ON BEAGLE’S WINGS

For the last three and a half years, I’ve driven a four-door Ford Focus. It is, by far, the coolest car I’ve ever owned, which should tell you something about my dull and miserable life. But you can’t tell me my car isn’t cool. It has to be. How do I know?

My car has a wing on the back. Ergo, it’s cool.

It’s not like I ordered it with a wing. First of all, I bought it used, so I didn’t technically order it at all. Secondly, the presence of the wing did nothing to sway me towards my purchase. I don’t even think it looks very good. In fact, I’d gladly remove it, except doing so would leave me with four gaping holes in my trunk lid. So there it sits, day after day, doing . . . well, what is it doing back there, anyway? After semi-exhaustive research, I’ve learned that the only thing it’s doing is making my car look “cool” while worsening my gas mileage just a tiny little bit.

There are circumstances in which having an airfoil on the back of your car serves some detectable purpose, maybe. Certain high-performance rear-wheel-drive cars need the downforce created by a wing to improve their handling and acceleration at very high speeds. My Focus, being front-drive, doesn’t have that problem. I’m no engineer (I failed Calc I twice, which put the kibosh on any engineering dream I might’ve had), but I think you could make the case that a rear wing would make the handling and acceleration of a front-wheel-drive car worse. Traction is a function of weight over the driving wheels, after all; if you push down on the back of the car, aren’t you simultaneously pushing up on the front? There’s something Newtonian in that, right? Well, if you transfer weight from the front to the back of a front-drive car, that should reduce the traction available to the drive wheels. (Enough readers of this page have enough of a technical background that somebody is bound to tell me if I’m all washed up. Remember, the science classes I took in college were Man’s Geologic Environment and Cultural Physics.)

The only other benefit bestowed by slapping an airplane part on the back of your car is that, again at very high speeds, the wing/spoiler will create enough turbulence to improve stability and reduce body lift. If it even works at all. Which, on most winged cars, it probably doesn’t. About the only thing most wings do is increase weight and drag, both of which hurt fuel economy.

So why, then, have these wings and spoilers proliferated like mosquitoes, bunnies, and webpages with the prefix ‘my’? At first, I’m tempted to call it the Gran Turismo factor. Young people (especially males), smitten by the popular road-racing video game series, want cars that look as much like their cybersiblings as possible. That explains the wing on my Focus, which is a low-cost car aimed primarily at young buyers.

It does not, however, explain wings on Chevy Impalas. Or Mitubishi Galants. And it especially doesn’t explain wings on Toyota Camrys.

I have a half-hour rural commute. On my way home this afternoon, since I was stuck behind an unending parade of farm implements, I decided to watch the cars going the other direction. I wanted to know how many of them had wings or spoilers. (Technical jargon: if air can flow under it, it’s a wing; if not, it’s a spoiler.) About one-third of the cars I saw had something affixed to the trunklid. I saw only one spoiler, on an Olds Achieva, a car many people would say came from the factory already spoiled. But there were lots and lots of wings.

Pontiac is the King of Wings. I saw close to 40 Pontiacs, and only three didn’t have some sort of airflow-management device (a Bonneville, a Sunfire, and a 6000 which look like it may have dated back to the time before man discovered the secrets of flight). But scarcely a manufacturer out there has been able to resist the temptation to smite the butts of their cars with a wing of some sort. Chrysler, for example started out with a demure wing on the first-generation Neon; the second-generation cars look like they have tabletop ironing boards glued to their trunks. I saw a wing on a Dodge Intrepid. On several Ford Tauri. Even, like I said, on multiple Camrys, and if there’s a Camry out there that’s ever been driven over 50 MPH, or in the right lane of a freeway, I’d like to hear about it.

I mean, seriously. What’s the point of slapping Formula 1-inspired wings on cars that are about as sporting as “The MacNeil-Lehrer Report”? I realize that all cars these days basically look alike, and if I owned, say, a silver Taurus (which I do), I’d want something to make it stand out from the 73 other silver Tauri in the mall parking lot. But how does a factory-installed wing make that happen? Do we all honestly think that putting a slightly aerodynamic piece of lowest-bidder plastic on our cars turns us from solid-citizen commuters into Speed Racer? “I know this looks like a rental car, but trust me, I could take the pole at Daytona if only those nitpickers from Accounting would stop bugging me for the fourth-quarter sales estimates.”

Cars today are better than they ever have been, that much is certain. In fact, cars today are so nearly perfect that they’re starting to get a little dull. If screw-on gizmos make us all feel like we’re being wild individualists who don’t play by society’s rules, it’s time to remember Hasty’s Law of Automotive Selection: What you drive says nothing about who you are–but it says a lot about who you wish you were.