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While many cars evoke raw passion, we don't all agree on what makes them sexy, writes Clive Hopkins.
THERE'S a connection between cars and sex, but why should a couple of tonnes of metal and plastic be sexy? Is it the look, the feel or what we sometimes get up to in cars? Or maybe a little of each of these?
The author of the new book Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything is emphatic about what makes cars sexy. English writer and design critic Stephen Bayley says it's not about phallic shapes or feminine curves.
"It's about power under control, which suggests a high threshold of pleasure," he says.
Car people as far back as Henry Ford have drawn the connection between the motor car and freedom, and this association inevitably has sexual connotations.
"Cars are invested with such passion - by the designers, the manufacturers and the consumers," Bayley says. "It's inevitable that they have an extraordinary power (over us), in a way that a microwave oven doesn't."
Creative director of The Furnace advertising agency in Sydney, Rob Martin Murphy, has worked on ad campaigns for Volvo, Peugeot and Mitsubishi. With his many years of selling the motoring sizzle, he's had a lot of time to think about the connection between cars and sex.
"It's human nature to like powerful things," Murphy says. "We've very visually led, especially with curves. But with cars, it's also an aural thing, like with the gurgling of a classic V8."
He says cars tend to be an extension of personalities.
"Culturally, we tend to pigeonhole people in relation to the cars they drive," he says.
One of the ways we associate sex with cars is that having sex in them was a rite of passage for a certain generation. Murphy says the panel van, for example, became popular with young people in the '70s. For people coming of age in a house with conservative parents, the van with the mattress in the back became known as the third bedroom.
But with 21st-century parents becoming more liberal, this association is diminishing. Murphy, though, lived and worked in Singapore - a more conservative society where sex in cars is still popular - for six years. Newspapers stuck over car windows in Singapore apparently provide privacy and warn the unwary to steer clear.
In Australia, despite the availability of reasonably priced motels, cars remain popular for clandestine affairs.
The owner of a Valiant Charger for 12 years before it was stolen, Murphy holds it up as a strong candidate for Australia's sexiest car.
"The Charger wasn't practical, but everyone knew when I was driving it and you got the respect," he says. "I got the 'Hey Charger' and the V-sign, even from people who weren't born at the time the ad was out, so it's obviously been passed down father to son."
Murphy says the Charger's roominess and easy-clean vinyl are among its many useful attributes.
"We always romanticise the sexiness of cars from the past," he says. "But, of course, sexiness and practicality don't always go together - just look at underwear."
Perhaps surprisingly, Bayley's current transport is a Smart Car. This, he insists, is not just the only viable car in chronically congested London but is also a sexy choice.
"The Smart Car says, 'I'm an intelligent person', which is the biggest turn-on of all," he says.
A woman friend once told Robert Hayden, a Melbourne-based business relocation consultant, that for something to be sexy it has to taste good, smell good, sound good and look great. He reckons his Ferraris cover all those bases.
The owner of two 1988 Ferrari Testarossas, which he drives as everyday cars in summer, Hayden likens having an older Ferrari to "being married to a high-maintenance woman like Sophia Loren" because they need a considerable amount of work to keep them going. Continued…
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