Naming your car = road rage?

I don't believe anything that comes out of Colorado.......especially one of their uni's.

 

interesting.

i know of 2 or 3 people who suffer from road rage, but by far the worst is in fact a guy who has named his car.

 

I've never named my cars. I refuse to put on bumper stickers. I rarely, if ever, suffer from road rage. I do CAUSE road rage frequently, though!!!

I'm not so sure I trust the validity of the study. I've seen too many studies where conclusions of associations were really statistically stretched. (You'll find all types of associations with something like road rage, but some (like stress factors) are more valid than others (like wears baseball hats.))

 

I named my car and I've gotta say I'm feeling kind of ornery today.

 

+1

 

Well, in the movies, there was "Christine", the "DeathMobile" in Animal House, but that big tanker truck that chased Dennis Weaver had no name, and Kowalski's Dodge was just "supercharged"...

So, I guess maybe "The Car" is sometimes just "A Car"?

So glad somebody really wasted time and money on such a subject. I would love to see how they achieved a standard demographic cross-section?

 

If you do a "study" on road rage, why would you use silly variables like "bumper stickers" or "items hanging from the rearview mirror"? Why not, "do you put on your left shoe first or your right shoe first?" Or "Do you slice your toast diagonally or straight across?" Ooooh, how significant! The statistics don't lie! If you have more than 8 keys on your key ring, you are a potential axe murderer!

 

the naming of the vehicle is a personification of the alter-ego of the owner. it is an extension of the owner's personality and sphere of influence.

as well, the car is seen as a "partner." and there is a greater solidarity of purpose or mission with this pairing, car and driver. they are one yet they are a team.

the car and the driver then assume the roles of 'looking out for each other.' so if someone "crosses" the car, or the driver, they "both" feel betrayed and slighted together as a team or family.

this territoriality enhances and dramatizes the reactionary behavior that is exhibited as 'road rage.' the offender has crossed not only the driver but the car as well. and this intensifies the "retaliation" measures of the car/driver. any perceived injustice on the road is seen as an act of warfare against 'the team' or "us." look what they've done to us-- like to a dog and a master. the dog (the car) is then "sicked" on the offender. sick em, thomas, get em.

the car personified as well creates a surrogate friend or intimate other. it is then easier to formulate an "us against the world --we're going to show them, aren't we" kind of a relationship. and there is power in this relationship.

thus the penchant for greater acting out.

 

But some learn to use their surrogate "power" for good, not evil - like, for example, David Hasselhof and the Kitt the Firebird...Roy Rogers and Trigger...Humphrey Bogart and LuLuBelle the Tank...

Oh, well, never mind.

 

Does it still apply if your car is named "Fifi" or "Fluffy"?

 

Do you have a link to the study?

Did they mean actually naming the car or just a personalized tag?

 

yes, but the two conditions, good and evil, are not mutually exclusively seen conditions. more often it is road-rager that exhibits traits of naming the car. the super-hero vigilante car and driver do not much appear in our society and are mostly objects of fantasy. road rage is real.

 

that is another issue that is very interesting and related: the vanity plate.


it's not called vanity plate for an arbitrary reason, as is elevated to cliche' here in los angeles.

often, the car itself with the vanity plate is enough of a vainglory statement without the plate. however, i have seen hilarious custom plates that are not related to power or snobbery. for example, i saw a Corvair once last year with the plate "UNSAFE" on the rear. and i laughed out loud when i saw that, was very clever. the car wasn't even in cherry condition but a good driver.

last week i saw a Cayman with the custom plate "IMPLS BUY" on the rear and gave the guy a thumbs up. was hilarious that the self-conscious plate was actually self-effacing or at least funny.

it's the plates like "GODESS" or "QUEEN" or "ARRIVED" --which i have seen-- that i hold in disdain. enough to give me road rage in my car i've named.

 

Fascinating.

Now, psycho-sexually speaking, were those drivers identifiably male, trans, or female? I can see you must feel strongly about them, as you do not seem to use caps anywhere else in your sentences...

As to the Corvair plate, I always wanted the tag "NADIR" for mine, but they could not spell it back in 1967 in Oklahoma City.

 

My women have historically named my cars.

I dated a girl from Wellesley who named my maroon corvair Corsa "Marooned" because we couldn't quite make it back to the dorm in time (women had hours back in the OLD days and separate dormatories).

The red 360 F1 Spider my wife named "Sophia"
The orient red metallic Boxster S she named "Ruby"
And the turbo Forrester is named Pepi le Pieu cause it goes like stink.

No road rage yet but I may be tempted if another woman talking on her cell phone...where's the RPG when I need it?

 

Especially if the person has named their car "Hannibal" and they have a machette hanging from their mirror and a bumber sticker that says "Get out of my way or DIE!".

 

females for the first two, males for last one. i'm not a gay-basher. if the QUEEN plate was on a car of a male driver i would laugh my as@ off!! would be funny that the driver calls such attention to themselves! would actually give him thumbs up.

over the winter i saw a ...hmm. some japanese car. i think it was a IS350? anway, i saw the A-pillar gauge pod and heard the blow off valve. he modded it. the guy was behind me, but the plate said "WHY TRY" as he did his blowby while i was minding my own business in the GTO. i wanted to kill him.

 

A study a while back (yeah, I know... ANOTHER "study"?) looked into bumper stickers, and why their usage has declined severely in the past decade or so.

Among the many reasons (hard to remove, damage to resale value, etc.) that people aren't putting as many bumper stickers on their car as they used to is (according the the study, of course,) because people fear damage to their cars if their bumper sticker makes someone mad. You know, they're parked in a parking lot with their "Hillary for President!" sticker, and someone keys the car for it - that kinda thing. A good portion of people would agree that something like that would happen more often now, than it would have 20 years ago.

Now, extending that thinking, it could be that those who put bumper stickers on their cars ANYWAY are less fearful of retribution - they'd be more assertive of their beliefs and maybe (sure, it could be a stretch, but I'll just put it out there), that assertiveness is part of their personality, and manifests itself in aggression while driving...
...
...or they could be driving a hunk of junk that they don't care if it gets keyed.

*shrug* What do I know? I just write code.

Orrie

 

You would not have felt that way if it were a Ferrari GTO, of course...you would have just smugly looked him down with that strange yet arrogant stare that James Mason used for Captain Nemo's character in "20,000 leagues Under the Sea". You don't have to use "ramming speed" unless you choose to.

But it is so transcending to get these feelings out in the open...what, if I might ask, is your car's name?

 

Actually, my wife named the cars and she is armed. Fair warning, y'all.

 

Not only don't I name my cars, I have never referred to the them as "she." I love my cars, but never saw a reason to ascribe the female (or masculine) gender to any of them.

When you ask me how I like my car and if I'm selling it, I'll say "it's a great car and I hate having to sell it" and not "she's a great car and I hate to sell her."

 

No, but you may have other issues.

 

My cars have had names, nicknames, and shorter nicknames, sometimes even derivatives of certain four letter words.


I think at present I am only using abbreviations of the make/model.

 

funny imagery, creative.

yes, a Ferrari GTO with a plate saying WHY TRY would garner much laughter and approval. i would have wanted to roll the window down to ask him to pull over so i could have a ride in it.

but not from the ricer blow-by i got form the guy in the IS350. he needed to go down. i was tempted to put my foot down on the loud pedal but my driving record is very bad, and street racing in socal is met with great disdain and consequence.

my cars do not have names. but come to think of it, years ago i wanted to paint the name "Endurance" on an S14 i drove back from Albany, NY as it was a salvage title vehicle that looked pretty ugly. it had been hit and had replacement body panels of various colors. i drove it from coast-to-coast and it ran like a champ. hence "Endurance."

when i got it home, friends and family came to see chad's car he went all the way to New York to get --and it was this pathetic looking $2400 car dented and with the front fascia somewhat pulling away from the rest of the metal. most who wanted to be happy for me just sort of looked at in silence and didn't know what to say. however, my brother just said "why did you buy this?"

i fell out of love with the name idea a bit thereafter, as i thought it would come off as cheesy. so i never went through with it.