Men and Cars

I think we have to admit we're a bit weird

rarely go through the comments on our videos on the Everything Electric Cars channel. I’m sure you all know why, people, and I have to say it’s about 95% male people, feel somehow enabled to say things in comments they would never say in the real world. Face to face.

I want to underline firmly that when I do scroll through the comments on a recent episode, the overwhelming majority of them are really kind, positive, supportive and intelligent. We really do have the most wonderful audience.

Still, every now and then we’ll be on the receiving end of some form of anger but I’ve got to say it’s less than it used to be.

But just the other day we had this wholesome humdinger. This was posted in the comments for the episode we did about the Polestar 5. A high end luxury electric grand tourer, not the sort of thing we feature that often but this was a bit if a special opportunity.

In response, KaptainKlunk1 posted the following.

For starters, it’s all CAPS. Lovely. No punctuation of course, no problem with that. He obviously meant to type I’ll but IL does the job. Don’t be so judgemental.

His main message is that he is going to stick to being a man, and if we assume he was born a man, well, I don’t have a problem with him sticking to his birth gender, but I would also be supportive if he felt uncomfortable in that role.

But this is where it gets weird. This poor lost soul somehow conflates a machine that someone else designed and manufactured and he bought, reinforces his male identity. There is a subtext implying that a woman would not drive a petrol Subaru, which is confusing because a woman who lives less than a mile away from me drives, a petrol Subaru.

His statement is also implying that driving an electric car might in some way diminish that gender identity, he’d rather have nothing to do with it.

Seriously fascinating. Weird, layered, complicated, it opens the door to so many questions.

Is he really so insecure in his gender identity that he needs a complex machine to validate it? Surely not, he can’t be that incredibly frail.

I’m sure it was posted without much thought, just that burning ember of anger that we have to assume is always there, something he saw in the video, and he won’t have watched much, spurred him to write this dismissive statement.

I’d like to quickly explain there are plenty of very legitimate arguments against electric vehicles, we regularly get them in comments, but these are not arguing that the old dated technology is better or assists frailm men with their masculinity, more that we are replacing one form of space and material gobbling technology with another, fractionally less damaging.

These arguments always suggest walking, cycling, public transport as a far more viable and sustainable alternative and I, for one, thoroughly agree. Also all the people who make these arguments live in cities.

This screenshot from a publication I had never heard of, Real Men, Real Style seems mainly to be about men in their mid 30’s who wear suits.

Clearly the publishers believe that is, say, a woman sees a man in a nice suit get out of a £150,000 car, she is going to be very attracted to him. I know that this could well be true, for a tiny minority of very shallow and incredibly dull women.

If you are a man and you want to attract a woman like that, go ahead, good luck, I hope you will both be very happy.

I have had the slightly odd privilege of driving a very wide variety of electric automobiles, from super tiny econoboxes to very high end expensive sports cars.

I had a loan of a BMW i8 for a few weeks 10 years ago, a 2 seater sports car with near zero baggage capacity. It truly is an amazing car to drive. Yes, it is a plug in hybrid but it is properly exceptional and I really enjoyed driving it.

I had it long enough to ask a few women I knew what they would think of a man who they saw getting out of this car. I asked this after they saw me getting out ofd the car, and as you can see from the picture, it does have attention seeking doors.

The descriptive terms they used were as follows:

Tosser

Plank

Wanker

Saddo

Loser

This may say more about the women I know than anything else, it may also be that they were describing the man they saw get out of the car. Me.

But I guarantee these women are not shallow and dull. Terrifying, insightful and funny yes.

So I remain a little baffled about KaptainKlunk1’s comment, and his avatar picture where he is clearly shirtless. Maybe that’s saying:

‘I’ll stick with being a man and not wear a shirt.’

If you want to, please let me know what you think about men and the cars they identify with, and why? I’m not saying I’m any different but it is something that has always mystified me.