By 
It didn't take long to notice I was being followed. Or paced, more like. It's an occupational hazard. Spend more than a minute in anything bright, rare and fast—like the Jaguar F-Pace SVR wearing a coat of electric blue paint like a sheetmetal Cookie Monster (should he swallow a rod of uranium-235) and with an exhaust bark that telegraphs its 550-hp hot-rod heart a block away—and the stares, waves, questions or comments invariably follow.
This particular admirer came in the form of a Chevrolet Tahoe, with massive custom rims and windows tinted so dark, in the overcast light it was difficult to detect where glass ended and gloss black paint began. The Tahoe shadowed me in the left lane from Plymouth Road, under the I-96 overpass, and nearly to Fenkell Avenue, when the passenger-side window rolled down. A young man leaned forward in his seat, looked my way and nodded.
A sign of appreciation, from one car person to another.
Thing is, despite a career spent examining, participating in, documenting and championing car culture in all the weird and wonderful places it resides, I haven't always been exactly ... egalitarian. Like plenty of you, I can be annoyed by the sight of cheap, bolt-on spoilers, ugly plastic body mods, aftermarket grilles, fart-can exhausts, spinners, neon underbodies—heck, anything tacked on, clipped in, swapped out or riveted in place of original car parts is fair game for my derision. Or, rather, was. Because a funny thing happened on the way to middle age: I came to tolerate, appreciate and even celebrate these things.
Like stance cars. Enormously head-scratching the first time you see one, but then the oddly real-world expression of a comic-book aesthetic has a way of sucking you in. Even if you recoil from the look, you'll find you can't help but appreciate the feats of engineering.
Then there's the other extreme, "monster"-ing something seemingly resistant to the whole notion of "monster." To wit: There's a killer third-gen Chevrolet Cam-aro RS not 4 miles from our house, its '90s teal body straight and clean and riding on a massive 4x4 chassis and bloated monster-truck tires. It makes no sense to me that someone spent so much time and money on a project like that, but it makes me smile whenever I see it.
Really, in the end, it's all about love, isn't it? A love of silly four-wheeled conveyances that, at their heart, are meant simply to ferry us from place to place. A love exercised in a thousand different ways, painted in a multitude of colors. Like a custom-tailored suit, low-slung pants, flowery boho dress or a flat-brim hat, a car projects to the world our very own sense of self. This car, here. This car, this is me.
But a girl's gotta draw a line.
I recently found that mine falls somewhere just before you get to a fully flocked Maserati.
Yes, flocked. A velvet car. On the outside. From nose to tail, that poor, poor Maser had to endure a "personalization" I hope never to witness again.
Then again, give me another 20 years. Maybe I'll "get" that, too.
Executive Editor NATALIE NEFF can be reached at natalie.neff@hearst.com
