Soul and Cars

This is a blog about the things we use. That is to say, the things that make us who we are, the ones that we use to explore the world, and, to a large extent, at least insofar as North America and much of Europe (and increasingly so in Asia), to transport ourselves from places to other places. Petersen’s Automobile Museum on Wilshire in Los Angeles has an excellent quote, attributed to EB White: “Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.”

That’s certainly been the case for me. I was born in the midst of a gas crunch in the much-maligned decade of the 1970s. My father was (and is) a car guy. He would regale me and my friends with stories from the 60s, the heyday of the American muscle car just as it was ushering in the unwitting descent of the domestic manufacturing (particularly steel) industry.

My main car in high school and part of college was a 1986 Chevrolet Cavalier (RS! – take note, it was an RS!) with a three-speed automatic transmission (sporty floor-mounted shifter) and an 85 horsepower 2.0 fuel-injected four cylinder engine. My Mom bought a Chevrolet Lumina (one doesn’t see those too often anymore, in my experience) and the Cavalier was passed onto me. My Dad had the body shop at the high school re-paint it and put tomato-red pinstripes on it, and it looked great. I got a couple of speeding tickets with it, the selfsame father noting that if I got the car to “actually go that fast, I should get a Nobel Prize in Physics.” It also survived three accidents with me behind the wheel. I needn’t go into too much detail here, but these were outcomes of those physics experiments that Pops noted.
(They weren’t failures. They were…learning experiences.)

The notable incident of technology in that car was its use of fuel injection. Why? Because the tempermentality of a carbeurated engine, particularly in damp or cool/cold conditions (lets face it – not unheard of in Western Pennsylvania), was eliminated by the use of electronic fuel injection. There was no setting the throttle by pumping the gas a time or two. There was no feathering the throttle to maintain an idle as a cold iron block gradually seeped its way to operating temperatures. Nope, it was as regular and reliable as the sunrise – turn the key, the engine starts, whether it was 100 degrees or twenty below freezing.

In this blog, am I going to be decrying this particular, very handy, technological intervention as a false economy, an improvement that actually wasn’t? Am I going to be making the same arguments that the vinyl enthusiasts today have as whinging against digital music, first in the form of the compact disc and later as just digital files?
No. I like fuel injection. I’ve pondered buying a vintage car from time to time, and while I can’t say it’s a deal breaker, I would take it as a significant spot in the “PRO” column if the motor has fuel injection retrofitted to it. This is sacrilegious to the purist, but there’s virtually nothing about me that even rhymes with “purist.” Sorry. While I like the warmth of sound coming from a vinyl recording, and while I can appreciate the painstaking restoration of a carbuerated and blueprinted engine original to its environment, neither one interests me as a consumer. Nor does it bother me as someone who gives a thought every now and then to the social changes brought by technology. I like the pluralism this implies; I am all for people enthusing vinyl recording, blackpowder shooting, ice fishing, and tuning carbeurators. I’m just none of those things and content that way.

In a sense, the automobile is the example par excellence of technology in motion. This, of course, has two meanings: one, the automobile is a technological implement for transport and two is that different arrays of technologies and types of technologies are included in that automobile, imbuing it with a technological language communicated between the makers and the operator of the vehicle.

No – instead, my exploration here will pertain to the most relevant question of the day: does a car have a soul? A recent podcast by Autocar featured the inimitable and legendary former host of Top Gear and the Grand Tour, and star of the titular Clarkson’s Farm: Jeremy Clarkson. During that discussion, he once again reiterated his disdain for electric cars, claiming that such a machine has no soul. The engine, he alleged, is the soul.

He might have something there. However, the Autocar podcast hosts, legendary auto journalists themselves in the form of Steve Cropley and Matt Prior, later noted that they weren’t sure about Jezza’s soulless assertion. They, perhaps not without merit, suggested that there was more to a car having a soul than its engine. Its design language, chassis, interior appointments…all point in the direction of having a soul.

Where they didn’t seem to disagree was about the existence of a soul. It goes without saying, at least for them, that cars do have a soul.

Still doubtful? Stay tuned. I’ll prove it. 😀