Basic Black

The aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant, finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease. Robert Lowell

There is the Sting Ray, of course. And the Marlin. And the Barracuda - though it isn't essential to have scales to be immortalized in steel. Horses do well too - Charger, Bronco, Pinto, Mustang. Birds are also fully represented: Blackhawk, Falcon, Thunderbird and Lark. Even insects - Wasp, Scarab, Hornet and Beetle - make the cut.

What do all these critters have in common? Well, they're all members of the animal kingdom, but they are also the names of cars. We love to name our vehicles after animals (I haven't even mentioned Impala, Jaguar, Cougar, Bobcat, Lynx, Rabbit, Ram and Fox). The reason for this long-time love affair may have been uncovered in a study conducted by researchers at the University of Vienna. The study suggests that subconsciously we think of cars as living creatures.

The researchers presented 40 young adults -half male, half female - with photographs of the front ends of 38 late-model automobiles, all the same colour. "What do you see?" the researchers asked. "A face," was the overwhelming answer. More than 90 percent of the cars evoked a face for members of the study group. They considered the headlights to be 'eyes' looking back at them. They regarded the radiator/grill to be a nose and mouth. Many of the cars had more than faces; they had Attitude. Some friendly; some not.

Sounds primitive and it probably is. You and I are only alive today because our ancestors were better than their neighbours at danger recognition. Our prehistoric forebears could 'read' the facial expressions of strangers and other animals swiftly enough to decide whether they were friend or foe. The quick studies, like your kin and mine, survived. The slower ones? Sabre-toothed tiger bait.

Car makers picked up on this curious human tic a long time ago. That's why the front ends of so many cars look dominant, masculine, arrogant - even angry-looking. Stands to reason if we buy such a car, it's on our side, right? Mind you, not every customer wants a macho marauder for personal transportation. Some drivers prefer friendly, submissive faces in their carport. Smartcars don't look tough or threatening. Neither do the Volkswagen Beetle, the Nissan Micra or the Kia Picanto.

But auto designers have to be very careful where they draw the line. A car can look cute, but not wussy. And you definitely don't want the front of a new car to put potential customers in mind of, um, bodily orifices. You could ask the designers of the ill-fated Ford Edsel about that. However we design them and whatever we name them, there's no question that the automobile profoundly influences the lives we lead as North Americans - for better and for worse.

The U.S. architect Philip Johnson pronounced the automobile "the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of city architecture". John Keats, the author and native of Kingston, Ontario went even further. He wrote a bestseller called The Insolent Chariots, in which he said: "The automobile changed our dress, manners, social customs, vacation habits, the shape of our cities, consumer purchasing patterns, common tastes and positions in intercourse."

Oh - and don't forget lethal. In the past 50 years more than 200,000 Canadians have died either at the wheel or under them. That's more than we lost in both World Wars combined.

Anyway you slice it, the four-wheeled gas guzzlers rule. They define our cities and they endlessly crisscross our rural spaces. They dictate where we live and work, they bloom like viruses in our public spaces and they attach themselves like barnacles to our expressways, streets and laneways. Someone asked the American historian and literary critic Lewis Mumford to nominate the national flower. "The concrete cloverleaf" he replied glumly.

Canada's own Joni Mitchell put it better: "They paved paradise, put up a parking lot."