At Home Mechanic

My home town is pretty typical. Well, typical by Southern California standards. I live on the west side of Los Angles, a fairly affluent neighborhood where you are as much what you drive as where you live or what you do for a living. Around here it is important to many people to announce their perceived place in the social pecking order by the size and shape of their automobile. Intellectual arguments that a monster Mercedes is hardly necessary to transport a single occupant to their office in Century City are lost to those who are constantly measuring their car’s status symbol value against their neighbor’s.

But it is not the marginally insecure who love their shiny, flashy cars; all Californians have at least a passing interest in their source of personal transportation. At an early age we Californians can learn to tell the difference between a Buick or an Oldsmobile from across six lanes of traffic. Combine this with Californian’s notorious eccentric taste in all things (fashion, politics, cars, you name it we got it) and you will find a broad range of automobiles on our streets from Yugos to Ferraris as a matter of daily course. Square the eccentricity of the city with the dry, temperate climate and it not considered unusual for cars 30-40 years old to be used as a daily driver.

So the streets of Los Angeles are swarming with cool cars, new cars, old cars, fancy cars and sporty cars. It takes a significant car sighting to make a dent in a Los Angelinos consciousness. And my first sighting of a FORD GT on the street made quite an impression on me.

I was driving southbound on Rossmore Avenue in Los Angeles’s tone Hancock Park during slow afternoon rush hour traffic when I saw the FORD GT coming toward me. Shiny red with white racing stripes, there was not mistaking the distinctive lines of that swoopy car. Like a bobbysoxer at a Frank Sinatra concert at the Copa, I nearly swooned when I caught sight of the car. Wishing to salute the car and its lucky driver, I flashed my lights at him hoping that this simple gesture could communicate my respect, envy and desire for that car.

As the car approached my car in the opposite direction, I expected to see a look of bliss upon the face of the lucky driver. But as he got closer I could see his white knuckles gripping the steering the wheel and a look of dismay on his face. It was only then that I noticed that the low slung FORD GT was dwarfed by the towering SUVS surrounding it. Sitting so close to the ground, the occupants of a FORD GT are eye level with the never used the trailer hitches of the Toyota Land Crushers and Ford Exploders that range freely across the LA landscape. The driver of the FORD GT was scared to death that he and his expensive trophy car were in immediate danger of being crushed by a careless turn of the wheel by a latté addled soccer mom who would never see the tiny car in their mirrors if they got off the phone long enough to look into them.

The experience of seeing some other driver driving a FORD GT (the modern fulfillment of all my school boy hopes and dreams of one day owning a Ford GT40) and NOT enjoying the experience was a sobering slap in the face to me. I guess it just goes to show you that the dream car that you have always lusted after is not always the best car for use in the real world. And that is the reason why I will not spend $200,000 to buy a FORD GT and continue to drive a more mundane car.