READER'S BLOG: The car... Necessity or Luxury?

WARNING: ACERBIC SOCIAL COMMENTARY

All of your earthly possessions can be categorised into two separate groups: necessities and luxuries.

Occasionally, something like your iPhone or the air conditioner in your bedroom accidentally finds its way into the "necessities" group, but it doesn't actually belong there if you think about it with an uncorrupted, less materialistic mind.

To make things more confusing, sometimes people have wildly different views on what a particular thing should be classified. For example, I have appealed to Foxtel for many years now for the common-sense reclassification of the Fox Sports channels as a "necessity" in the hope that they might include them as part of the basic package, but they see that issue in a different light. Those channels remain a mostly unattainable luxury to this very day, only affordable to the ultra-wealthy who are willing to pay the extra fee for the add-on sports pack.

You would therefore be forgiven then for thinking the only certainty we have is that pretty much everything, except basic shelter, food and true love is technically a luxury, right?

Well, no. Unfortunately that's not correct.

See, I would suggest that cars are in fact a necessity in a country like Australia, despite what you might initially think. Consider that proposition as I present the following three facts.

Firstly, in this vast, brown land of ours, everything is always at least 400 kms away from where you are at any given time. That distance takes about four hours to cover in your VT Commodore Executive, which is just enough time to listen to a Rodney Rude CD plus your favourite 12th Man album.

Given that those recordings are compulsory listening for Australian citizens on road trips, it would simply be impossible to hear them both in entirety if you didn't have ready access to a phone charging port like those commonly installed in most current motor vehicles. If you decided to – I don't know – walk? or do something equally as futile, your phone/MP3 player would run out of battery power long before you arrived at the local post office or corner store and you would have nothing hilarious to listen to for the balance of your journey.

Secondly, there is no point ever trying to catch a bus or a train to wherever you need to go. They are reported to come only every six weeks and are more than likely mythical things that don't actually exist.

Lastly, if you have any capacity to engage in rational thought, you will also make sure that you never become a passenger in a taxi. Although there are many millions of them lurking around the streets like urban vultures, they cost more than you and your family's next two generations would earn in your lifetimes and they stink like death in the Summer time.

Contrast this with Europe.

A car over there is nothing but a luxury. You just don't need to own one.

For starters, everything is within rollerblading distance. And if you are too old or unfit to strap on the 'blades, you simply ride a bicycle to the cafe or bakery or poodle store instead.

Driving a car in Europe is only really for those who have the money and who could otherwise be bothered with the whole ordeal. And that probably explains why their attitude towards crafting motor vehicles has historically been more, um, refined than ours. There, they will not sell unless the finest engineers and designers in the land have sworn a blood oath to dedicate their lives to the eternal quest for vehicular perfection. Here, we will buy whatever comes along provided it has a petrol V6.

At least, that used to be the story.

The last 10-15 years have been an exciting time for the Australian motoring scene. Apart from the collapse of our local production industry (that small disaster...), the range of cars available and the standard of what is acceptable quality for Johnny Consumer have increased well beyond what anyone would have expected. If someone went back in time and told 1995 me that even the cheapest cars on the market will have ABS, cruise control and four power windows within the next 20 years, I would have frisbeed my Discman angrily into his futuristic face and bet my entire ninja turtle collection he was wrong.

Thankfully, I didn't meet that hustlin' time traveller, so I kept my ninja turtles. But even more thankfully, he would have been right.

And that is a great thing if you appreciate having the opportunity to blur the line between necessity and luxury every now and then.

Guest reader: Leighton Smith