I suppose, deep down within us all lies the potential to be a jerk. I’d like to believe that for most of us, these latent seeds of jerkiness remain in their dormant phase, held in check by your cell’s natural anti-jerkiness organelles, the dejackassochondria and the endoplasmic de-redickulum, the one with the ribosomes on them. But that doesn’t mean the jerkiness doesn’t exist. It just means it’s held in check, precariously, and we must all accept that those checks and balances could – and can – fail.
Sometimes it’s stress or general life pressures that wear us down and allow the jerkiness to escape. Sometimes it’s other people. And other times, yes, it can be a car.
A car! That most glorious of machines, the most worthwhile product of human endeavor, yes, even a car can be the catalyst that brings out your Inner Jerk. And not just any inner jerk: your inner driving jerk.
For me, the car proved to be a Lotus. Not the lovely old Lotus above, which I just stuck in here for the hell of it, but a 2014 Lotus Evora I had for a week back when I worked at the Old Site to do one of my Will It Baby stories, back when my kid still fit that description.
The car was phenomenal to drive, and it just felt so damn good when you pushed it. It was a car that really worked with you to make driving engaging. The problem was you had to sort of be in an engaging driving situation to take advantage of it. And that meant this car helped unleash some really jerky driving habits in me, just to force engaging driving situations.
Did I weave in and out of slower traffic like I was in a rally just because it felt so damn good? I sure did. Did I take off too fast at stoplights and send it into highway on-ramps at twice the legal speed just to get that sensation through the wheels and pedals, to feel my body shift with the weight of the car, to be intoxicated by the speed and control and visceral feeling of the car as a prosthetic, and extension and enhancement of your own body?
Did driving like that make me a jerk? Absolutely. A big jerk.
Now, I’m very used to occasionally driving cars with performance well above my daily driver. My daily has 52 horsepower; it’s a pretty low bar. So I often find myself unwittingly speeding in press cars, but I’m still not driving like an absolute jerk, like I did in that Lotus. Even in really powerful, fast cars, I can usually contain myself. In those, it’s not so much that I drive like a jerk as it is that I feel frustrated, because having to hold back a 500+ hp car in traffic has all the joy of stopping peeing mid-stream. It’s frustrating.
But that Lotus! That wonderful, intoxicating Lotus, it made me a stupid jerk, and I love it for that, but I’m also glad I don’t own one, because I’d feel guilty all the time, knowing what a jackass I am on the road. Our own Mercedes drove one fairly recently, and I think she would back me up here.
Maybe I’d get used to it? Maybe. Luckily, I can’t afford a Lotus, so I think the roads are safe from one more jerk, at least for a while.
I love driving a slow car! I regularly run the engine to 5000 RPM just keeping up with the acceleration of normal traffic. Most of the fun of accelerating like a jerk, with none of the consequences!
It’s such a feeling of accomplishment when I can beat someone from a stoplight, even when they have no idea I was trying to race them…
My mid 90s Buick Lesabre I had in school made me drive like a TOTAL asshole, it was boaty, unengaging, smoky, and leaked power steering fluid, but off the line it could rip a fat burnout, it could hold a line surprisingly well on a twisty road, and whipping that thing around at 3 times the speed of sound in traffic was the same sort of fun as driving across the map in GTA IV. All issues exacerbated when I put sticky michelins on the stock 15s
Mercedes 240 diesel. You can drive like a jerk all day and nobody will notice. It’s actually kind of fun.
I also drove a Ford F100 in NYC that was sort of an art school project. It looked like a Jasper Johns painting after I had read an interview where he said that he based his paintings on the paint job of a car that he saw on the W. Side Highway. No two square inches the same color, except for the front bumper and grill that were painted fluorescent orange.
Anyway a cab tried to merge into my lane, the rear fender got hung up on my bumper, and the cab’s fender mostly got torn off. From that day on, no cab would get within 6 feet of me. Apparently cab folklore was that I would deliberately ram taxis.
So I wasn’t actually driving like a jerk, but I received the benefits all the same. It was amazing how easy Manhattan traffic was to navigate when all the cabs are trying to stay away from you. When I gave people rides they would immediately notice that there was a weird bubble of sparse traffic that traveled with the truck.
You ripped the fender off a NYC cab!
That is the funniest story I’ve ever heard from there!
Photo?
No the cab kept going. It had a passenger who see rather animated. I couldn’t tell if the passenger wanted to get to their destination as quickly as as possible, or wanted to get out but the cab driver wouldn’t pull over.
My take about traffic there, was if you don’t slow anyone down, you can do whatever you like.