Some years ago, a male work colleague of mine named Bob was in a little auto accident and had to take his car to the shop to have some bodywork done.  After he got it back, he was talking about how pleased he was that the shop had been able to restore his fender to its original appearance.  He took everyone in the office down into the parking garage to admire the repair job.  I looked at the formerly dented fender and had to agree that it looked great.  But I noticed something that had completely eluded Bob.  Bob drove a Grand Am.  The mechanic who’d reattached the words “Grand” and “Am” to Bob’s car had reversed the words so that now Bob was driving something called an “Am Grand.”  Talk about a Freudian slip!  But there’s another shoe yet to drop.  Bob actually contemplated leaving it that way.  To his credit, or perhaps because the female contingent in our office shamed him into it, he eventually fixed it so that his car made a less grandiose statement.

The incident sums up nicely the way men’s egos are all tied up in their cars.  Whether it’s a Mustang, a Mercedes, a Lamborghini, an F-350 or a DeLorean, most men lust after some motor vehicle and treat it like an outgrowth of their personality.  If all they can afford is a Grand Am, well, they see it as an Am Grand.

Why do men identify so powerfully with objects whose purpose, essentially, is nothing more than to move them from point A to point B?  As I said in Men and Trucks, I don’t know, but I do know that it’s time to tell guys the unwelcome truth: the car you drive may not be sending the message you think.

A while back, I made a comment to my husband K— about cars that are disparagingly called (by women, anyway) “penis rockets.”  I shouldn’t need to explain this, but penis rockets earned the moniker because their flared front end, boxy rear and long, low profile make them resemble…. *

Anyhow, the message a penis rocket sends is this: I am insecure, which I make up for with flashy displays of bombast.  Being insecure is not necessarily a bad thing—we’re all insecure to one degree or another—but is it something you want to advertise?

What’s even more perplexing is why guys who drive penis rockets sometimes put bras on them.  And yes, they really are called bras—those strap-on vinyl tarps meant to protect the front end of the car from road dirt and dings from airborne pebbles.  Nothing sends a mixed message to a heterosexual woman like a penis rocket adorned in something that looks and sounds like lingerie.

Probe deeply enough, and you’re almost sure to unearth the idea that a penis rocket is a “chick magnet.”  In my opinion, the biggest automotive chick magnet these days is a Prius, because it means you may still be mobile while other guys have maxxed out their gasoline credit cards.  But anyhow…why a hunk of metal with a funny shape and a Frederick’s of Hollywood bustier would be appealing to females is a mystery to me.  After all, if they were, we’d be buying them.

Ditto the little foreign jobs that are also perceived as irresistible to women.  Years ago I briefly saw a British guy.  (I will not use the word “date” to describe our fleeting acquaintance for reasons that will become clear shortly.)  He owned and was extremely proud of a little black Alfa Romeo.  From the way he kept asking me what I thought of it, it was obvious that he expected me to be terribly taken by his car.  Unfortunately for him, I did come to view the car as a reflection of his essence, and that was not a good thing.

If you’ve never been in an Alfa Romeo, all you need to know is that it makes a VW Beetle seem decadently spacious by comparison.  Driving around in one felt like someone took a carnival bumper car out on the open road by mistake.  And this was before SUVs were around to dwarf it even more.  For the rest of my life, as long as I retain a memory of this man, the qualities I will associate with him are small (very, very, small) and uncomfortable.  Based solely on my impressions of his car, I must emphasize.

And I was right to form a negative opinion of him, because on our third and last outing, he cornered me in an elevator and told me how turned on he got at hearing American women say a certain four-letter word with their “sexy accents.”  His final tally was Car: 0, Style and Manners: 0, Personality: 0.  A pretty good correlation.

In the end, the whole car-man-ego thing really works to the advantage of women if they just pay attention, because the cars men drive are the closest thing to a mating display the males in this species demonstrate.  Personally, I think something from Monty Python’s The Ministry of Silly Walks skit would be a lot more entertaining, but nobody asked me.  And I guess that says a lot about what I want from a mate: entertainment.

Of course, guys can tell a lot about women from the cars they drive, too.  My mother-in-law swears she once saw a woman tooling down the highway in a little red convertible with a license plate that read “WAS HIS.”  The chances of her being asked out on a date while driving it seem slim.

Cars sum up who we are.  Sure, it’s good to weigh a person’s thoughts, words and deeds, but that can take a lot of time.  Cars cut right to the chase and tell you so much about a person at a glance.  Ladies, are you going to pick a guy whose beat-up Cavalier with the missing taillight and an antenna perpetually at half-mast identifies him as a modern-day René Descartes, someone whose disavowal of earthly concerns hints at profundity of character, someone capable of uttering deep philosophical thoughts like Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore, I am”)?  Or are you going to pick a guy whose choice of car is more consistent with Bob’s vain fender, something that fairly screams Sum, ergo magnus sum (“I am, therefore, I am great,” or, in the vernacular, “Am grand”)?  I thought so.  And nothing says that like a big, fancy, honkin’ penis rocket.

*  A Corvette is a classic example.