Men have emotional attachment to their cars

Let us go for a drive! No place to be, no particular time to get there at, but just a drive. The car, the road and you. The man.

And if you are indeed a man, chances are you love cars or at least have a passing interest, otherwise there is something wrong with you. You love your wife too, despite her many shortcomings; she watches every episode of Ugly Betty, she can’t cook like your mother and she always forgets to put the toilet seat up. But it is love — irrational, unconditional.

Man and machine have an emotional attachment that women should admire. We look at a car and we don’t see a way of getting to work on time. We see sensuous lines, sunlight gleaming off the curvature of a bulging wheel arch and a bonnet bursting with a V8 ready to awaken at our command and rupture the air with its growling quad-pipe exhaust.

We look at the badge on the bonnet, think of the great racing heroes who crossed finishing lines all over the globe under that marque’s colours, winning admiration, wreaths, bubbly and trophies. We see adventure, a conquest, a hunt. It is primal — that need to be fast, to be the most agile, to have physical power and “hunt” down the next corner, the next straight.

We don’t care about any of the responsible stuff. Ikea stacking shelves are practical. Carrefour working hours are reliable. So as a man, I buy my shelves from Ikea and shop for groceries in Carrefour. But when it comes to cars, my logic will seem childish even to a first-grader. I couldn’t care less if it had a two-tiered boot, a vanity mirror or 13-and-a-half airbags.

I suppose I would be mildly impressed if the manufacturer claimed its latest model could get 20 kilometres to a litre of 98 octane but they didn’t get those figures with a man behind the wheel, I can tell you that. So what would really make my jaw fall off its hinges are blistering acceleration times, zany top speeds, 13-inch-wide Pirellis and a useless (in a practical sense) ride height.

I would happily trudge to work suffering every minor road imperfection because of the rubber-band tyres — all for that one early Friday blast down Sharjah’s camera-less Maleha road to Fujairah.

The caveman in me awakes, the right foot goes down hard and my eyes lock on the horizon ahead, shrinking almost as fast as the speedometer needle rises. The car talks to me through my feet, hands and spine, telling me where the grip is, when to get off the brakes, feed in the power and correct the steering a smidgen. It is a relationship. And it is the only one men are allowed to have outside of marriage