Cars

Cars aren't weird.  They are machines designed to transport small groups of people efficiently.  The internal combustion engine has been around for more than a century, the arrangement of pedals and steering wheel has been omnipresent for not much less than a century.  Cars are everywhere perhaps the most common machine in the world.

People and cars are weird.  People name their cars.  They think their cars have personality, like being willing. or stubborn, or wicked.  People spend vast amounts of money on their cars, many times more than necessary to get essentially the same result.  Status is attached to cars, personality traits assigned to the owners of certain cars (in the USA essentially everyone can tell you something about the owners of Subarus, Ford Mustangs, and the Hummer).  People love or hate their cars with real emotional attachment.  None of these things happen with washing machines, or stoves, or refrigerators.

What is the difference in these machines?  The most obvious difference is that cars move, that there is something about movement that causes these effects in people.  However, the last time you got on a bus, or a train, or a ferry, or a plane, did you feel emotionally attached to it?  Did you feel like you wanted to name it? Not whether it had a name but rather did you want to name it?  The pilots of planes and the captains of ships want to name their machines and feel attached to them.  I think, therefore, that emotional attachment happens when a person controls a machine that moves.

We unconsciously think of things that can move as alive, as inherently having motivation and "thought."  In the world in which we evolved, everything that was as big as our hands or bigger, and could move, was an animal.  While we may not believe that animals think, we do believe they have motivation, and experience pain and pleasure.  Our default setting is therefore that cars have the same qualities.  Our minds are set up in such a manner as to be biased towards assigning the qualities of a mind to cars.

We also operate cars, and not just sometimes, but frequently.  Most of us drive a car at least once a day.  Our intentions are directly transferred into motion, in ways that are rare with other machines.  No only does a car do what we want, but it moves us to where we want to go.  How does the brain make a machine move?  The same way it makes a body move, it identifies with the machine as "itself", internalizes routines for movement (you don't consciously think how you move your legs to walk, or how you drive a car), and then decides where to go. 

The most important thing about that is identifying oneself with one's car.  Think about when you operate a car in tight spaces.  Do you constantly make measurements in your head as to where the edges of your car happen to be?  Or do you actually "feel" where the edges of the car in the same manner as how you know right now where your right foot is even without looking at it?

Cars are special because they fit into an unconscious category of "alive" from their basic function of movement, and because in a very real sense we consistently identify our car as "us."  That's why calling your 1981 Toyota "Gladys" isn't weird, or thinking she was a stubborn old bird who refused to lie down.  It's why you can have a touch of sadness when your 1984 Honda Civic is passed on to other people.  It's also why some people will spend $100,000 on a new Mercedes when a $2,000 used Nissan does essentially the same thing.  How many people would spend fifty times as much on a better washing machine?  Cars are special.