The Economist asked an astute question recently: with the arrival of effective and safe weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic, will thinness keep its elite appeal?
It’s a question that understands well the status games people play. Running a busy home and raising healthy and happy children, having a successful career, a happy marriage with a bouncy sex life and staying in shape is very difficult — and is therefore very much a “flex”.
But if anyone can take a pill and look like Brad Pitt, it raises the likelihood that status will need to be found elsewhere.
There is a motoring equivalent. The old-school car “flex” was acceleration, blitzing from 0-100km/h in a short few seconds. I recall, 20-odd years ago when Aston Martin was going through its original beautiful phase, driving a V8 Vantage that could clip along to 100km/h in under five seconds. I recall describing its sprint time as “feral”.
Well, it’s just no longer the case. There are VW Golfs that can do that, and with the growth of electric motoring, with their instant access to 100% torque all the time, there are any number of Chinese automotive microwaves that will leave the snarly old Aston for dust.
What area of motoring life does this leave in which elite motorists might perform their status?
The most obvious is beauty. Beauty and its importance in both private and civic life has never been better explained than by English philosopher Roger Scruton. He explained that counter to the reductive instincts of socialist town planners, brutalist architects and Scandinavian interior designers, beauty is an end in and of itself, and the modern habit of meekly submitting to the tyranny of form-follows-function design is an aesthetic and cultural outrage. It ought to be thought about carefully and seriously.
So perhaps we will see prettier cars in the future, with interiors less devoid of all life, and hopefully this will encourage builders of electric cars to dispense with the exceptionalism that besets the likes of Tesla, which builds clever and fast cars that are so wilfully dreary and nailed together with so little care as to be verging on disrespectful.
The preponderance of SUV ownership is well noted elsewhere, but another field of play for the automotive status seeker is in off-road ruggedness. Cars like the Suzuki Jimny prove the point, because it’s a reasonably cheap car but they all seem to have beefed-up wheels, updated suspension and gigantic roof-racks.
The Jimny opens the game for less wealthy people, who can now go toe to toe with the Toyota Cruiser 70-series gang with their V8s and locking diffs. I was chatting to an acquaintance the other day who has just bought himself a kitted-out Toyota Hilux with all the bull-bars and monster-truck wheels you can imagine. He said — and it’s clearly nonsense — that he needs it for the bumpy driveway at his house by the sea.
But there is another possible outcome that doesn’t sit well with me, as a confirmed petrolhead, that cars will simply cease to be a field of play in the status games because cash doesn’t buy the status it used to. What’s the point of spending millions of rand on an M/AMG/Turbo S if people can overtake you in a humdrum electric school-run crossover?
There will always be a community of car weirdos like me who will be reduced to a quivering wreck by a mint 1992 Toyota Cressida station wagon, but among automotive civilians that’s just ridiculous and if dropping a ton of cash no longer necessarily buys you supremacy in the light-to-light showdown, perhaps — like thinness — cars just won’t be so important any more.
This brings me neatly to the new VW Polo Vivo. I drove the 1.6 automatic and loved it so much that I bothered the Volkswagen fleet people to have a go in the range-topping GT.
The new Vivo is up there with the hybrid Toyota Corolla for my car of 2024. Most reviews of the car have snagged themselves on the car-savant wag-’n-beitjie that is the age of the platform; the Vivo is the last-generation Polo launched in 2009 and built uniquely in SA with amortised tooling to keep costs down.
In doing so, my fellow car writers forget to review the car itself and get caught in the mistake of presuming as fact that time and automotive progress move as one.
I’m afraid they don’t. You just cannot buy cars like the Vivo anymore. The current Polo is a sophisticated and high-quality piece of kit, but its price matches the quality and composure. It’s also got a three-cylinder turbocharged engine, whereas the Vivo models mostly have four-cylinder naturally aspirated motors.
This gives them an old-fashioned feel. You really need to drive the Vivo, gun that motor because all the shunt is at the top of the rev range. Do that and the 1.6 models are pretty sprightly. The manual boxes are a hoot to use, and all of a sudden you realise that you’re driving like you used to when you were younger — blipping the throttle to set the revs for the downshift, turning in and feeding in the gas again, enjoying the lightness of the car and the weighty, direct steering. I loved the way it slices through traffic and yet manages to feel secure at the national speed limit.
If you ever wonder why people in Vivos seem to drive so fast, I can explain; they’re enjoying themselves.
What the Vivo GT does is give the driver what I might unhelpfully call contextual status. In petrolhead language, it’s a sleeper, a car that looks like a Polo Vivo but is in fact by any modern standard what we’ve come to know as “warm hatch”. This one has the Polo’s three-cylinder and a six-speed manual. It’s a gem of an engine and 81kw in a Vivo is plenty.
Mated as it is with the older, lighter body of a Vivo and what you have is a car that I was more than happy to be seen in. Does it play the status game? Well, not at all — until you surprise yourself and those around with a turn of pace not usually associated with a Vivo.
For my money I’d take a manual 1.6l car for R320,000 and bask, smugly, in the quiet knowledge that I have saved a ton of money and bought an SA-only car that demands to be driven like it’s 2009 — and, critically, that this is a good thing.
Sure, the big boys will drop you at the lights, but there is a good chance you’re having more fun. And what bigger flex is there than “if you know, you know”?
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