I’ll tell you what’s cooler than living in LA.
Living in LA as a six-foot tall, porcelain skinned, even-tempered, former super model who gets invited to car dealerships to test drive cool, new cars. Well, I’m six feet tall in heels and I recently got an invite to Santa Monica BMW to drive the new fully electric car based on 1-series platform. My friend at the dealership knew I was coming in wanting to hate it (see “In Defense Of The Gas Guzzler”), so the bar was high.
Even walking up to this thing, I knew it was going to be something special: (cue sexy music)
I got behind the wheel and it turned it on and ,well, I thought I turned it on. How the hell could I tell? There was no roar of exhaust… no cloud of diesel smoke… no libido massaging vibrations.. just the familiar ding of the seat belt indicator and this crap on the dash:
Score= one for Mama, none for the tree huggers. I was completed underwhelmed.
But then I pulled out of the driveway, hit the gas (or whatever) and drove like I was.. dammit..driving a BMW. Arg! I really wanted to hate it, but it went. It went fast and while I missed the roar of the engine and the shifting of the gears, the silence was kinda nice. Such a terrible word, “nice.” Who wants “nice” while they’re driving? Certainly not Mama. Anyway, I took my foot off of the gas and it suddenly lurched forward, like I had popped out of gear. That my friend, assures me is something I’d get used to. Alright, fine. Score= one for Mama, two for BMW.
Here’s the doozy. Sitting at a traffic light in complete silence. It brought back all of the post-traumatic stress of my early driving days. Like the 1987 Saab 900 Turbo who liked to catch on fire after stalling on the expressway back East. Or the Toyota Tercel whose fuel gauge would get stuck in winter and then, surprise!, reveal that I was left with an empty tank on an equally empty Boston street, in February. It reminded me of a car that had stalled, not like one who was just “conserving its battery.” That’s… nice.
We bring it back to the dealership, where he shows me this nifty (cousin to nice) little contraption:
Don’t you love it? Who doesn’t want that in their garage, no matter what it does. It’s pretty (I’m still a girl dammit). But then there comes this action that I was not ready for:
Remember that scene in “The Crying Game” when the lady lifts her skirt only to reveal that she’s got a full set of junk and she’s a he? Exactly.
Final score: two for Mama, four for BMW. As much as I hate to admit defeat, I have to confess– while I’d miss the noise, the vibrations and the gears, if I could have one of these in my fleet, that would be pretty “nice.”