Why I won’t buy a Tesla

I loved the Ford Mustang Mach-E which I had on loan for four days. It was gorgeous to drive, and slightly saner than the Tesla Model 3 — in that some of the controls involve physical switches and buttons, rather than an on-screen interface. The only annoyance was a persistent whining noise. This came from my teenage daughter who endlessly delivered her strongly held opinion that a fat, 55-year-old advertising man shouldn’t be driving a Mustang. As I patiently explained, when you are a 55-year-old man, you don’t really buy a car for yourself, you buy it for your Jungian shadow-self. So whereas your real-life wife and children might not much like riding in a Mustang, your imaginary 26-year-old Colombian girlfriend thinks it’s fabulous. This indeed was the very insight that gave rise to the Mustang in the first place.

Ironically, a few US car purists have attacked Ford for attaching the Mustang name to an electric car as a ‘marketing exercise’, when of course its whole existence was a marketing exercise, much of it inspired by an extraordinary Ukrainian-American psychologist called Louis B. Cheskin — the man who made margarine yellow (it used to be white), designed the Marlboro pack and created Ronald McDonald. Cheskin had earned the respect of Ford executives when he predicted the failure of the Ford Edsel; with another motivational psychologist, Ernest Dichter, he believed the Edsel’s radiator grill resembled female genitalia, and so might symbolise castration. Freudians may have given us appalling psychology but they did give us better-looking cars.

The Mach-E body shape divides people, but I’m fine with that. Left to me, cars would still have fins and white-wall tyres. Cars look far more boringly similar today than 50 years ago.