> the kind of person who is willing to buy a vehicle with ho-hum performance, expensive repair bills, and poor fuel efficiency? I think that's the key to it.

> the kind of person who is willing to buy a vehicle with ho-hum performance, expensive repair bills, and poor fuel efficiency? I think that's the key to it. There are two reasons to buy more expensive things than normal: for better quality and durability (think of the famous Terry Pratchett passage on boots), and to show off. Most expensive purchases are a bit of both; a BMW, for example, is a showy vehicle when it's new, but it's also something that'll have a lower total cost of ownership than a Ford if you own it for 20 years. A Mercedes, though, will cost you more over 20 years than an equivalent Ford. If you know that a Mercedes is a money pit (i.e., if you've ever talked to a BMW salesman), and you buy one anyways, you're practicing conspicuous consumption, showing off how much money you can spend on this money-pit of a car, and generally doing the opposite of Pratchett's Boots. This is noveau-riche behavior, which goes with the rest of being noveau-riche; Old Money buys Pratchett's Boots aggressively (Mercer and Sons shirts, easily-repaired shoes, etc.), which is part of how they stay rich for so long. (A fortune is an easy thing to lose if you start treating it like a genie in a bottle. Recall how the Count of Monte Cristo blew through 2/3 of his fortune in a decade; he has many real-world counterparts.) > Have you got a link for the "language of cars" you're talking about? No, but there's clearly a lot of interest in this. Maybe I should write a book about it -- even though I don't know cars particularly well... Note regional variations, as another commentor brought up here; and note that here I'm talking about high-end cars. For really dangerous driving, look for working-class drivers with low-riding sports cars; twenty Mercedeses are less dangerous than one guy who thinks he's driving an F-16.