Graeme Cobb ⚡️🚙🚗 ⚡️@graeme_cobb
Cars don’t have souls and people need to get over that.
Whatever you drive your car has characteristics that may be unique to the brand, the model or the specification.
I’ve owned many, many cars over 35 years of driving and not once did I sense a soul there.
My eldest dog has a soul and I love him to bits. I’ll also be overwhelmed with grief when he goes.
I’ve never grieved over a car going. I’ve really liked some cars, but I quickly moved on to the next one.
It doesn’t mean to say that I have not thoroughly enjoyed some cars. I have. And I currently enjoy my current car.
Having owned a few Alfa Romeo’s, a Lancia HF Turbo, a V6, straight six, V8, V12, plenty of turbocharged performance cars, a supercharged car and some EVs, they’ve all offered good, engaging, entertaining drives. None had a soul.
Equally I’ve owned some terrible cars through hard times and they didn’t drive as nicely and were less pleasant places to sit.
They didn’t have a soul, either.
Some of my cars sung wonderful notes, but they didn’t have a soul.
Some felt like they pivoted from my hips, but they didn’t have a soul either.
When my cars broke down, I was cheesed off. In fact, I felt a sense of some being badly engineered (cough cough Alfa). They didn’t have a soul either.
What tickles our fancy is a combination of great engineering, amazing driving characteristics, how well it steers into a bend, or the glorious noise from lift-off, or fast acceleration. It excites us, makes us want to drive it for no good reason, brings a smile to our face, but still it has no soul. It has great characteristics.
We need to get past looking at cars that don’t appeal to us and slamming it as a soulless box. Some will treasure their cars irrespective of what it is, but for most people, they just need a tool to get from A to B and will either opt for a trusted brand, or great value.
A few will look for cars with special features, great driving dynamics, speed and a sense of having the car wrapped around you like I did with my old -Y-reg BMW E46 with a nice straight six in it.
But it had no soul. And it died after 18 years so off I went to replace it. No grief.