I shouldn’t pick on Napervile only, there are plenty of west suburban towns that are the same, but Naperville is close to where I work, so I know about this firsthand.

This is a Gwagon. They’re pretty hardcore offroad vehicles, originally designed for military and industrial use. Even the industrial use ones are not cheap, and they are built to be used hard.

This is also a Gwagon. All of the mechanical features of the first one are there, but this one conceals them all under thirty coats of paint.

yesterday I saw a woman chiding the wetbacks at a local carwash for not cleaning the inside of the wheel wells on her Gwagon properly. She had, apparently, driven it in the rain, and mud had spalshed up inside the wheel wells, and she was Not Happy. Didn’t they know that this was a $100,000 car? Couldn’t they be bothered to do their jobs properly? After all the wheel wells were part of the car too, and this is a CAR WASH.

I have a built in inhibition about punching a broad square in the face, but I was hoping that the mexican dude didn’t.

Anyway, this is typical of vehicle owners here- and probably most places where people have that kind of scratch to drop on a car. it’s extremely common to see a beemer or a benz with Armorall on the tires, all the way to the pavement. You can tell by looking at them that none of these cars have ever pulled even a sixteenth of a G, the tires wear actually square to the ground with sharp edges. The Lexus are invariably like this, they all have too much money invested in their rides to ever consider making the tires squeal or anything like that.

I had a co-worker who was a big fan of fast cars. His father was heavily involved in open-whjeel racing, and they all could drive- and i mean DRIVE. he also lived in the area, and he had a very nice car, most of the time, but he DROVE it. His Mercedes Sl class went through tires like teenagers through Clearasil. the Sheetmetal on that benz showed signs of constant repair, it was in the body shop nearly every month- he’d push it a little too hard and kiss a curb, or a parking block, and another $2500 worth of tin would have to be fixed. he was forever fighting traffic tickets, and at one toime he was allowed only to drive back and forth to work. Just going to lunch with him would cause your testicles to retract into your inguinal canal. Even if you were a girl.

I can respect that. I understand that. And only a very few people in town ever drove like that. Probably the world. People buy those cars because they are status symbols, and though they talk a big game about performance and features, most of those cars get traded in at moderate mileage with most of the tread left on their original rubber, and the big, heavy land rovers and Gwagons have never even been on gravel, let alone off pavement.