Car rules

Before we can even start to look at English unwritten social rules about cars and driving, there are a few ‘universals’ about cars that need clarifying. Across all cultures, humans have a strange and complex relationship with the car. The first thing we need to be clear about in this context is that the car is not primarily a means of transport – or rather, if that sounds a bit too extreme, that our relationship with the car has very little to do with the fact that it gets us from a to b. Trains and buses get us from a to b: cars are part of our personal territory, and part of our personal and social identity. A bus can take you to the shops and back, but you do not feel at home in it or possessive about it. A train can get you to work, but it does not make socially and psychologically significant statements about you.

These are cross-cultural universals – basic, rather obvious facts about humans and cars. But we can now move straight back into discussions of Englishness, because the English, of all nations, are the most likely to resist or even vehemently deny at least one of these basic facts.

The Status-indifference Rule

Specifically, the English like to believe, and will often doggedly insist, that social-status considerations play no part in their choice of car. Even at the height of the BMW’s yuppie-image heyday, for example, upwardly-mobile English executives claimed that they bought their BMWs for their excellent German engineering and design, comfort, reliability, speed, handling, BHP, torque, low drag-coefficients and other rational, no-nonsense qualities. Nothing to do with social image. Nothing to do with status. Nothing to do with vanity. Nothing to do with impressing colleagues or neighbours or girlfriends. Oh no. It’s just a bloody good car.

English women, and some English men, will admit to aesthetic and even emotional reasons for choosing a particular car. Men will say that their flashy Porsche or big Mercedes is ‘a beautiful car’, women will tell you that they want the trendy new VW Beetle because it is ‘so cute’; both will even confess that they ‘fell in love with’ a ‘gorgeous’ car in the showroom, or that they have always had ‘a passion’ for MGs or Minis, or that they are ‘sentimentally attached’ to their rusty old banger.

We might even go so far as to acknowledge that we choose cars that we feel express our individual ‘personality’ or some aspect of our self-image (cool, sophisticated, stylish, fun, quirky, eccentric, sporty, sassy, sexy, honest, understated, down-to-earth, manly, professional, serious, etc.). But not our social status. We will not admit to buying or wanting a particular make of car because it is associated with a social class or category to which we wish to be seen to belong.

Class Rules The ‘Mondeo Test’

But the truth is that car choice, like almost everything else in England, is mostly about class. If you are conducting research – or just have a mischievous nature – you can trick English people into admitting, albeit indirectly, the real social-class reasons for their car choice. You do this not by talking about the make of car they actually own or would like to own, but by asking about the brands they do not like and would not buy. Mention the Ford Mondeo³⁶ to a member of the middle-middle or upper-middle classes and they will automatically make some sort of sneering jokey comment about ‘Essex Man’ or insurance salesmen – in other words, the sort of lumpen lower-middle-class person associated with this particular make of car. ‘Mondeo Man’ is the current generic euphemism for this social category.

Some upper-middles may be too polite, or too squeamish about appearing snobbish, to sneer out loud, so you have to watch their faces carefully for the characteristic brief wince or little moue of distaste that will be triggered by the word ‘Mondeo’. Among the higher or more secure reaches of upper-middle, the reaction is more likely to be mild, benign, somewhat condescending amusement³⁷, and the genuinely upper class may simply have no idea what you are talking about. I found that the Mondeo-test is a pretty good indicator of class-anxiety: the more scathing and contemptuous someone is about Mondeos, the more insecure they are about their own position in the social hierarchy.

This is not a question of price. The cars driven by Mondeo-despising upper-middles may well be considerably cheaper than the reviled Mondeo, and the almost equally ridiculed Vauxhalls and other British-made ‘fleet’³⁸ cars. But however inexpensive and lacking in comfort or luxury features, the Mondeo-despiser’s car will be a foreign, preferably Continental make (Japanese cars are not favoured, although marginally more acceptable than Fords and Vauxhalls). The only exceptions to this anti-British rule are Minis and big, four-wheel-drive ‘country’ vehicles such as Land Rovers and Range Rovers. Those who regard themselves as being a class or two above Mondeo Man may well drive a small, cheap, second-hand Peugeot, Renault, VW or Fiat hatchback – but they will still feel smugly superior as Mondeo Man glides past them in his bigger, faster, more comfortable car.