The Outdoor Car Law

You may not have realised it, but I am not only the Blogopolis’ pre-eminent automotive-style commentator, but I am also highly regarded in the field of automotive-psychology. This week, instead of a post trying once again to puzzle out a theory of automotive style, I thought it would be interesting to write on psychology.

It is an undeniable psychological fact that some people will always have more cars than they have garage space. There is a particular, established number of cars, laid down in one’s subconscious, that one can keep out-of-doors without undergoing mental anguish – this number is one’s ‘outdoor-car tolerance’. Fluctuations around this number do occur, with these fluctuations being most apparent during a time lag if more garage space is acquired, or some is given away, but the number of cars kept outside will always return to equilibrium at this number.

The rule always applies. If your outdoor-car tolerance is set at one car, then, time-lag effect notwithstanding, this is the number of cars that you will always keep outdoors. The more garage space you have access to, the more cars you will own. If your tolerance is set at one, then one car will stay out-of-doors. It is important to note that you needn’t own the garage space for the rule to hold true – it applies to rented garages, garage space you’ve borrowed off a friend, or a brother, or a mother-in-law. Within a period of time – usually about six months – of having placed all of the cars back undercover, you will have bought additional cars such that one of them needs to be once again kept out-of-doors.

There is of course a dangerous fallacy toyed with by those who build massive warehouse-sized workshop/garages – they believe they can outwit their own subconscious. They believe that if they build a big enough garage space, that this space will be sufficient, and that they will never again need to keep cars out-of-doors. After all, who could possibly need sixteen cars? This is not true. The freshly built space will be filled with cars, and the original number of cars will, within time, return out-of-doors. The best result that can be gained from building an enormous garage space is an increase in the immediate time lag. That is to say, if a man’s outdoor-car tolerance is as high as eight cars, and he builds a twelve car garage where previously he could only store two cars, then it is likely to take sometime more than six months before he is back to eight outdoor cars. There appears to be a multiplication factor in the relationship between time and outdoor cars – six months to acquire the first outdoor car, then an additional three months, roughly, for the acquisition of each additional outdoor car. To illustrate: our friend with ten cars, two of them in indoor storage, moves to a new home and builds a twelve car garage. He is very pleased with himself: suddenly he has two empty spaces. Shortly thereafter, those are filled by new acquisitions. Within six months, he has purchased an additional car – the first to be stored out of doors. He doesn’t feel he is doing too badly – the new garage seems to be working. However, he will, inexorably, over the next 24 months, acquire an additional 7 cars, all of which will come to live out of doors.

The process also appears to work in reverse – as an individual passes his outdoor-car tolerance, the subconscious urge to find or build garage space increases until it is unbearable. With an outdoor-car tolerance of two, a man who buys a third car will find himself building or renting a garage within six months. Of course, he will try and be smart, and build a two-car garage, but this will only result in him acquiring a fourth car.

It appears that the number of cars that can be stored outside is laid down in one’s subconscious relatively early in one’s life. If, in your early twenties, you had one car, and it was always kept outdoors, then this has set your outdoor-car figure for the rest of your life. If you find a house with a garage, within six months you will have two cars. If you find a house with a two car garage, and then borrow a garage from a friend, within six months you will have four cars – one will still have to live out of doors.

Additionally, the solubility of cars seems to have some inverse relationship with the outdoor-car tolerance of a person. People with a fancy for water soluble Italian cars seem to both have a higher outdoor-car tolerance, and feel a greater level of anguish about leaving those same cars out-of-doors. Those who fancy quadruple galvanised late model German cars often appear to have an outdoor-car tolerance close to zero, when their vehicles would stand storage in a disused and flooded salt mine.

It is also important to understand precisely what constitutes a car. You are not able to trick your subconscious by keeping a bare series one Alfasud shell somewhere where you might occasionally see it, and thus keep all of your ‘good’ cars indoors. For a car to count towards your outdoor-car tolerance, you must be able to, intend to, and convince other more objective people, that you will return it to road-going condition. You may from the bottom of you heart believe that you intend to restore that box of rust flakes and a chassis-number plate back to a mint condition Alfa Giulia Super, but if I don’t believe you, then your subconscious isn’t going to either, and it doesn’t count as a car.



My own car:garage-space ratio provides a useful illustration. As you may have seen from my side-bar bio, I have two and a half old Alfa Romeos. At the moment, the regular car that I drive around in is an old Alfa 164, dark green, 3.0 litre V6 and manual. In many ways it is a very good car. The second is an older Alfasud Sprint that I am restoring, with just a little hot-rodding thrown in for good measure. (Those of you who are deeply nerdy can see this process here.) The ‘half’ is much of a second Alfasud Sprint, partly dismantled, but still rolling if you push it.

Traditionally, I have always had an outdoor-car-tolerance of one. Currently I have a two car garage outside my house, and rent a space in another garage some 45 minutes’ drive up the coast. Three cars, three garages. You might reasonably think that I have overcome my one car outdoor-car-tolerance. But things are never that simple. Because restoring is a time and space consuming process, the Sprint is parked diagonally in the two car garage with various parts spread around it. So the 164 lives outside.

Of course, the half Sprint is also not going to be returned to the road, so does not qualify as a car according to the above law. Somehow, then, I have managed to obey my psychological imperative and have three garage spaces, two cars, and still one car outside.

So it goes.

Style vs. Cool

There is an important distinction that needs to be drawn between ‘cool’ and ‘style’. This is important, as I will inevitably critique cars that are cool, but that do not have style.

Let me see if I can explain.

Cool is the quality that teenagers mistake for style.

There are certain rules that one should live by.

One of those is that, by age 25 you need to have stopped blaming your parents for things that happen in your life.

A second is that, at about the same age, you need to stop pursuing ‘cool’, and being pursuing ‘style’. You may never succeed, particularly if you are a man, because every man has inside him a small boy aged between about six and ten, and that small boy will always be susceptible to ‘cool’. But that is by the by. It is the pursuit that matters.

To relate this to cars: just because a car is cool, it does not follow that the car has style.

The small boy inside you, or the teenage boy, will mistake the cool for style, and that boy will be mistaken.

For example: you can make pretty much any car cool by giving it 400 horsepower. It’s really that simple. You cannot, however, make a car stylish by giving it 400hp.



So the Porsche Cayenne, a big jumped up SUV with over 400hp, does have an element of cool, but is in every other way hideous. It is enormous and ugly and overweight. And it has the complete absence of style.

Actually, as I think about it more, I suspect that the 400hp rule applies to almost anything. Give a motorcycle 400hp, and it’s cool. Or a 400hp skateboard. Cool.

A while back, I even saw a 400hp twin-turbo diesel wood-chipper, much like this. This thing was so big you could put an entire tree with a four foot diameter trunk in it, and it would turn the tree into woodchips. That was cool.

But none of these things, with their 400hp, have style. It’s fair to say that there is no correlation at all between power and style. 400hp doesn’t preclude style, but it doesn’t endow style either. We need to bear this in mind when considering a powerful car.



Going back to the Porsche example, this is a 912, the version of the 911 that came with a four cylinder engine carried over from the last 356. They usually had about 90hp, though there were variations. Style wise, it exceeds the Cayenne immensely.



And this is a Porsche 356. Again, the most common versions had between 70 and 95hp, well less than a quarter the power of a Cayenne, but immensely greater style.

But, why do the 356 and the 912 have style, where the Cayenne does not? Well, in the first instance, because the Cayenne is a hugely ugly, hugely expensive billboard advertising how rich you are. It’s about as easy to be stylish in a Cayenne as it is to be stylish while wearing a necklace that spells out your net worth in diamonds.

But why the 356 and 912 have style? I cannot yet explain this.

This is why we need a philosophy of style.

First week readership statistics

Well, a week into this blog, I thought I would provide an update on readership statistics.

Firstly, readership is up 500 percent on the first post.

That’s right, I now have six readers.

For all the advertisers who will shortly be knocking on my door based on this phenomenal first-week performance, I can even provide some demographics:

· Two thirds of the readership is male, and one third is female.
· Three quarters of the male readership is currently single, and do not own their own homes.
· The other quarter of the male readership has a partner, and within the next couple of weeks, a small baby. That same quarter of the male readership also owns his house.
· Half of the female readership is married. Indeed, married to me.
· The other half of the female readership is Norwegian. (Thanks for reading, Kristin.)

What makes a car stylish?

I thought I should write a car-style philosophy, as all good style blogs seem to have a philosophy.

But after several drafts, it turns out it’s trickier than it looks.

It appears there are four main conditions that a style philosophy should meet:
· It should be concise – perhaps three conditions that need to be met.
· It should contain wisdom belied by its short length.
· It should be useful as a tool for quickly checking one’s style choices – people can’t just go around saying, “I like that, therefore it must be stylish.” Imagine the chaos!
· It should be able to be tested against a few select but clear examples and be shown to be useful.

This in mind, I set about my first draft.

“In order to be stylish, a car must have prettiness, fastness, and lightness.”

I quite like that.

It’s certainly concise.

Wisdom? Well, prettiness and fastness are obvious inclusions, but lightness is a slightly unexpected requirement for a style philosophy, hinting that that there may be deeper thought behind it. (Only ever hint whether you are capable of deeper thought. Never confirm, nor deny.)

As a quick test? Well, as a checklist, I can ask – is my car pretty? Check. Is it fast? Check. Is it light? No? Well, not stylish then. (Sure, you could argue that prettiness is subjective, and fastness relative, but, meh, what isn’t?)

Can it be tested against select but clear examples? Well, it clearly includes the original Lotus Elite – fast, pretty, light – which is vitally important for a car style guide.

But, it equally clearly excludes the series one through three Land Rovers, which have none of fastness, lightness or prettiness, but which very clearly have style. The Land Rover wouldn’t even pass a two out of three test.




So, as a philosophy, that one fails.

Back to the notebooks.

(Though the Land Rover question does raise an interesting point though, that I may comment on in a post or two.)

About

I am a car geek. All the way, head to toe. Indeed, a car ultra-geek. I’ve been reading about them since I was six. I drive them, I build them, I hot-rod them, I spend a bunch of time imagining how cars that I don’t even own could be made better or cooler or faster or prettier. Sometimes, when I have nothing else to do, I imagine that I have some other life with different car requirements, and then imagine what type of car I would need to meet those requirements. If I was a lumberjack, what type of car might I have? If I was a war correspondent, what type of car? I just love the things. I really do.

And the other thing I love, not least because it’s cheaper and easier that driving, building, hot-rodding and buying cars, is reading about them.

I know I’m not entirely alone in this. There are a bunch of magazines published for people like me – Octane, Classic Cars, Classic and Sports Car.

It’s the reading about them that has me here. See, I like a well written and entertaining article about cars. And there are a reasonable number of those in the magazines. Fewer than I might like, because car journalists often take themselves too seriously (I mean, it’s a car, not the war in Afghanistan), but enough.

And I also quite like blogs. But though there are a number of great blogs about some of the other things I like – some great bicycle blogs, some great style blogs – I can’t for the life of me find a car blog that does what I want.

I’m not actually sure what it is I want ... but I thought I’d write it and try to figure that out along the way. A kind of car-style blog, that’s not too techie, not too Fast and Furious-ie, but also not too hyper-directional-fashionista-ie, like that Intersection magazine is (not enough car geek there – no technical understanding. I think you need to have a technical understanding, but not bore people with it).

All with a touch of funny thrown in for good measure.

So I think that’s what I’m going for. Let’s see what we can do.

Stay tuned.

[And look at that – two posts in one day. He's charging hard, but I bet he doesn’t have the staying power.]

Maiden Post

Apparently 120,000 people start a blog each day.

So, to my 119,999 brethren, whom I shall refer to as the "Class of 3 May 2009", I salute the effort you have made in registing a blog name in the hope that this flash-in-the-pan idea will last more than a week. I wish you all the best, and hope that your readership extends beyond your wife, which is what I expect my readership to be.

And now, onwards.