CHERCHEZ LA CAR: This past week, I had to turn in the family car to the company we’d leased it from. The lease was days from coming due, and we needed to downsize. But the real deal is that on this planet, that car could have got me shot. Three times in the past few months, I’d inadvertently gotten into other people’s cars — all the same make, model, and color — parked in various parking lots throughout Santa Barbara, only to realize I had entered into someone else’s unlocked four-wheeled abode. And no, I didn’t steal anything. Fortunately, no one was home at the time. Two White cheerleaders in Texas — not so lucky — recently got shot for doing the same thing.
Naturally, none of this was my fault. It was my car’s.
It’s a perfectly fine car — better than that, even. It’s a RAV4 hybrid, a dignified, professional-looking charcoal gray. Good visibility, commodious, and pseudo-responsible from an ecological standpoint when it comes to greenhouse emissions. It is, however, the single most anonymous, invisible car on the road — perhaps the planet — a steel-ish tortoise shell on four wheels that pretends to be a compact SUV. Every Saturday afternoon at thousands of shopping malls across America, thousands of hapless Dagwoods — zombie dads — can be seen clicking their key fobs in the vain hope of finding their RAV4 via echolocation.