Out of the blue, my longest term old friend asked for advice in regards to buying a “new” car. She’s moving on from her 2003 Honda Accord. An urban dwelling badass that has worked on both sides of the tech and non-profit divide, she’s looking to reward herself with a new ride, to spoil herself with the latest and greatest of luxuries. She’s also expecting her first child.
Both of us, in our Mid 30’s, were born into California car culture. We were blessed with rolling not-so-relics from the 1950’s and 60’s splicing through our upbringings as malaise machines were in retreat, giving way to modern masterpieces of the 1990s and Y2K years.
Continue reading “Dynamic Divergence: The Village Of The Damned Prius Owner”
One theory I constantly want to debuke about the Automobile, either created once upon a time, or as an item we covet now, is that cars are the provenance of straight, by and large white, men. Since at least the mid-Century, if not earlier, manufacturers employed women, minorities and queers to help design the dreams that we all stare back at with rose tinted glasses.
Once upon a time, on a website far far away but not really, when I was 30-ish years old, I declared the Ford Falcon the vintage chariot fancied the most by a certain demographic. Interestingly, at the same time I made such a grandiose generalization about my own respective urban peer group, I took up another anachronistic way of expression; 
Once upon a time, in an America of a not too distant past, there was an interesting dynamic of who had access to necessities. In a country where we believe the myth of hard work and perseverance gets us far and wide, systematically bigotry kept and still keeps a number of people behind invisible yet visible lines of life.
It’s worth note of the potential freedoms that driving and motor vehicle ownership offer people. I’ve been thinking of the scales between the freedom and consequences of the motor vehicle quite often over the last year.
Dynamic Drive 