Talking Cars

I tried fix­ing the wipers on my car right after lunch, smack in the noon heat, hop­ing to renew the Tioman tan, but failed in both departments.

I popped the bon­net and peered into the engine com­part­ment, think­ing, so, this is what my car engine looks like. You could say I know noth­ing of cars other than how to drive them, turn up the air-con and put CDs in the stereo. It was some­what of a con­so­la­tion when my brother saw me muck­ing around with the bon­net open (its about the only time we inter­act – the other being when I open my com­puter cover), and came over to see how he could help, and he couldn’t.

My brother, the expert in all things tech­ni­cal and auto­mo­tive, couldn’t fix my wipers. I have to bring it in to the mechanic’s tomor­row, if it doesn’t rain.

So in all, five min­utes were spent stand­ing shirt­less, span­ner in hand, look­ing for a nut or bolt to undo. No tan.

It is a chore talk­ing cars to other straight men. I spent a good half hour dis­cussing the mer­its of my car to Cheng last night, with him ask­ing all intri­ca­cies of how and why my car is worth buy­ing. You need to have the apti­tude of a nuclear sci­en­tist when you own a car in Sin­ga­pore, and some­times, I feel exposed as a supremely unin­tel­li­gent con­sumer when peo­ple tell me things like, wah, your road tax must be a killer, your fuel con­sump­tion must be quite high, your car must be very dif­fi­cult to park, how many years left on the COE? What is the depre­ci­a­tion? What is the scrap value?

But over the past year of own­ing Mini (the name I gave my Merc Benz 300SEL), the stock response to these ques­tions is, “I got it for real cheap at $28K, 5 years left on COE, fuel is not too bad, am used to the park­ing, just take up one and a half lots, I start the engine, it works, I step on accel­er­a­tor, it moves, I step on brakes, it stops, I steer, it turns”.