When I opened my laptop Monday, I saw a story on how Bugatti can personally monitor customer cars and fly technicians out on a whim. It reminded me of my Saturday: eyeballing my odometer, deciding I needed an oil change and then cleaning dark, burning gunk out of the cat scratches on my hand for 15 minutes.
“Lord,” I thought—or, “think,” since this thought sequence happens daily and should probably be in the present tense. “I spend my whole life trying to save a few dollars, while there are people in the world who pay to get personal calls from Bugatti when one of their tires is too low.”
While I’d rather save the money and make sure things get put back where they go when the job is done (RIP to some of my missing undercarriage panels), it never fails to remind me how cheap I truly am when I get online and read that the Chiron’s systems track 10,000 different signals from the car on its health and send them back to Bugatti reps. Then there’s the fact that Bugatti’s “flying doctors” are “available round-the-clock and are ready to board the next aircraft” to take care of cars, so that customers don’t have to move a pinky.
Meanwhile, I think the cat scratch on my pinky is going to take an extra week to heal after I so kindly smothered it in old, dark engine oil. Maybe I’ll make that into the next pyramid scheme for skincare and get rich enough to buy a Chiron.
Automakers are always quick to remind people how frugal they really are and how much money they don’t really have, because the car industry, deep down, is a place for the ultra rich and people who envy the ability of the ultra rich to buy whichever cars they want. Sure, Craigslist junkers can steal as much of the heart as a new Porsche 911 GT2 RS, but that doesn’t stop people from wanting to read a review about the fancy car—even if they can’t afford it.
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There’s also the fact that cars are really all about the brands and how much of those brands we can afford, regardless of how goofy the branded product is. It’s haunting, really, and it’s the kind of stuff I read and write about every day. Nice!
This Lamborghini luggage, clothing, shoe and toy-car line from a few months ago still visits me in my sad, middle-class nightmares.
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As do the man buns and puffy vests from BMW’s outdoors line, complete with all of the overinflated pricing you’d expect from a BMW product but with none of the BMW logos that make people want to pay too much for its products.
There was also the Land Rover stroller, priced at more than $2,000 at the time and only usable for a couple of years (? I don’t know, I don’t have kids). There’s a definite lack of logos to make people feel rich and important here as well.
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Or there’s idea that shooting stars need to be on the roof of your Rolls-Royce, because going outside and breathing peasant air just to maybe spot one of them is a gross, co-mingling waste of time.
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And we can’t forget the Bugatti lifestyle fashion line to go along with the on-call Chiron doctors, with its promotional photos that look like a cross between a metal version of The Wizard of Oz, the X-Men and a bad DVD cover from one of those late ‘90s, early 2000s Disney Channel original movies.
Brands, right? Can’t live with them, definitely could live without hearing about the latest automaker fashion line or how posh the lifestyle of a Chiron owner is.
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Already very excited for Tuesday morning, when I will probably wake up to read about some 18-karat gold rings with diamond-encrusted Lamborghini logos on them that can also magically unlock the car via Bluetooth.
Oh, and the inevitable fact that all 250 of them are sold out. Maybe next time.
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