They say (whoever they are) that you can tell a lot about a person by the car they drive. Whilst this may ring true in a lot of cases I really don’t think you can make such a sweeping statement any more and claim to be accurate. Take me for example; sometimes I drive an old Land Rover Discovery which I use for carrying stuff around in, mainly my dog as he is a bit smelly. Other times I drive a Ford Mondeo which is comfortable and reliable and thankfully doesn’t smell of dog.
Like it or not though people do still tend to make snap judgements about others based on the vehicle they are driving and I suppose I am just as guilty of that as the next person. I occasionally drive buses in my spare time as a sort of hobby which I think must originate from when I was a boy. Me and my little collection of pals would hang around the bus station heaven knows why, I suppose it was because we didn’t have PS2’s back then and had to make our own entertainment. I do recall the drivers though, they seemed to all share common traits such as the ability to smoke a cigarette in about ten seconds flat or close the doors and drive away in the fraction of a second as soon as they saw someone approaching with a ten pound note.
Having experienced the reality of driving a bus I now know why two buses arrive at once although I’m still waiting for the opportunity to explain this to someone (like they’ll be interested) and have realised that given the limited amount of down time you have on the road the only thing you can realistically do is smoke a cigarette. In fact I was even thinking about taking up smoking so as not to feel left out.
As I say it is easy to stereotype others based on their job or appearance or even their vehicle of choice but as the saying goes you can’t always judge a book by its cover.
I recall then my teens and twenties when image was everything to me especially with my designer jeans and trainers. I would spend hours lovingly ironing creases into my jeans in fact I remember doing this one time and returning to find that my cat had vomited on them, he was obviously not a fan of Liberto! Nowadays I don’t even know where the ironing board is.
The same was true with my car. I had every possible cleaning product you could imagine and would avoid driving altogether if the roads were muddy. I bought ever more exotic kinds of car air fresheners and would annoy the guys in the tyre centre by insisting that when they balanced the wheels they would hide the little weights so as not to mark the carefully polished alloys.
I’ll never forget the day when my mate Piers who was the epitome of style arrived outside my flat to take me to a trendy wine bar in his brand new Ford Ka. After I had stopped laughing at his rather girlie car, sorry Ka he decided to wipe the smile off my face by tearing around the streets of Bristol like a scene from the film ‘The Italian Job’. In fact the Ka was as much of a revelation as the Mini was when it first appeared. Now I got it, the car or Ka (kept getting mixed up what to call it) was a great laugh to drive and being new attracted a lot of attention especially from the ladies. I said cheerio to Piers as he sped off with a car full of girls and a big grin. All that was more than ten years ago but the Ka lives on and is about to be replaced with an even better looking version. Ford has a habit of creating modern icons often by accident and has proved with the Ka that although image isn’t everything, sometimes it helps.
Author Resource:-
Jon Barlow gives his slant on the image conscious and recalls the Ford Ka if you are in need of a http://www.sandicliffe.co.uk/ Used Ford
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