One thing i don’t understand about cars is …
Okay, let me be straight: there are many things i don’t understand about cars. i don’t own one, because i blessedly don’t need to. i do drive, and through renting a lot of cars over the past 15 years, i’m getting a sense of what i like (within my rental car budget of compact-to-economy-class vehicles). But here’s one thing that’s always mystified me: if a car is noisy, it is cheap. It’s either missing a muffler, or it’s a piece of junk. You have to pay more for a nicer, better car if you want a quieter drive. Quietness is a selling feature of fancier cars, as car commercials BN would have me believe (BN = Before Netflix, back when i was forced to sit through car commercials).
But then you get cars like your Porsches and your Maseratis and your Marscapones. If you ever sit in one of these cars with the proud, filthy rich driver (or if, in my case, you watch someone in a teevee show or movie sit in one with the proud, filthy rich actor who’s portraying a proud, filthy rich driver), that proud, filthy rich driver will invariably say “Mmmm. You hear that? Just listen to that baby purr.”
![](https://www.swadeology.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/MidLife.jpg)
(Babies don’t purr, jackhole)
It’s probably down to my unrefined ear that i can’t discern the difference between a noisy car engine and an expensive one. They both sound like noise to me. This is a chart i made depicting the phenomenon that as a car gets more expensive, it gets quieter, until it gets really expensive, and then it gets obnoxiously loud again.
i was wondering if there were other things about cars that followed this kind of strange arc, when i considered that doors and seats do a similar thing. A cheap two-door car is later trumped by a roomier four-door car that seats more people. Station wagons and SUVs are even more expensive, and then you get even pricier as you get into two-door, two-seater sports cars. At the highest end of the spectrum, there are unltra-expensive Formula One cars that only seat one person.
What does this all prove? Take it with a grain of salt, of course, but Saddam Hussein was a secret Muslim, and 3-1-1 was an inside job.