Motor Heads

I’m wedged into a bus shuttling patrons from the Massachusetts Convention Center’s south parking lot to the entry.  The bus, other than the indomitably pleasant Javier, is crammed with scowling, plump, white people, in bulging winter coats, their hats and gloves balanced precariously on their laps, as they squint, distorting their faces, and stab index fingers at phone screens.  

“Well, Lucille’s not exactly a motor head,” says a pink-jowly, sixty-something man, with a tightly trimmed, silver goatee.  He looks over his foldable reading glasses, across the aisle to a wool-hatted companion.  “But she does know racing.  

He nods knowingly, still staring across the aisle.

“Oh yeah, you can take Lucille to a race not be ashamed.” 

“You’re lucky,” the friend answers, the wool-hat shaking ruefully.  “I needed something like that to keep my … .”

His words trail off, but the wool hat keeps shaking.

The shuttle bus lurches around corners, plump, white people crushing one another; alternately flashing hey-nuthin’-I-can-do-about-it smiles, or it’s-your-own-fault-for-taking-the-seat-next-to-me scowls.  

It’s actually entirely appropriate that we’re burning fossil fuels, extracted from a mile below the planet’s crust, refined and shipped (using more fossil fuels) thousands of miles to Boston, to be exploded in a carefully choreographed pattern inside the combustion engine that propels our Ford shuttle bus along at seven miles per hour, as it stretches out what is a two block walk, into a ten block bus ride through the Convention Center’s labyrinthine, internal road network.  

I mean, it would be a sin against the shiny gods of industrial marketing to walk to the opening night of the Boston Auto Show! 

It’s only diehards that turn out for the bitterly cold January, Thursday opening night.  They’re simply unable to wait for the weekend, and a leisurely meander through three acres of carpeted concrete on which the latest models from the big American and Asian auto manufacturers, dare you to show, that by owning that very car, the one parked, provocatively, in front of you, you have truly arrived!

My son and I are, as is often the case for us, unwitting diehards.  We’re here because it’s the only time that works for him, with a Martin Luther King weekend ski trip looming.  Somehow New Englanders have decided, despite widespread, heartfelt appreciation for the great civil rights leader, that we should celebrate his legacy by spending the day devoted to his memory on entirely white, in every possible way, mountain slopes.  But, we are diehard enough “motor heads” – who would hopefully not bring shame upon anyone at a race – that this is probably our sixth or seventh Boston Auto Show, plus a lot of summer evening Classic Car Meet Ups, strolling across still-radiating-heat asphalt, gazing longingly at what may have been the pinnacle of American design in the form of immaculately maintained, antique Mustangs and Corvettes.

 The bus finally docks, and we disembark, not without a few plump, white people scowl-jams in the aisles and doorway.  We make our way to the security checkpoint, where, like the good citizens we are, we drop to our knees, proclaim unswerving allegiance to our stable, genius, Dictator, strip to our underwear, and walk, hands up, through a metal detector, set so high that the fillings in my teeth start to boil off saliva.  Safely through security, and with only a few articles of clothing missing, one sock and my jeans, we soldier on, grimly.  

Actually, for real, we join a lengthy line at security, in which all the plump, middleclass, white people, excited for an evening out, immediately transform, in the eyes of the Security Guards, into suspected ISIS members.  These “suspects” are then funneled, very, very … very, slowly through a seemingly-never-stops-beeping metal detector, after which the Security Guards wave their powered-by-two-AAA-batteries-ultra-metal-detecting wands up and down our plump white torsos, and finding no ordinance, with an indifferent nod, we’re released into the display of American style capitalism at its finest.

Walking into the Main Hall, our senses are assaulted by bright lights hitting shiny metal, the purr of a few hundred motor heads appreciating topnotch engineering, and the new-car-smell of $4M worth of automobiles.  

Three steps in, senses clearing, we get the not-so-subliminal message that the most classic element of the automobile industry is that slim, young women, in spray-on, black clothes, sell cars.  

Cars, just as horses once did, hold a peculiar place in the human psyche – particularly so in the US.  Humans have become to be defined by what car we drive; how we drive it; even what types vehicles your country proudly manufactures.  Does anything capture the essence of the French quite as contradicting-ly well a Citroyen?  

Attitudes to cars are beginning to define cultural fault lines: Are they a necessary evil or the zooming symbol of upward mobility?  

Is the Chevy Suburban – “which seats nine adults comfortably,” though it can’t stop them from making snarky comments – the greatest family car ever?  An urban attack vehicle, par excellence?  Or is it a prime example of modern, clunky Yankee engineering?  

Is BMW’s X3 really the “greatest all terrain Sports Activity Vehicle of all time” – even if the closest it comes to sports or all terrain usage, is parking in a barely paved lot at a kids’ soccer game?  Or is the X3 a company parking lot, required accessory to display social status?  Or is it simply a fair warning to others of the approach of an obnoxious asshole?

Car brands, like every brand from coffee to beer to shoes to just how organic-fair-traded-dolphin-safe-voted-for-Bernie is the very food you stuff into your face, are now asked to continually shore up our ever more fragile sense of self. 

Toyota, the biggest car manufacturer in the world – the second biggest, in market value, Tesla, who have shattered the longstanding car sales model, isn’t even at the Show – has taken the stand by the entry doors, presumably flexing their financial power.  Even though we’re much more likely to drive one of their cars, we didn’t come out on a nasty January evening to look at Toyotas.  Thus, we hurry through a maze of Supras, 4Runners, and definitely-not-your-grandmas-Camrys to get to my son’s favored section: Dodge-Jeep-Chrysler – and let’s not forget their owners, FIAT; or as a they used to be known; “Fix It Again Tony!”  

Dodge is the spiritual home of American automobile brawn: Black (stealing from Henry Ford; “you can have any color you like, so long as it’s black!”) pickup trucks ripple with beefy fenders, Hemi, V8 engines, and a suspension system that can handle, without breaking a sweat, the ever expanding American girth, and anything it’s likely to encounter on the road.  

A regular dweeb, like me, can’t hardly get into the cab of one of these trucks, but I finally make it, with some help, and the, $1,015 accessory, running board.  Once inside, elevated by a crucial few feet, the closed doors effectively shutting out the noise, the Auto Show looks like a muted documentary: MAGA hatted, young men, proud of their drunkenness, slam in and out of Jeep Gladiators (now there’s a name for our times), beer cups splashing.  Sprayed-on-black-clothes, saleswomen, avert their eyes, looking for the suddenly no-longer-looming security guards.  A forty-something couple, a handful of all-you-can-eat-buffets away from full-blown obesity, pose for each other in front of the royal blue, fully loaded, $89,000, Challenger Hellcat (now there’s a …).  She’s in a purple full-length dress, well coiffed, thick-vivid makeup, a big black leather bag, with a VL black metal clasp, dangling from her arm:  He’s in Timberland boots, baggy jeans, a brown Carrhart jacket, scraggly goatee.  

A sprayed-on-black-clothes saleswoman, literally a fraction of their size, approaches. 

Her lips move; her head nods; she smiles.  

Their lips move; their heads nod; they smile back.  

She takes his phone, holds it gingerly between her fingers.  

The couple stand in front of the Hellcat, his arm held stiffly behind her back.  They smile rigid smiles, eyes pointed at the phone, unfocused.

We climb in and out of several Dodge pickups, a Gladiator, a Wrangler, a Cherokee, a Charger – the Hellcat’s off limits.  

By now, I’m already Thursday-night-tired, drained of energy and auto-enthusiasm.   

We stroll past McLarens and Aston Martins, each of them costing two, three hundred grand – as much as a one bedroom condo in the burbs.  

Ford have an electric Mustang SUV – but that’s just confusion on so many levels.  We want the smell of burning oil from low-slung, muscle cars; not an half-assed SUV with the electric whirr of an uncertain future.

We stroll on.

KIA’s marketing department, in an effort to break the young-women-in-sprayed-on-black-clothes sales mode, instead have a team of young women in sprayed-on-sky-blue-retro-floral-mid-thigh-dresses.  They look more like smiling air stewardesses, departing on a Pan Am flight to Honolulu in 1968, than “auto sales associates” in 2020, flogging affordable cars in Southie.

But KIA have a winner in the race car simulator, the graphics for which are exciting enough, and the fake gear shifter makes enough of a rumbling boom, for my son to join the long line awaiting their turn.

I stroll on.

Volkswagen, the only European car company there – you can’t really count Fiat as being present, with just two tiny cars on show, both of which look like the door of a Dodge pickup would crush them – strikes a typically German pose.  Their cars are practical, more affordable than the comparable competition from America or Japan, and ruthlessly clean: Some of the only people of color in the enormous room, are two older black guys gently wiping down a Golf and a Tiguan with beach towels. 

Near VW are some chunky cars with a logo I don’t recognize.  A plus size, sprayed-on-black-clothes sales woman approaches my confused self.

“What cars are these?”

“Eh, Buuiick!” she says, extending the middle syllable.

“Oohhhh,” I extend right back at her.  “You just don’t see Buicks around anymore.”

There’s an awkward silence, except for the sound of her inhaling a deep breath.

“We’re keeping our market share,” she says, furrowed brow replacing her smiling eyes.  “Maybe not so much in thiiisss region, but in the heartland.”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry.  I just don’t get out much,” I don’t lie, and move on.

By now my legs are tired from the slow walking, and there’s nothing quite like a $60,000 Lexus SUV to sit in and rest.  I climb in, no assistance required, and close the door.  They’ve left the window half down, so now the documentary has sound.

Three generations of a family have stopped at the $85,000 Cadillac Escalade.  The toddler tries to climb the tire. His dad, a balding, goateed, thirty something, in black sweat pants, and a grey Celtic’s long-sleeved shirt, scoops him up, holds him horizontal, tickling gleeful squeals of laughter from the little boy.  Mom, in a matching pink sweat-suit, looking a several months pregnant, opens the Escalade’s rear door.

“Plenty of room in here for you, an’ mom, an’ the kids,” she turns to the grandfather.

His baggy eyes and fully bald head turn from her, as he looks the Cadillac up and down.

“Yeah, I guess,” he says, breathing out slowly, hands on the hips of his old-guy, grey sweat-suit.  “But what if you guys get a dawg, or ya throw a couple a hockey bags in there?  The little guy plays pop-Warner?  I dunno?  I think the Cadillac’d fill up fast.  I’m still thinking a Suburban’s the way to go.”

Back at the simulator my son’s crossing the grass, smashing into the tires protecting the barriers.  All in all, he’s convincing me I should increase my auto insurance – significantly – but he does finish with a decent time.

The line has grown even longer: A mixture of the young and the young at heart.

“You shoulda seen it,” he laughs.  “That little kid in front of me, his score was like twice as good as his dad’s. Probly ‘cause he’s so used to video games.”

“Yeah,” I note ruefully.  “And probly his dad is so used to reality.”

We head for the exit.

On the way out we pass KIA’s electric car.  It feels like we’re in that odd transition period, where even the most ‘diesel n’ dust’ motor heads accepts that there is no future for the industry without electrification.  Yet most manufacturers only dabble in the electric car realm.  They begrudgingly produce an overpriced hybrid of an existing model.  Or maybe they have a puny, all-electric, that barely fits yourself, let alone all your insecurities, and only gets you 237 miles down the highway before the battery suddenly dies; whereupon a Dodge pickup emerges from the smog, Hemi growling, and squashes you like an bug, its suspension barely noticing the slight thunk.   

Two years ago at the Auto Show, Toyota had an impressive looking, fuel cell car on display: The Mirai – Japanese for ‘the future.  The sprayed-on-black-clothing saleswoman, hands waving, brimming with millennial confidence, assured us this truly was the future.  

“This is a mature market in California, with a network of hydrogen dispensing stations, literally ‘gas stations’ already in place,” she laughes at her own joke.  “And I believe Massachusetts is creating a similar infrastructure.”

“Impressive,” I nod in agreement, but can’t hold back adding, “So now no need for obnoxious Masshole drivers to create any more noxious fumes!” 

She looks at me confused.

It all sounded great.  The Mirai had a 400 mile range; more than you’d get on tank of fossil fuels.  The only problem was the “similar infrastructure,” when transduced from California to Massachusetts, ended up as a single ‘gas station’ for the entire state, located just south of Boston, a mere 200 miles from the western, high mileage driving, side of the state.  Two years later, the future appears to be already consigned to the past. 

  Yet, walking through the acres of shiny, combustion engine cars at the 2020 Auto Show, the paltry display of electric cars, must surely be like the Gottlieb Daimler’s “Riding Carriage” – the first combustion engine car; which was literally just a horse carriage, with a tiny four stroke engine supplying the ‘horse power’ – would have been in the midst of top of the line steam vehicles at some fair in the late 1880s. 

 The steam barons, no doubt confident, plump, pink-jowled men, in bulging, expensive suits, would have laughed heartily at Daimler’s bizarre invention.  

“Come Franz, leave Herr Daimler’s childish toy alone.  Let us go toast our bright future with champagne,” one could imagine them saying.  

“No one will need a horse carriage, much less a horse-less carriage, when our steam engines run up and down every street, with the pleasant hiss and whistle of steam, and the beautiful smell of coal!”