Stephen Stills wasn’t thinking about cars when he penned the lyrics, If You Can’t Be With the One You Love, Love the One You’re With. But his song ran through my head last week as I returned a new Porsche Cayman R and climbed back into a 2002 Honda Accord.
Both cars were green. Both had four wheels. And that’s where the similarities ended. The Cayman R was a Victoria’s Secret model with headlights. The Accord was the girl next door – the one with the decent personality and zero sex appeal. I wanted to be with the Cayman R. But the Accord is the one I’m with.
After the lightning-quick Cayman, the Accord felt like saddling up a Jersey cow. But it’s my automotive life partner. So I need to love it. But how?
I pulled into Starbucks – a skim-milk latte always cheers me up. And that’s when I had my epiphany: as I slipped my coffee into the Accord’s cup holder, I realized that it put the Cayman’s to shame. The automotive Gods had finally shown me how to love my car. The Cayman might be fast and sexy, but the Accord’s cup holders were the marrying kind.
The compensation of age is wisdom, which allows you to appreciate what you have. And I have a car that can carry a cup of coffee really well. I’d always taken the Honda’s cup holders for granted. Now I was studying them as industrial paragons. Honda’s engineers had designed a near-perfect beverage holder, mounted exactly where your right hand falls, and located low in the car, reducing the chance of spills.
The Porsche’s cup holders, on the other hand, were like a schizophrenic supermodel – stunningly attractive, but cursed with flaws that make your life a living hell. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of thing you appreciate when you are in the courtship phase: only after marrying the underwear model or buying the super car do you realize that the cocaine addiction or the lousy cup holders may be a problem.
When I first tried the Porsche’s holders, I was amazed – they emerged from behind a secret panel in the Cayman’s dash like a pair of carbon-fibre mantis legs, and ratcheted open with the satisfying click of an expensive fishing reel.
But the honeymoon ended when I loaded them with a cup of coffee. Because they’re mounted at dash level, the Porsche cup holders force a coffee cup to travel through an exaggerated arc of motion as the car pitches and rolls. (It’s like standing high on a ship’s mast of instead of staying down on the deck.) And that carbon-arm design might look cool in the showroom, but when you hit a bump, it turns into a miniature trebuchet – there’s a good chance that your hot coffee will be launched into your lap like the flaming oil sacks the Romans used to subdue the Germanic horde.
So my Accord was superior than the Cayman! Or at least that’s what I tried to tell myself. Truth was, I had played the old silver lining trick on myself yet again. Dealt a bad hand, I looked for the upside, and found one. It’s a human survival mechanism. The first time I recall using it was in freshman year at university, when I scored a few dates with Christina, the most beautiful woman on the University of Maryland’s Munich campus, only to be ditched in favour of a guy who was her male equivalent.
