made it this far, do know that I continue to hook memories off cars. Like the blasts in the C63 I owned for some of a summer before realising a 6.2-litre V8 super-estate with an MCT gearbox can't really work as a town car. Or putting the WRX on a Channel Island ferry. Or the 911 Turbo S I used for drop-off, or the orange Mustang, or the F-Pace we drove for three hours in a thunderstorm, or the Jeep, or the Kodiaq, or all the other stories.

Anyway, remind me what I was talking about again?