Girl Cars

First published June 17, 2005

Last week on this page we talked about guys and their obsession with the automobile. In the course of that discussion I happened to mention “girl cars.” As you might have guessed, this sparked a bit of controversy;

Dear Mr. Funny Guy,

You got a lot of nerve! Why I ought to rip your arm off and beat you with the bloody stump, you no good commie…

Yours truly,

Sister Mary Catherine

Well Sister, I sure didn’t mean to offend you or any of the other chicks who read my column.

Mea culpa! Ha, ha, ha.

It’s just that men and women truly do have different attitudes toward cars. Women use them to get where they want to go. Men build shrines around them.

Not that women aren’t picky about what they drive. When they go car shopping they consider “important factors” like styling, color, comfort, and utility – how adorable is that! Women will almost never base their decision on really critical issues like the bench horsepower of the model their pal Toby just bought.

“But what about Danica Patrick?” you ask. Ok, maybe you didn’t ask, but play along with me here.

Danica Patrick almost won the Indianapolis 500, finished fourth and was named 2005 Rookie Of The Year. She’s become a major force in the Indy Racing League and appears to be headed for a career as maybe one of the best open-wheel race drivers of all time. So what kind of car does she drive?

A Honda.

Now we all know that Hondas are good on gas and practical for getting around the track, all things considered. Danica just drives her Honda really, really fast.

Ok, I’ll admit it – I’m a major Danica Patrick fan. She’s talented, intelligent, articulate, attractive, and I can tell just by looking at her that she’s nice enough to push the seat back when she gets out of that race car so the next guy that comes along doesn’t bash his knees to hamburger trying to get in.

Ladies please take note of this last point. If you want us guys to put the toilet seat down, you might want to reciprocate by leaving the car seat pushed back, so that anyone taller than a Keebler Elf can get behind the wheel.

Here’s an interesting thing I noticed – Danica Patrick doesn’t seem to wear much in the way of makeup. This might be partly because she doesn’t really need much, but I think it might also reflect the relative difficulty of putting on eye liner at 225 miles per hour. That, and there’s no center rear-view “makeup mirror” in an Indy car.

Anyway, I’ve decided that the main thing that identifies a true “girl car” is not so much what kind of car it is, but how it gets used – usually as a sort of rolling long-term storage facility. A man doesn’t even want to keep a car as long as a woman will haul around a stack of old magazines or a tote bag full of used tennis balls.

And this brings us to the question of the day – do you think Danica keeps a box of chipped flower pots in the trunk of that Indy car?

Send your story about girl cars to mike@learnedsofar.com.

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball