I know you’re disappointed. All year and maybe all your life you’ve been dreaming you could buy a car that would make you the person you’ve dreamed of becoming. A car that’s power, shape and noise loudly makes both it and the driver have such strong sexual potency that the most desirable, men, women and others will instantly fight each other to sit beside you in the left-hand seat.
As soap dodger psychologists, Marsh and Collett, wrote in their 1986 classic Driving Passion; The Psychology of the Car: “Few people are indifferent to the sexual potential of the automobile or to its sexual symbolism.”
Then no wonder, when the new Porker, Lambo, Feezer or McLaren turned up in the Santa sack last week, you immediately drove it along one of those boulevards of erotic fantasies: Smith St, Collingwood; Hastings St, Noosa (or more correctly South Yarra by the Sea) and Guilfoyle St and Bay St, Double Bay, where you tapped the loud pedal to attract the smooth skinned, botoxed browed, trout pouted, Brazilian butted, social X-rays and lemon tarts of all genders lined up outside Margaret, the Tom Wolfe of the cooking caper, Neil Perry’s suburban global gastronomic HQ.
But, as when your world was shattered when you discovered last year that there was no Santa Claus; that dick pics and their female equivalent actually turned off your intended and attracted somewhat negative publicity in the Herald Sun; that ASIC, the ATO, the AFP, the ACCC and ASIO all knew where you lived and what you had been up to and Ferrari don’t give the kiddies free balloons even when you drop $650k at the dealership, the reality of a swish auto not being a ticket to Sexyland hits hard.
Cheer up! While you have been moping, around your team here have been hard at work to show you where you have gone wrong. You’ve seen Succession on Foxtel and Binge, you know there is no festive season or festivities here but we pretend we love every minute of it.
Maybe you bought the wrong-coloured piece of metal?
US car sales site iSeeCars compared the prices of more than six million new and used cars between 2017 and 2020 and used that data to determine which colours were best or worst for resale value. Now you will be shocked to find that white is only No. 9 on the list! Beige, orange and green are second, third and fourth. Beige cars only dropped by 22 per cent where gold (the worst paint you can have) cars plummeted by over 45 per cent. Top of the pops? Let’s all be sick together. Yellow. Only a 20 per cent loss.
Maybe you didn’t buy one of the London Telegraph’s best cars of 2021?
The conservative paper’s motoring writers, Andrew English and Alex Robbins, picked 10 but we don’t count electric so here’s the top four.
While the Telegraph rightly raved about the current Corvette C8 (available in Australia sometime soon for about $160k), be patient and wait for the 2023 Corvette Z06 with the Z07 package. Last year’s model is mid-engined, cheaper and better value than anything from Europe at more than double the price, but the new Stingray will have 500kW (the most powerful naturally aspirated production V8 ever made), 0-100km/h in three seconds, carbon ceramic brakes, Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyres, carbon-fibre wheels and a spoiler that makes sense at around 290km/h. And they will make it ex-factory in right-hand drive and yellow.
You probably haven’t heard of Cupra. It’s the performance brand of the VW-owned SEAT that launches here later this year. The lads at the Tele rank the Leon TSI 300 DSG VZ2 as “one of the best hot hatchbacks on the market today; if you exclude the Toyota GR on the basis that you now can’t get hold of one until 2023, it may well be the best”.
The Bentley GT V8 is “the best model in the range, despite also being the cheapest. Well, relatively speaking, of course”, at a tad over $400k. Then there’s the Ford Mustang Mach 1, which at around $80k is even better value than the Bentley. And it comes in orange.
OK, still looking for a guaranteed person magnet? The world’s greatest auto promoter, John Hennessey, has two cars that genuinely have it all. John specialises in making fast cars 20 times faster than the maker ever thought they could be. Could anyone resist this? Porker or Audi. 289km/h. 600kW. And a real Douglas Fir tree strapped to the roof. First up John put a tree on top of his Turbo S Porker and timed it at 281km/h. (Without tree: 331km/h.) Wife Hope, thought her 596kW (standard 440kW) Audi RS6 could get the tree home quicker. So, the gang at the factory loaded a 1.9m tree on the original equipment roof racks and Ford factory driver Spencer Geswein got it moving 10 clicks an hour faster than the Porker.
If none of this solves your problem, then do a Tuomas Katainen. Tuomas had been happily driving around Finland in his 2013 Tesla Model S. (Two rookie errors there 20 readers, one friend and one son. I’ve driven both cars and huskies in Finland and there’s nothing to be happy about specially near the Arctic Circle. Owning a Tesla?) Anyway, Tuo sees an error code come up on the iPad with wheels and the dealer says “crook battery, no authorised service, give me $25k and I’ll replace it”. Tuo says “pyhä jysäys, I can buy the same model car for $40k with a battery that works”.
Then Tuo lived the dream. Rather than pay Tesla anything, he blew up the car. He got some help from a YouTube explosion team. They strapped 30kg of dynamite to the wheeled iPad, stuffed in a crash test dummy with a pic of Elon Musk’s face, and hit the plunger. Boom.
Given all this you won’t be surprised that Elon, 50, of Austin, Texas, founded the Boring Company. No, it doesn’t make cars. Yes, it tunnels. Well tunnels under Las Vegas to be exact. Elon is creating a public transport system that promises to move you around in driverless Teslas at up to 240km/h until the code errors come on. Part of the system is up, sorry, down and running at the Las Vegas convention centre right now where it cuts a 30-minute walk into a 10-minute back seat ride with a driver.
So, there’s something to do these hols. Get in the back seat of a Muskmobile underground, see a free concert by the Village Persons then head into the Convention Centre for a riveting three hours on emerging infectious diseases including novel influenza viruses, resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases, zoonoses and disease related to animal exposures, bioterrorism and food/waterborne illnesses. After the Village Persons and Zoonoses you will have to beat them away with a stick.
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