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PORSCHE TIME. INDEED , 911 time. We have a light blue 964 model Carrera 4 Cabriolet on a
K plate, so it's about ten years old right now. The '4' means it's four-wheel drive. This is
not so you can take it off road, it's to give the little blighter more grip in the wet and try to
tame the notoriously tail-happy behaviour 911s have exhibited since the sixties because
they have the engine in the wrong place, i.e. hanging out astern of the rear wheels.
It's a creaky, rattly, bangy kind of place to be, the 911, when the top's down. Actually
it's a fairly noisy old thing even when the top is up, when, in addition, it feels dark and
claustrophobic, but then it's almost never used with the hood closed unless we've gone
out in sunlight and encountered unexpected rain. The 911 is another unexpectedly relax-
ing and limit-friendly car to drive, because - while it will very happily scream along at
three-figure speeds with the hood stowed, and give every impression of enjoying it - it
feels just as content at much lower speeds.
Happy cars: in defence of anthropomorphism .
This is all, obviously, about our perceptions, about human comfort, in the end; when we
talk about a car enjoying a certain speed all we mean is that we feel happy with the sen-
sations we experience while in the car at that velocity, based on our earlier experiences of
being in cars. To the extent that a car exhibits (in the widest sense) behaviour, this is what
makes us treat it as alive even though we know perfectly well that it isn't. The conceit
of ascribing emotional states to cars or other vehicles is simply shorthand for expressing
our knowledge of the parameters within which the vehicle is designed to perform and its
current relationship to - and position within - those parameters.
A degree of mechanical sympathy is necessary here; an even moderately good driver
should experience a degree of discomfort if they hear an engine being overrevved, and,
equally, when a person feels that a car is humming along, engine singing, their sensa-
tion that the car is 'happy' probably reflects as accurately as possible a state in which the
vehicle is performing just as its human designers intended it to in those conditions.
So, in the 911, with the top down, wind roar and hair-mussing tend to increase beyond the
acceptable at very much more than a mile per minute, and certainly when sustaining such
speeds for long periods, and it's that feeling of being battered by the slipstream that tends
to rein in any accelerator-flattening proclivities while you're exposed to the elements.
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