Good Ol' Beauty.

I've just read an article about old cars in Top Gear Magazine written by James May and yes, I agree absolutely. Having an old car is nothing like having a brand new one. It's better. 

Having a new car is like having a brand new set of bathroom furniture - they're all smooth, pretty, good looking and well working. They satisfy you because they work in the way you want them to. But there is one problem - they're all completely deprived of soul. Some say that some fancy ass sports cars have a soul because they sound differently, drive differently and feel differently. But let me tell you something, my friend - they're just the same as any other new car I know. Do you know why? Because 'having a soul' is something in the way different than being different. It's about experience. 

And there we come to the old cars. Experience is a factor here. If the car is twenty years old, you can definitely say that it's got a soul. That it's experienced. Do you know why? Because it's got 200k miles on the dial and you're the only person in the world who knows how to set a sit in your car in order to stop this rambling around and dancing on the floor every time you try to take a corner. It's beautiful. You look on your car's headlamps and you can see in them how many millions of landscapes they have seen. You look on the steering wheel and wonder how many millions of corners it has made. You look on the passenger's sit with a huge black/brown stain on the upholstery and you try to imagine a previous owner going to McDonald's, ordering a cup of coffee, putting it on the passenger's sit and then you see a cup falling over and a coffee pouring away. You look on the gear lever and wonder how many times it's been moved. Each morning you wake up and you're just amazed of the fact that your car is still working! After some time you get so familiar with an old car you own that I can even bet $100 on the fact that any other person who's going to try to at least move my car, is not gonna be able to do it. No way. 

Some owners of brand new cars may say "if you guys had more money and could afford a new car, you would buy it". Bullshit. And by the way, our cars are sometimes in the way more expensive than yours. We, "ol' guys", love old cars and are not gonna change them on any new, safe, good lookin' Merc or whatsoever. You don't understand it? We do. You can't.

© PHOTO BY tangerined, FLICKR.COM