Thursday, August 11, 2005

The best high status car

If you think that your giant SUV is the ultimate status car, think again. North Carolina is the land of big vehicles, and most of my cohorts have these giant SUV assault vehicles, designed to have high luxury and big gas bills, especially with rising gas prices.

As a child I was intrigued by the 1960’s bestselling book “Is your Volkswagen a Sex Symbol?” and I begged my parents to buy me a copy. It’s essentially a treatise on sociology and how someone’s vehicle preference reveals insights about their personality:



Around here, the ultimate status vehicles are the amazing John Deere tractors, such as this one. It has an enclosed cab, full air conditioning and a fantastic stereo system.




I like ”Old Yeller” a 1958 Chevy Dually. It’s a great chick-bait car, and my son is always after me to borrow her:



Of course, I’m #1 on Google for ”redneck car”, but that old heap was sitting out on the back 40 when I bough the ranch. I may cut the top off and use it for a planter:





Sigh, cars don’t do much for me anymore, but I do enjoy my pickup, a fully-loaded Ford F350 dually with a color TV and all the gadgets:



This sucker is so big that it takes two parking spaces and it has two gas tanks. A typical fill-up is $60, and we don’t drive it much, except when we need to haul horses to shows.

A big fancy car may be OK for status-oriented folks, but I like my plain-old minivan. It’s like the old joke about the show-off Yankee and the southern redneck. The Yankee tries the impress the rube by saying "Check out my new $70k Beemer. Nice Huh?". The redneck replies:

“Seventy thousand dollars, eh? I’m impressed.

See that reaper over there?

I paid three hundred thousand dollars for it, and I only use it six weeks each year. . . . “