By Lorraine Sommerfeld
It turns out Canadians have deeply personal connections to their cars. A recent survey by Carfax Canada had a little fun with the relationship people have, or believe they have, with their vehicles.
Except for the 40 per cent who think of it like a toaster — y’know, just another appliance.
About 55 per cent of people were sad to let a car go. I get this. Once you have all your settings at the right spot – finally – starting at ground zero means weeks of work, or more if you share the driver’s seat with someone else in your household.
New cars are also rather pleased with themselves at their ability to disguise where something should be, instead turning up where some engineer thought they should be.
Don’t believe me? I had one car (for years, I’ve driven a different press car every week) I believed had a heated steering wheel. I called my son when it wasn’t working. He told me I was pushing the ride setting button (which looked like a heated steering wheel), said the car didn’t have a heated steering wheel, then laughed and hung up the phone.
Two out of three people claim to have special memories involving their car. There is no need to share these memories with us. Thank you.
No fewer than 44 per cent reported others just didn’t understand the special connection they have with their car. While part of that number is no doubt referring to those “memories,” I can’t believe this number isn’t higher.
Considering all the historical revision most of us do regarding our cars, the rose-tinted glasses we sometimes wear reminiscing about them, we get how that Gremlin you had for a year back in 1976 suddenly takes on mythical proportions. So what if the MG’s electronics were as reliable as my Internet provider, or that Pacer turned into a terrarium in the sun? Ask anyone what their first car was, and you are likely to find a tale of a special connection (at this point someone needs to haul out a Sunbeam story).
Turns out 42 per cent of Canadian car-owners have given their cars a name. This, of course, is not a new concept. History – and Hollywood – is full of anthropomorphized heroes, from Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang to Herbie to the sinister Christine to, of course, the entire cast of Cars. I remain convinced that, sometimes, entire shows are made just to feature a car. Smokey and the Bandit without a Trans Am? Forget it. Bullitt? The Gumball Rally? Knight Rider? If you spend enough time in your car, chances are good you’re gonna name it.
My Dad had a 1966 Rambler named Betsy, which according to some lists is a very popular name for cars. My Dad wasn’t a list-follower; he named the car after a horse he’d had back on the farm in Saskatchewan in the early 1930s. As Betsy got a little long in the tooth – the car, not the horse – my Dad got kinder and gentler with her. Even with a new car parked alongside, he had a hard time letting her go.
A quick office round-up of car names yielded results from “I don’t name my cars” to “my friends called my Ford Escort the ‘Smurf Turd.’” Jil McIntosh’s ‘47 Cadillac is named “Lucille,” and it says so right on the licence plate. How loved is Lucille? None of her five siblings rated a name. A friend of mine named her Crosstrek “Lorraine” because I helped her buy it.
Sometimes the moniker is literally part of the car, like the colleague-owned Model A nicknamed “Chickenbone” — the licence plate started with “CKBN.” My first Chrysler minivan was the “Ramchicken,” though only because my Dad’s beast at the time, a Ramcharger, dwarfed it. My daughter-in-law had a Civic named “Doug” (Hond-ug), though her current Elantra is named “Lanny.”
A (much) older RAV4 from the office gets called “Pipsqueak,” because it is “small, blue, dorky, and slow,” while a car in the same household is a “Mazdarati”: a Mazda 3 that spoils them with heated seats, back-up camera, Bluetooth, and a fancy screen. From a colleague who shall remain nameless, “shockingly, our Westfalia has no name. I wanted to name it Lisa, but [my partner] Lisa thought that was weird.”
As you can imagine, the crew I work with collectively own a lot of cars for a lot of reasons. Actually, David Booth doesn’t own any car, come to think of it. Clayton Seams is probably the most prolific namer on staff: “I named my ’71 Opel ‘Ophelia’ because I love Hamlet and because just like in the famous painting, she was beautiful but very dead! The ’70 Corvette is named ‘Francine’ because of a ZZ Top song that was playing at the time. My ’99 Suburban is called ‘Sherman’ because it’s a tank.”
We’re living in pretty gruesome times. Share your car-naming stories; there is no prize, but it will be a nice diversion — and re-assuring that we’re not the only ones that think of cars as more than big toasters.
