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Sex machine
100 Sexiest Cars: ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. A car that drips desirability from every curve
See gallery of 100 Sexiest Cars.
There are a million phoney psychologists in the world and every single one of them has some hackneyed theory on the relationship between sexuality and cars.
That the E-Type Jaguar, for example, is really just a phallic symbol, because its bonnet is long and essentially projects from the driver's crotch. Far too obvious.
Or that the previous Nissan Micra was modelled on a lady's bottom. But what short and vaguely curvaceous car couldn't be seen that way? In any case, the Micra was avowedly designed to appeal to women, which must mean there are more lesbians out there than we thought.
What makes a car actually sexy is something else entirely. Often, it's as much to do with who's in it. At some time you will have seen something as nasty as an old Allegro being driven by someone who looks up for it and thought, 'Wow, what a great car'.
The point about the original Cinquecento is that everyone, from strapping blokes to fainting flowers of womanhood, looks sexually charged behind its wheel. It works irrespective of age, beauty, wealth and position; even a nun in a 500 seems to telegraph a faint tingle of the procreative urge.
'Everyone, from strapping blokes to fainting flowers of womanhood, looks sexually charged behind its wheel'
Modesty must have something to do with it. It's coy, like Marvell's mistress and because it was a simple car for simple folk, conceived in a more rural age, it has raw peasant appeal, like a heaving breast or bronzed bicep glimpsed through the coarse folds of some honest rustic dress - a sackcloth smock of a car.
Art and literature have milked the image of the untutored country lass and the noble savage endlessly, and for exactly that reason. The Cinquecento feels like the same image made metal.
It has about it the allure of the wholesome and uncomplicated; it is devoid of any trappings of sexual intrigue and manipulation, and chimes with some dormant fantasy about haystacks and innocence.
Most importantly, the Cinquecento advertises nothing about its owner except, perhaps, that it's someone who doesn't need to try. So you look, and you know. You would, wouldn't you?
James May
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