Veni, Vidi, Volvo

The other day I saw a commercial for a car which stops itself. I don’t really need a car that can self apply brakes. I have been perfectly capable of stopping my car. Other than the time I ran over a speaker pole at the Airport Drive-In Theater and another time I hit a house (very gently) I have been able to avoid having my automobile come into unintentional contact with other objects. What I need is a car which can clean itself.

It cannot be a surprise that the first company to create a car with this kind of feature is Volvo. No, I am not piling on the American car companies by implying that only a foreign company would have the smarts to do this. I know that is not true. I mean American car companies are more concerned with things which actually sell cars to the general public. Things like voluminous amounts of cup holders strategically placed throughout the vehicle or television screens imbedded in the backs of seats to keep children neurally numb (a fun and alliterative way of saying brain dead) by allowing them to watch the Hannah Montana Battles the Tranformers while My Little Pony Kicks the Living Daylights out of Barney Sing-A-Long Songs DVD as the family motors along.

I guess when you stop to think about it many, many cup holders are a safety feature for the reason that before such things existed many an accident occurred because a man was distracted from watching the road due to the fact the ice cold soft drink he just purchased at the convenience store, the one which is so large it has an undertow and virtually the same volume as your average lobster tank at Trader Vic’s, was placed between his legs, due to the lack of proper cup holder availability, and the frigid temperature of the cup worked its way through the fabric of his jeans and he suddenly was more concerned with the fear of frostbite to a certain zone of his person than about the bicycle rider who really did have the right of way but failed to yield to the Camaro piloted by the distressed man with the frosty…thighs. (Apologies to Ms. Lisman, my high school English teacher, but I am more than a little proud that I was able to create the preceding 153 word sentence, a new personal best. Boo-yah!)

We now return to the Volvo Company. Of course they were the ones to develop such a safety feature. Volvo is the company which decided long ago to pin all their hopes and business plan on the reputation that they are safe. We got the first 3-Point Safety Belt. We got the first padded dashboards. We got the sex appeal of Larry King in a Speedo. They have no trouble cashing in the cool, hipness that is intrinsic to so many car models and going with the unstated motto: You look like a geek driving a Volvo, but you get to become a very old geek.

Actually, in some circles a Volvo is cool. Granted you will never see a rap star pull up to a Grammy after-party with his blinged-out entourage and spill onto the red carpet from the doors of a Volvo Laplander (maybe if they changed the name to a Volvo Lapdancer you might). But, you will see a veritable wagon train of Volvos lining up to pick up blazer wearing eight year olds in front of private schools with names like Westminster Uppingham Prep and croquet teams called the Fighting Monocles.

Upon closer inspection I have found another reason to believe there is a super secret coolness wrapped up in the Volvo brand for people in the ultra-snobby, esoteric intellectually-based culture residing in certain regions of the planet. Latin is a dead language. Right? If you become fluent in Latin you can only use the language to communicate with biologists swapping genus species jokes around the centrifuge in the entomology lab at Cal State – Berkeley (I have no idea if a centrifuge has any place in an entomology lab but it was the only high tech device which came to mind, because I am not a biologist at Cal State – Berkeley) or talking to high brow aesthetes at cocktail parties in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So those are the only demographics who would know that Volvo is the last word in the ultra-cool Latin phrase: Illud est quemadmodum volvo. Which translates for that rap star in the Volvo Lapdancer to say: That is how I roll.