Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Once, when I was touring a house to rent from an acquaintance, he pitched it as basically: this house is a house. All the things you would expect to work do work, it's big enough, it provides shelter. That was true, and totally fine -- the house was totally adequate, and for the most part nothing leaked or sagged or burst while I was in it. This is also what I'm looking for in a car.
My current car is a hatchback with 7.5 inch clearance that can drive across Texas without breaking down. It can fit three carseats in the back if I pay attention to which ones I get. I am not very pleased that it tells me to keep my hands on the wheel even when my hands are already on the wheel. Grr. The lane assist and adaptive cruise control are nice, and I do not really want an experience when I'm trying to drive an 800 mile stretch of perfectly straight, flat road for a road trip. It will probably be annoying when the sensors start breaking down, I hope I will be able to afford just getting another car at that point or something. Perhaps there will be a model available that's fully autonomous on the freeway or something, which would be great.
My neighbor's son did something to his exhaust that made it roar to life at 4 am every morning for months, waking me up hours early. I don't know what it was, and when I tried yelling at his father about it (because the owner was slinking around avoiding me), he said nothing about the cause, but it was fixed within a week. I do not care at all whether that resulted in a less aesthetic driving experience.
I tried looking up 90s German sedans, and there seem to be different looks, but they all look just kind of like basic cars, maybe a bit ugly but not in a way that matters. The cars I knew as a teenagers liked to stall out at intersections and were too terrible to even drive on expressways; I have no impression of them other than that mostly they will move people around, but sometimes they're a huge hassle and not reliable. The air conditioner broke a lot, and I would be blasted with 100 degree wind. I'm not sure if I've ever known anyone who actually enjoyed the act of driving for its own sake, then or now.
Searle, in his lectures on Philosophy of Mind, talks about how perception occurs at the level of your baseline skill. And he talks about how men buy cars to impress women, but if he actually shows an actual woman at Berkeley his car they will say it is "red" or "a convertible" or if they're relatively knowledgable a "sports car;" they may notice the badge and they may not if they look closely. While when he shows it to his male friends in the Engineering department, they instantly see that it's a Guards Red Porsche 911 Carerra Turbo Targa, probably a 991.2 but he'll have to look closer to be sure. And it's not that either of them is "thinking" more about it, it's that they perceive those facts essentially instantly, but in completely different ways.
Sure, but a working class woman(that is, one not at Berkeley) knows full well that that’s a Porsche, which means the man who owns it has a fair bit of disposable income.
I think most women would recognize that a Porsche was expensive, but probably wouldn't recognize anything about a 90s German sedan, lovingly cared for and modded, other than that it wasn't new.
Even I can recognize a carefully maintained turquoise low rider and have a bit of respect for the effort (but know nothing about why they're beloved, or how they drive. There was a whole museum room dedicated to explaining why, which I couldn't force myself to read).
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Likely only if she reads the badges, while a man who's into cars clocks it instantly from a quarter mile away on the highway.
In the same way that my wife recently told me that the new flowers she put in the living room vase were special to her because they were the flowers in our wedding bouquet. I hadn't noticed that the flowers had changed, as the last ones were yellow too.
A lot of women impressed by a Porsche wouldn't immediately know the difference if you rebadged a Corvette.
But she would be able to recognize "fast, expensive car", which is what she's likely to care about. And she can tell the difference between a rebadged japmobile and an actual sports car.
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