QOTD: Dealing With Depression?

No, not depreciation — though that might come into play here, too. A great number of car models are lackluster, deficient in style, reliability or panache, or basically appeal to buyers only for their low cost of ownership. Some vehicles are simply appliances, nothing more.

Yet appliances stimulate little in the way of bad emotion. They’re not meant to. So, despite the blandness of some vehicles, you wouldn’t call them depressing. No, that term is reserved for a very specific cohort of rides. Which models are they?

The topic of this discussion arose from a movie debate, perhaps one sparked by CNN’s obsessive campaign against a certain flick your author had no intention of seeing, but now might shell out for a ticket. The movie looks a little grim. A little depressing in its subject matter and character arc.

Sure, lots of movies are downers, but few add weight to your bones and leave life a little less colorless hours, if not days, after watching. Then there’s movies like Ordinary People (great Olds, Donald) or The Deer Hunter. There’s that episode of Black Mirror about the U.S. college student and the shadowy UK video game developer that stuck with me for days. Films and shows like this leave a mark.

And so do some vehicles. Directors try to insert such vehicles into films to give a sense of what the characters’ lives must be like; to have the vehicle embody the type of person they are, or the situation the character finds themselves in. Remember the jobless, unravelling D FENS abandoning his 1978 Chevette on a crowded L.A. freeway and walking off into the city, (empty) briefcase in hand? Think of how different that scene — and character — would be if you instead watched Michael Douglas exiting a purple 1970 Barracuda 440.

You get the point.

Some vehicles simply lack almost any redeeming figure, and the passage of time isn’t likely to make such mediocrity cool or quirky again (in some unlikely cases, this isn’t the case. Oddball vehicles or grim crapwagons can experience a resurgence in popularity among the hipster contrarian set). And while your author might be more quick to find silver linings than others, the fact remains that the derisive descriptor “penalty box” exists for a reason. What car model, perhaps one you have personal dealings with, is simply irredeemable, leaving you feeling bad for anyone seen driving one?

[Image: Murilee Martin/TTAC]