Car Blindness

Driving in cars with logos.

Sophomore year of college, my roommate had a car on campus. I’d ridden in it dozens of times when my sister asked if it was nice. I said, “Yes. It’s normal. Big. A black SUV. It might be a Toyota.”

Later she saw the car in person, and said, “Savannah, that is a very nice car. It’s a BMW, and I think it’s new.” BMW is one of the brands that has their name conveniently displayed in their logo, but still, I hadn’t noticed.

My affliction is Car Blindness, and I have a serious case. My mom says I come by this honestly. “We aren’t car people,” my parents say. I hope I never witness a crime and have to ID a car, because I wasn’t raised to remember. Unless it’s the exact make and model someone in my immediate family has owned in the past two decades, consider the getaway car gone-away.

I never remember cars. After a breakup years ago, I was haunted by every dark-colored Jeep-like car in Los Angeles. We’d dated for a year and a half, but I didn’t know the make, model, year, or even color of my ex-boyfriend’s car. The number of unspecific vehicles that reminded me of my recently massacred heart was staggering, the triggers endless, a minefield set for constant explosion. He and his mystery car had left the state permanently, but I kept looking over my shoulder. For what, I didn’t know. (I think it was black, but it could’ve been forest green or perhaps slate.)

When I first met my fiancé, he drove a two-seat convertible. I started a rumor that it was an Audi Spyder, but unsurprisingly, that was incorrect. It was thrilling to drive with the car’s top down, especially for short stretches when the weather was perfect. Once he picked me up from the Burbank Airport and gave me a bouquet of flowers to thank me for not flying to LAX. I remember the color, red, and the make, rose. I had two suitcases and one backpack with me, but only one suitcase fit in the small trunk. In the passenger seat, I sat with the other suitcase under my legs, the backpack on my lap, and the bouquet on top of that. I couldn’t see out the front window, but I was still delighted by the flowers. A month later, my friend Clair came to visit, and I told her how small the car was, too compact to take on a road trip, or fit a third person or more than two suitcases, a backpack, and a bouquet. “Why does he have this car?” she asked. “It sounds so impractical.”

Then she saw the car, a Fiat Spider, it turns out. “Oh,” she said, “I get it now. You didn’t tell me it’s a cool car!” Well, she would know. In high school, she was the first to get her license and the most dependable chauffeur of our friends. She’d drive us around in an old BMW with stick shift, which the rest of us never attempted let alone mastered. This car broke through my affliction, because our other friend’s dad was interested in purchasing it for a “friend price.” This came up anytime we went to pick up his daughter in the BMW. 

“Ask your dad if he wants to sell me this BMW for a friend price,” he’d say, and as we drove away we’d cackle. No way would Clair ask her dad. This was our group’s getaway car, her car, sort of. We’d never part with it.

A week after my college graduation in 2014, I was driving to LA to move there forever. I loaded up my dark red 2004 Honda Accord, which had a sunroof and heated seats. Luxury! It had belonged to my parents. After sophomore year, I borrowed it for my summer interning in LA, and then I got to keep it on campus. “This isn’t your car, exactly,” my dad liked to clarify. “It’s ‘the car for your use.’” Now that I was taking it to the city of stars, the city of cars, I was permitted to call it “my car” if I wanted. In LA, I’d be starting my first paid internship, with an hourly rate above minimum wage. I was very pleased. A little too pleased, my parents said. They worried I might settle for too little for too long, that I might have low standards. I don’t think they realized that starting a career in entertainment means consistently lowering your standards, then starting to raise them, and then, as is my lot today, going on strike because the studios have lowered everyone’s standards and we’re not gonna take it anymore!!!

For graduation, a family friend had given me a license plate frame that said “Stanford Alumni” on it. As my dad and I put it on the car for my use my car, I started to worry. Was I flying too close to the sun, flaunting my privilege, my expensive education? Would this make me a target? People would see the license plate frame, know I went to Stanford, think I was rich, and steal my car.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” my dad said, with his signature calm.

“Why not?!” I asked, with my signature worry.

“Because they’ll look at the car, and they’ll know you’re not rich.” 

(Had he forgotten the heated seats?)

He was right, I didn’t have any trouble. My biggest car incident that year happened when I wasn’t even there. The car got hit while valet-parked on the studio lot where I worked as a production assistant. A delivery truck did it, and a lot attendant put the security camera footage of the crash on a DVD for me. I sent it to my dad, who was veritably thrilled to watch it. “You don’t usually get to see what happened,” he said. That summer, my parents sold the Accord to Clair’s dad for a friend price, and I started driving my parents’ newer old car, which I still drive, now in my name.

It’s a 2007 Toyota Prius, a sturdy teenager of a car. My parents named it Agatha, but I have neither held onto the nomenclature nor changed it. It’s a risk to advertise that I drive a Prius, since its catalytic convertor is in high demand and has already been stolen and replaced once. But I must paint the picture. Besides some scrapes on the bumper, the Prius is in great shape. It has idiosyncrasies, like we all do. One of the back doors only locks manually. The tire pressure sensor is broken, so the light is always on. The car has state-of-the-art technology circa 2007: a backup camera, bluetooth that works exclusively for phone calls, and a six-CD player. And then there are my hacks. I bring a portable bluetooth speaker with me on drives so I can listen to podcasts and audiobooks from my phone. I charge my phone with a portable charger, which I set in my lap while I drive. My phone connects to a magnetic holder that grips onto the vent, so I can use that for navigation. Technically the car has a navigator too, but when I try to use it, it says every street I’m on does not exist. I know I’ll have to get another car someday, but for now, I’m happy to safely “drive it into the ground,” a cost-saving technique endorsed by my family of non-car people and by financial expert and Stanford alum Ramit Sethi.

My car, with a visitor and a view.

A couple years ago I was at a museum downtown for a Pipilotti Rist exhibit called “Bigheartedness, Be My Neighbor.” A man was there with his young teen son, who was maybe 14. The man pointed to the projectors, which were in use all around the exhibit. “One of those projectors is 20 thousand dollars,” he said.

“Wow,” the boy said. “Is that more than our car?”

The dad looked at the son and said with disdain: “You just really don’t know what things cost, do you?”

“So it’s less than our car,” the boy said, learning his lesson. I wanted to tell him that some cars cost less than the projector, some cost more, and he’s not stupid for not knowing what everything costs at 14 years old. I bet he knows more car logos than I do. He’s being raised to remember.