More on cars

Watching a smartly dressed, enterprising man spot a parking space several car lengths back and back up into it decisively in the face of oncoming traffic -- and all within an eye-blink, too -- I could not help being impressed. I also reflected on the difference between being alert and being... smart. The car he drove was clearly too much car: it was a Range Rover SUV, expensive, famously unreliable, uneconomical, and, above all, unnecessary (an SUV -- in Lisbon? It doesn't even rain here). Add difficult to park, too, of course, though perhaps that he considered a benefit, i.e. a stimulating challenge, an opportunity to display.

The smartly dressed, alert looking man had clearly bought the car new (thus turning it into a used car and giving himself a 30% instant capital loss¹); and he almost certainly carried a loan on it (what middle class person in Portugal has 30K to put down in cash to buy a car? And, at any rate, a person who can put down 30K in cash for a car does not need to grab aggressively for free parking spaces: I am certain the man carried a loan).²

The car revealed to me almost everything I needed to know about the man's powers of cerebration. But the woman sitting next to him did not see what I saw. She was clearly impressed by his parking-spotting-backing-up skills. (What great genes my babies will have!) She was probably impressed by the car, too. And that's just as well since, if she marries him, she'll be responsible for half the interest on the loan.


Footnotes:

¹ Instant destruction of about 13K of capital in the case of a Range Rover SUV.

² If he carries 50% LTV loan at 10%, he pays 2K a year in interest: more than 200 taxi rides' worth. As a result, he can't take those 200 hundred taxis (while leisurely reading a book in the back) and must drive himself. Hm.