Mon Jun 07, 2004 8:21 am by Indy11
START YOUR ENGINES
There's a Reason BMW Drivers Zip Along the Autobahn
By MARK LANDLER
Published: June 6, 2004
FRANKFURT From Motown to Munich, automobiles are marketed as a tool of sexual conquest. In Germany, though, cars are so prized that it's not clear, given a choice, that men would choose the girl over the gearshift.
Several recent surveys here have studied the link between cars and sex in the German psyche. While it may not be as deep an exercise as pondering the role of romanticism in the land of Goethe, the results make for juicy reading - and are, in their trashy way, quite revealing.
Who would have predicted that German men, offered a weekend with Pamela Anderson or a Ferrari, would chose the Ferrari by nearly nine to one? Or that Porsche drivers get less action of a nonautomotive kind than the drivers of Volkswagens, BMW's or even Volvos?
Porsche, after all, has built a nifty business catering to gray-haired Lotharios, who dream of gunning the engine of a 911 while an adoring woman gazes at them from the passenger seat.
Yet according to Men's Car, a new magazine that quizzed 2,253 Germans, age 20 to 50, about their sexual habits, Porsche owners have sex less often than drivers of any other make (1.4 times a week). BMW owners are the most active, at 2.2 times a week.
Frequency, it seems, has little to do with fidelity. The survey also notes that male Porsche owners are the most likely to be unfaithful. Nearly half the respondents confessed to cheating on their partners, compared with 46 percent of BMW owners and 31 percent of men who drive the proletarian Opel.
"This isn't serious academic research - it's a form of entertainment," said Werner Hagstotz, an expert in automobile marketing at the School of Applied Sciences in Pforzheim. Still, he added, "I'm glad the motorcycle parked in my garage is a BMW."
Professor Hagstotz is getting at something primal in this country of turbocharged engines and autobahns without speed limits. Fast cars are embedded in the German brainstem. What a German man drives says a lot about who he is, what he does for a living and how he expects to be treated by his fellow man. It may even be a means to decode his sexual DNA.
"For Germans, the car is a unique symbol of identity," Professor Hagstotz said. "It's like a bottle of wine for a Frenchman."
On the cover of Men's Car, a woman reclines seductively against the grill of a car. "Tell me first," the headline coos, "what kind of car you drive."
Some of the results, it has to be said, have less to do with nameplates than demographics. Porsche probably scores low on the sexual-activity scale because its owners tend to be older. BMW's peppy 3 Series, on the other hand, is the ride of choice for young professionals.
Among German women, however, the results are an across-the-board rebuff of Germany's high-testosterone brands. Women who drive French or Italian cars claim to be the most sexually active, while those who drive a Porsche or a Mercedes ranked themselves as the least.
The good news, for a country plagued by a low birthrate, is that just being in a car can make Germans frisky. In another poll, by an auto club in Stuttgart, one-third of respondents said they fantasized about sex while stuck in traffic jams. Only 10 percent thought about finding an alternate route.
So much for Teutonic efficiency.
as was a bright red motorcycle with sidecar