Love Cars but Don’t Drive Much

The other day, I received a comment on my blog that went like this:

I’m probably a different kind of car lover than my husband. I get invited on tours, but I hardly ever go, and my GT3, which I’ve had for six months, has only about 800 km on it. But you know, I really do love cars. It’s true. It’s not like the “train enthusiast” who actually rides trains. But honestly, I can’t quite analyze what kind of car lover I am…

Interesting.

It made me realize that even when we say “car lover,” there are actually many different types of people. Thinking about this, I talked it over with my husband, and he said:

Yeah, even among car lovers, there are people like me who just love driving, and then there are those who love owning cars itself. It might be fun to try categorizing car lovers.

So I decided to give it some thought.

Types of Car Lovers

As my husband said, let’s first divide them into “Driving Lovers” and “Ownership Lovers,” and then split each of those into two subtypes. Of course, you can get more detailed, and one person might fit into more than one category, but for now, I want to roughly divide car lovers into four types.

First, the characteristics of “Driving Lovers” and “Ownership Lovers”:

◼ Characteristics of Driving Lovers

• Cars are meant to be driven
• It’s okay if the car gets a bit dirty while driving; you can always wash it later
• Enjoy driving the car themselves
• Choose cars mainly based on driving performance
• Once they buy a car, the mileage quickly exceeds 10,000 km
• Prefer manual transmissions
• Interested in car mechanics and quite knowledgeable

◼ Characteristics of Ownership Lovers

• Love the act of purchasing cars itself
• Want to keep their cars clean and stored in a garage
• Enjoy just looking at their cars for long periods
• Choose cars based on design
• Don’t rack up many kilometers even after buying a car
• Don’t usually take long trips of hundreds of kilometers at once
• As soon as they buy one car, they’re already thinking about the next purchase

Something like that. Then, within Driving Lovers, I divided them into “Touring” and “Circuit” types, and within Ownership Lovers, into “Appreciation” and “Show-off” types. Let me introduce them briefly.

① Driving Lover – Touring Type

Loves driving their car themselves, especially enjoys touring on public roads and driveways. On weekends, they go out touring, always discovering new enjoyable roads to drive. They easily exceed 10,000 km a year, and their passion for touring never fades no matter how many thousands of kilometers they drive.

② Driving Lover – Circuit Type

Enjoys pushing their car’s performance to the limit on the circuit. They constantly practice on the track to shave off even a tenth or a hundredth of a second from their lap times. At home, they hone their driving skills daily by playing racing games with a steering wheel controller. They spend an extraordinary amount of money on their car.

③ Ownership Lover – Appreciation Type

Loves owning and buying cars, and cherishes the time spent admiring their car in the garage. They never drive their car on rainy days, and even on sunny days, they don’t have much desire to drive. They own their cars like collecting works of art.

④ Ownership Lover – Show-off Type

Loves owning cars and strongly wants others to see their beautifully designed car. They like cars with stunning designs and often go to gatherings where car lovers meet on weekends to show off their cars.

…That’s roughly how it goes… though it’s very simplified, haha. My husband said,

Each of these categories also has another axis (the Z-axis) for whether they like customizing their cars or not. So really, I’d want to show this in a 3D graph.

I thought it would be interesting and credible to conduct a survey on this blog and categorize people based on data.

As for me… I do love cars, and compared to most women, I’m probably quite a car enthusiast, but since everyone around me, including my husband, is a bit crazy about cars, I often think, “Someone like me can’t really call herself a car lover…” (Though there’s really no need to be so modest). That’s how I’ve been feeling lately.