Well not everyone loves cars. Some consider a car to be an appliance with no soul, just transportation and nothing else. They have no more love for their automobile than someone would have for a city bus. (except maybe the bus driver)
For me, I think it’s a multifold phenomenon: Obviously someone who grew up with cars, or in a racing family is going to appreciate them. Cars represent freedom–your own private space that you can take with you and go pretty much anywhere you want. It takes a key to get in, just like your home, or at least to make it go, and when you’re young, it’s the closest thing you have to your own place, until you leave the nest at least. Most of us spend at least an hour a day in our cars, just getting to and from work and elsewhere in life. Our family, loved ones, and friends ride in our cars, and there are associations with that. We’ve all been through a lot of ---- in our cars. I’ve had my old vehicle through 3 jobs, 3 girlfriends, and been through a lot of ups n’ downs in life with that car, and it’s unfailingly always started and not asked much, even if it has had its problems over the years. My mother and two good friends that have all passed on rode in that car when they were alive. It makes it pretty hard to get rid of, and it’s why I flatly refused to participate in the “cash for clunkers” program with it, though I probably could have come out ahead–it didn’t deserve to be destroyed needlessly after years of faithful service. Every guy, and probably most women remember the car they had (if they had one) when they had their first kiss (and maybe more), and odds are these events may have taken place in that vehicle.
Maybe they’re just machines and have no souls, but you do get attached to them, maybe just from the familiarity…
If there were only two people left in the world they’d disagree on somthing. That’s the way human nature is. The thing swe like com from a combination of our upbringing, our environment, our education, our interests, and everything we’ve ever seen or done. All million++ variables. That’s why we all like different cars. And houses. And shoes. And sports. Etc.
I learned, as a college student, not to make fun of another person’s car. In my senior year in college, the small private college I attended decided that a car should be furnished to the president of the institution. Until that time, the president was using his own car and turning in his receipts for reimbursement. The president’s wife wasn’t happy about being left without a car when the president was on one of his numerous fund raising trips according to one of my classmates whose father was on the board of trustees. I had no idea what had been purchased until I was walking into town to buy school supplies. I heard a blast of a horn and it was the college president offering me a ride. The car was the lowest trim line Chevrolet made in 1962–no armrests on the doors, no passenger side sun visor, manual transmission and painted in a basic brown. I made some sarcastic comment about the car and president replied, “I picked this car out”. I guess he saw the shocked look on my face and he continued, “I have to raise money for this institution. Would you be tempted to give more money if I were driving a Cadillac or showing that we are not wasting money on expensive cars? I like to go looking poor”.
I use to work for a Large computer company (Digital Equipment Company) in the 80’s and 90’s. Back then DEC was the second largest computer company in the world. Our CEO (Ken Olsen) was also on the Board for Ford. As a board member he was given a car by Ford…ANY CAR HE WANTED. But Ken was a very frugal man. Lived in the same house he bought before he started DEC…Now in the early 90’s he’s worth close to a Billion dollars…So what car did he choose.
@MikeInNH
I could start a new thread on why we love our computers. I made a lot of use of the DEC-10 and later the DEC Vax cluster that we had at my institution. Part of my position was in designing research studies and analyzing the data. The other half of my position involved teaching statistics and computer science classes. I really liked the simplicity of the job control setup on the DEC equipment as compared to the IBM systems that I have with in doing statistical analyses. In teaching computer science classes, I really liked the design of the DEC assembly langauge on the VAX.
Perhaps your CEO appreciated machinery that did its function in the simplest, most reliable way and that is why he chose the Ford Escort. the straight forward simplicity of the DEC equipment as compared with other computers of its time may reflect the thinking of Ken Olsen.
My last job with DEC was working on the VMS operating system. So I got to know the Vax-11 Assembler intimately.
IBM’s JCL language…was far more complicated to use then DEC’s DCL. Yet DCL was much more robust. It was an actual language.
I worked on IBM mainframes for years…then started working with PDP-11’s and Vax systems. DEC made easier to use systems that were far superior any comparably priced IBM system.
IBM made some good hardware…but they were a good 5 years behind DEC in software. And in the 80’s DEC was the world leader in Network systems. Around 1986 IBM announced that they had a computer network of 100 computers up and running. Made front page news of WSJ. At DEC we were laughing our *SS’s off…because our own internal computer network at that moment in time was well over 65,000 computers…From PDP-8’s to PDP-11’s to VAX’s and even DEC-10 systems…all at different DEC campuses in different parts of the world.
Ken Olson just wasn’t a flashy guy. You should see the way he dressed. But brilliant engineer. MIT graduate. He started the small and mini computer market. But he had his flaws…especially in marketing. Didn’t know how to market against IBM (which were marketing geniuses). Late 80’s DEC designed and built the fastest computer chip in the world. At the time it was over 3000 times faster then the fastest Intel chip. But we didn’t position in the marketplace well and while sales were good…it didn’t reach it’s potential.
When I went to school for electronics (in the late 80s), we learned how computers worked and how to troubleshoot them on a donated PDP 11/70… or was it an 11/40… It was interesting to have to peruse blueprints of circuitry that were published when I was only a toddler. Typically our instructor would ‘break’ some function of the machine by plugging in a faulty chip or cutting a wire, and we would have to trace down where the problem lay by putting an oscilloscope on the right pins of the wire-wrapped backplane, containing thousands of connections, after studying the blueprints to find it, then locate the problem on one of the hundreds of plug-in boards and fix it. (The processor alone was a couple dozen boards as I recall) If I could have gone back in time, I probably could have made a decent living just repairing these beasts after that course. For my final project, I recall interfacing a Radio Shack speech synthesizer chip with this machine and writing software to make it work–toggling the program into the machine in octal with the front panel switches.
Fascinating to think that my smart phone has more computing power than this thing had, back in the day.
And that’s a good thing, no, a great thing. All those sensors and variable valve timing allow us to have superb power, excellent emissions, and outstanding fuel economy. It’s a great time for automobiles.
