Adam Schoeman
Now before I get inundated with complaint emails, this is not a blog about how bad women drivers are, or that they try and do too many things whilst still driving a car - for the record, I see numerous bad men drivers in a day, attempting to do just as much multi-tasking behind the wheel. No, these are instead my thoughts on the strange relationship that women (and yes I am generalizing so deal with it) have with automobiles.
You see, women love cars but also equally hate them. Sound strange? Let me paint you a word picture: you’re on a first date with a lovely lady and everything is going perfectly. Arm in arm, you glide (couples don’t walk; they glide) past an Audi R8 V10 in carbon black with azure inlays. “Wow, now that’s a sexy car,” your lady friend says and the heavens open up and angels sing because my friend, you think you’ve just discovered the perfect woman that loves cars. “Yes, its especially clever how they managed to split the power 30/70 to the back wheels so that the Quattro still allows you some sideways action in the corners when the TC and ESP are in Sport mode,” you proudly say, knowing that you’ve stunned her with your superior knowledge. “What?” she says. “Oh never mind, I hate all that car talk”.
My fellow (men) car lovers, you know this has happened to you at least once. If not, well then you are obviously a toddler with excellent reading skills, or you have learnt through the wisdom of your father to keep your car ramblings strictly to how good it looks or how fast it is and to not mention how RevoKnuckle suspension will revolutionise torque steer.
Let me share with you one of my personal experiences on this topic. My fiancée had been looking for a new car for a few months, but things were not going well. You see, we had started our search right after the second hand car market picked up, so deals were not popping out at me from Autotrader. She had had her mind set on an Audi A3 Sportback 2.0T (yes, a practical, handsome car with a good engine and sturdy build quality – she only wanted the Sportback because the 3 doors' rear lights looked ‘horrendous’) but low mileage in Motor Plan models were difficult to come by.
The only option was to start broadening our horizons and look at other acceptable alternatives. After some heated discussions revolving around 360 degree views of the cars we had added two more cars to the list – the Volvo C30 T5 and the Peugeot 207 GTI. Not wanting to be short-changed in the power department, my fiancée asked me how big the engine sizes of the cars were. Well, I answered that the Volvo had a 2.5-liter straight five with a turbo and the Peugeot had a 1.6-liter turbo compared to the Audi’s 2.0-liter turbo. This didn’t go down too well and I was told that I was being too technical and she didn’t care about the things that make a car move. In the end we resorted to a kind of 1 - 10 scale. The Audi was assigned the value 5, and whenever we spotted a car on the road that she liked, it was my job to take the cars power output and torque curve, its potential loss of power at Vaal altitudes, the gear box ratio and weight, and aggregate all that into a number either greater or smaller than 5 so that it could be compared to the A3.
The worst part of this is that she will often ask me questions about cars that have amazing and interesting answers but as soon as I mention a cylinder or an injector I get the I-don’t-care-anymore-this-is-boring look and I know I need to try and simplify things.
This is a 1957 Ferrari 250 TR and it recently sold for over 9,000,000 Euros, which is a lot of change for a car. I can guarantee you that a man bought it because a woman would have asked right away whether she would impress the tennis ladies with it pulling up to the Country Club or if it goes really, really fast and upon receiving a "No" to both questions, would have asked “Then what is all the fuss about?” And honestly, I do not know – but I sure would have paid that for that Ferrari.
I think women do love cars, just in a different way to men. Men are obsessed with cars to the point where we should be considering institutionalizing ourselves whereas women are able to admire them without needing to know the drag coefficient of the Merc E-Class that just went passed you at 160km/h on the highway… on your way to the loony bin.
