Any loser can drive a posh car but it takes real character to drive a crap one. If a sports car is a penis extension, then a rust-bucket screams Big Dick Energy. Even, or especially, if you are a woman.
I picked up my own crap car, a 2007-plate Nissan X-trail, five years ago because I moved to the countryside and needed a workhorse to replace my previous car, a Honda CR-V, which I’d bought for £500. Prior to this I had a Volkswagen Type 2, which cost £18,000, but every time you turned the key in the engine you still had to hold your breath.
My Nissan looks like it has just been in a fight – and lost. The heating has gone. The seat covers are ripped. The sunroof jams. The battery light flickers on and off like it’s trying to communicate in Morse code. I have to keep a DIY emergency repair kit in the car at all times consisting of rope (for towing), cable ties (to hold up the front bumper) and masking tape (for everything else), so it looks like I’m heading off to recreate Fifty Shades of Grey.
The interior is worse; ruled by my fat chocolate labrador Bear who keeps the mud-flecked backseat as his throne and a selection of sticks in the front foot well. Who needs a pine tree? Eau de wet dog is my car freshener of choice.
My crappy car cannot look at a garage without costing me £500. We Buy Any Car offered me £200 for it – and yet, despite all these flaws, I couldn’t bring myself to hand it in.
Some of the reasons for this are sentimental: the three Glastonbury festival parking passes stuck to the front windscreen that I can’t get off; the masking tape holding the wing mirror together from that great birthday lunch when I walked into my car. Obviously.
But, more than that, it’s because having a crap car is a relief in the countryside. Gone are your worries about potholed lanes or a horse taking a kick at the bonnet. I hit the back gate like I’m playing bagatelle. Plus it’s essential lest the locals think you are a DFL (Down From London). Drive a shiny new Range Rover around Somerset and you’re asking to have your tyres slashed.
My Nissan looks like it has just been in a fight – and lost. The heating has gone. The seat covers are ripped. The sunroof jams. The battery light flickers on and off like it’s trying to communicate in Morse code
I would say this of course because I’m too broke to buy a posh car. But even my rich author friend Guy Kennaway agrees. He says that when he drove a sports car he felt like a twat; now he bombs around in an ancient golf. ‘It wasn’t driving a Porsche that made me feel like a wanker,’ Guy explained, ‘it was arriving in one’.
In the countryside everyone’s driving bangers. But even when I take my bashed, bruised, petrol-loving, Ulez-hating rust-bucket into the city, she comes into her own. People clock her with horror. Other drivers give me a wide birth, literally swerving to avoid me. When a woman drives a car as pummelled as mine it’s obvious she doesn’t give a fuck, which is a petrifying mentality to a man driving an £150,000 Mercedes.
Surely this is the laissez faire attitude we should have to what are, after all, just lumps of metal. It’s chic not to buy into obvious status symbols, like the French, who show their indifference to motors in Paris by banging each other’s cars out of the way when parking – as famously demonstrated by Richard Hammond on his show The Grand Tour.
To me, what you give up by not driving a £200,000 motor, you make up for in freedom: freedom from cripplingly expensive insurance and the fear of your trusty steed being stolen. If anything, I leave my car unlocked on London streets, quietly praying for it to be taken so I can be instantly relieved from mechanical problems and get a nice insurance payout to blow on lunch.
But the freedom is more than that, too. It’s the feeling that calls you to get behind the wheel, sunroof down, Fleetwood Mac on the stereo (or, in my case, Richie Spice which has been stuck in the cassette player for two years), not knowing where you’ll end up. It’s a hankering captured in American car culture, which doesn’t quite translate to the UK because, I suppose, we have the MOT. But, paperwork aside, it’s far easier to recreate On The Road in a rust-bucket than it is if you’re worried about your paintwork getting scratched.
Ultimately, the reason why I love my crap old car is because I’m not afraid of losing it. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for why I’m so bad at relationships.
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