Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Cars weren’t invented for transportation, but conversation

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When I first heard Abba’s magnificent 1982 swansong ‘The Day Before You Came’, I’d never come across the Americanised use of the verb ‘make’, meaning ‘reach’. So the line ‘I must have made my desk around a quarter after nine’ baffled me. Given the Swedish obsession with self-assembly furniture, I even wondered whether Björn was using the word conventionally, and Ms Fältskog was in fact kneeling on the floor aligning Tab A with Groove C, while looking for the elusive Allen key with which to attach the castors.

On the other hand, if you are British, the lyrics to the Beach Boys’ song ‘Little Deuce Coupe’ are like the poem ‘Jabberwocky’, in that you can perfectly understand what the writer is getting at, even though you haven’t the foggiest what most of the words mean. Even ‘Deuce’ and ‘Coupe’: ‘She’s got a competition clutch with the four on the floor/ and she purrs like a kitten till the lake pipes roar.’

The problem with ordinary modern cars is they are so reliably boring they give you nothing to talk about

For the uninitiated, ‘four on the floor’ means a four-speed manual transmission with a floor-mounted gear-stick. ‘Four on the floor’ is here in contrast to ‘three on the tree’, which denotes a three-speed automatic transmission with the gear-shift mounted on the steering column
(or ‘tree’). And ‘lake pipes’ were the unsilenced, side-mounted pipes to which you would divert your exhaust for extra power when your hot rod no longer had to be road-legal — typically when racing on the dry ‘lakes’ of the Bonneville salt flats.

This argot supports my theory that cars were not principally invented as a form of transportation. Instead automotive technology evolved to give men a nerdy vocabulary over which to bond while avoiding any awkward talk about emotions and stuff.

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