All right, so in answer to several questions, it’s a 2007 Mustang convertible that I’m shopping for. It would look like the one above, except not red. (Probably either black or Vista Blue Metallic.) I love red. So why not get red? Because my current Mustang convertible, which looks much like the one above, is red. (And oddly enough, given what they say about red muscle cars, I’ve never gotten one speeding ticket in it.) I think that if you’re going to spend the money to buy a new car, you at least want everyone to see that you’ve bought a new car. A new car of the same make and model and color that has a slight change in body style and maybe an additional stripe isn’t likely to make quite the statement — and like it or not, we all know those statements mean something. Especially in LA.

The person I’m most making a statement to is me, so it’s really for me that I’m changing colors. And a few other things. I actually considered changing cars (this will be my third Mustang convertible in a row), but then I looked at other convertibles and drove the new Mustang, and my heart was set.

Problem is, I am set on some features that seem incompatible. Or so they tell me.

The top photo here is the red leather interior for a Mustang convertible. The bottom photo is for a two-tone red-and-black leather interior for a Shelby Mustang convertible. I’m trying to get a non-Shelby Mustang, but still with that two-tone interior, either red and black if I get a black exterior, or dove (a bluish white) and black if I get the blue exterior. Wish me luck with that.

The big change is I’m requesting GPS with Bluetooth. There are two reasons for this. The first is, all my many apparent gifts aside, I am directionally challenged. I know downtown Los Angeles very well. Eighteen years of going to obscure areas in the dead of night will do that. Put me on the West side, or anywhere in the “West Valley” (with place names like “Tarzana,” “North Hills,” and so forth, places I’m not sure I’ve even been to) and I’m lost. Increasingly, I’ve been finding myself in such places or trying to find my way from Santa Monica on the west side to either downtown or Burbank (where both my office and my house are), and desperate to find some mystic route that no one else on our clogged lanes has somehow discovered. I’m tired of looking to find a place to pull over and consulting my Thomas Guide. Plus, I’m looking forward to having Mr. T tell me how to get places.

The other reason is that increasingly I’m on my cellphone while driving. California passed a no-hands law that takes effect July 1, 2008. By “no-hands,” that doesn’t mean they want you to drive with no hands — although I certainly see a lot of that, from people reading magazines behind the wheel to ubiquitous young office workers applying eyeliner on the 405. No, that means your cellphone must be “no hands.” The fine is only $20, but that’s not the point. The point is that with Bluetooth my car will be connected to my smartphone and I won’t have to fiddle with it while driving.

Although I’m buying the car through my car broker Ed, I’ve spent some time (too much time) on Ford’s website and at local dealers looking at models. Ford hasn’t made this easy. For one thing, some of these options seem needlessly exclusionary (get the frimmistat and you can’t have the frammistat; if I don’t want, say, a sport racing stripe, why does the system automatically replace the leather seats with cloth?). For another, as Ed says, there are about 2500 options. After deciding on a couple of packages I would be happy with, I tried to convey these to Ed over the phone but after going through the various permutations of options we finally agreed it would be easier for me to email it. He said he’s going through this with two other clients right now. Ed is one of the smartest guys I know — he’s the only person I’ve met who passed my “Name the original Three Stooges test” — and he said Ford just has too many options and they aren’t making it easy to buy their cars.

(Note to Ford: Perhaps you should simplify your offerings and sell more cars. Take a page from Mr. Jobs, who upon his return scrapped about 16 competing Macintosh Performa systems and created the easy-to-buy iMac.)

So I’ve sent the options to Ed, and he’s got until Monday to find this car for me. After which I’ll be back East for a week, and then he’s got until January 7th. (The sooner the better.)

In the meantime, all this time and effort spent on car shopping and debating decals and stickers that add or subtract $500 here or there has increased my eagerness to be driving this new car, and also my awareness that simultaneously 2.8 billion people on this planet subsist on less than two dollars a day. Somehow or other every day almost everyone I know is living that contradiction.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 12:24 am and is filed under On being, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.