Cars

My car lives a double life. By day, he’s just a regular Hold-On station wagon, driving around Melbourne, helping people with their daily routines. We do Goober together, taking people wherever they need to go. It’s a simple job, but a fulfilling one. But by night, my car is something else. Like a car from a spy movie, he turns on his boosters and releases his wings. Suddenly, he’s Super Car. We drive or fly throughout the city, stopping criminals and saving people in danger. Most people don’t know it, but Super Car is an essential part of keeping the city’s livability standards up.

Once, after an intense chase with some criminals, Super Car had to visit a mechanic near Malvern East. The damage was so bad that he was out of action for almost a week. In that time, Melbourne’s crime scene swelled, and the police were swamped with calls. Usually we’d deal with half of those, but with the city’s auto superhero out of action, there was nothing to be done. I suppose that’s why they created Super Car in the first place.

Finding the best auto repair in Malvern isn’t easy, especially for a superhero. Super Car could get repairs from his creators, but between us, he doesn’t quite trust them. Sometimes Super Car gets these flashbacks of being created in a factory with an army of other auto superheroes. He’s worried that if he goes back to them, he might get replaced. With a quick memory upload, I wouldn’t even know the difference if he did get swapped out. So we have to be careful.

Thankfully, there are mechanics around who know how to handle an auto superhero. It’s nothing like in those Transforming Robots movies. Super Car is a delicate machine that requires a great deal of care. If anything happened to him, this city wouldn’t last long, I fear. That’s why he gets the premium treatment.

I’m having trouble selling my ute, which is starting to get annoying. I knew that my poor parking would come back to haunt me, and this is how. It’s pretty badly knocked up, because no matter how I try to park, I manage to stuff it up. I’ve hit poles, other cars, rubbish bins. Pretty much anything you can imagine, I’ve hit it with my car while trying to park. I suppose the fact that the car hasn’t had a log book service in years doesn’t help. People just don’t want and old and broken car, no matter how cheap I make it.

I’ve had a few people enquire about it, but they always pull out when they find out I don’t have a roadworthy certificate. Around Underwood, they aren’t hard to get, but I don’t want to pay for one until I know there’s a buyer. Otherwise, it could be money wasted. It’s a bit of a problem, since I need a certificate to sell the car, but I don’t want to get a certificate without knowing that I can sell the car.

I know that the issue isn’t the car’s colour. Who wouldn’t want a hot pink ute, with pictures of flowers on the side? It’s a man’s car, and yet all the people who have enquired have been women. I get it, hot pink and flowers isn’t manly at all, but that’s exactly why it is manly. It takes a true man to be comfortable no matter what, and ignore what the people around him think. When I got this vehicle as a birthday present, I was appalled. But I grew used to it. I’ve never felt better about myself, because I had to ignore the criticism around me. It’s a manly ride, no matter what other people tell you. It’s taught me more life lessons than television. I’ve never known a better car. You’d be a fool not to buy it, hot pink or not.

I do love a good festival. Just celebrating other cultures, right here in the country of immigrants…feels so right. I’m sitting in the café right now watching it all happen in the square: the Festival of Light. Honestly, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen twenty people doing a ribbon dance in perfect sync, except their ribbons are lined with tiny LED lights that make it look like they’re swirling little lightning bolts around themselves.

Folk music is super cool as well. A heavy beat like rap songs, but there’s a more subtle sound to it as well. I dunno, cultures are fun.

My old mechanic used to be from my home country…I guess he still is. He would always talk about this amazing auto electrical garage in Bentleigh. He was constantly talking about cars back where he used to live. Apparently they’re still pretty popular over there, but there’s a big push-back over the idea of having them in country towns and villages. People just don’t like the idea of that level of modernity invading the way they’ve always done things. He actually left his village after a tourist showed him pictures of a classic car and he had a burning desire to know everything about them, so he became a black sheep for a while.

Suppose it’d be like leaving an Australian country farming town to go and work in a big corporation, except the corporation is anti-farming and wants to give all land to the government.

I don’t know, I just made that up, but he had to cut ties with his family to follow his passion. And follow his passion he did, since he became a mechanic and all. Maybe next time I go to Bentleigh for a car service I should ask if anyone knows how to contact my old friend. Maybe he’s gone back to his home country to spread the good news of cars and mechanics actually being pretty impressive after all.

-K

Can’t wait for the next twenty years to pass, because then everyone is going to have a smart car, and my hacking skills are going to come in extremely handy. Feels like I’m caught in an unfortunate fringe period of history right now: early enough to become a master hacker, but TOO early to rule the world via everything having smart technology installed. Right now I can impress my friends by hacking people’s fridges, if they’re the affluent sort who have smart fridges, and sometimes I steal millions from foreign bank accounts if I’m bored, but smart cars are what I’m waiting for.

You know, the cars that can basically drive themselves to get repairs. Like, say you need an auto service in the Malvern area but you work in Sunshine, and you just don’t have time to both get home, make dinner AND take the car in for a service. No problem in the tech-savvy world of 2030, when you can get home (after having the car drive you, of course) and just tell it where to go for a check-up. Still not sure whether the mechanics and auto repair garages will be automated, although my current guess is half and half. Everything will be automated to some degree…even hacking.

And with all these terribly clever vehicles comes the potential for me to hack them, with my hacking mastery. I don’t really have any particular reason, mind you…I just like the thought of there being a whole new playground of technology to explore with my amazing hacking. Although just to be clear, I’m not a monster. I wouldn’t mess with people’s cars, so I trust the local garage to do a proper auto repair in Hawthorn. I might just sneak into the car’s systems and replace their horn with some sort of shameful ringtone, or turn their headlights pink. Just normal hacker stuff, you know? Nothing…lasting.

-Zed-One

Every now and then, you just have to return to the classics. Pretty Car Dealer Sailor Hoon feels pretty relevant right now, since Dinky-Dai-Animation is producing a reboot with what seems to be an absolutely massive budget, so while I look forward to that, let us revisit the 90s classic! The new series is going to be based in Melbourne, obviously…it’s the new trend. I really hope it’s going to be in a recognisable location. Imagine if they featured car repair garages in Mitcham, right next to where I live! I could go on the forums and tell people that I live next to the place where one of THE biggest reboots is set! I might even go so far as to book my own car service, Ringwood is only up the road from me.

Anyway, back to the retro-review. It was a simpler time, when anime in the West was unknown, and the few that slipped through the cracks were aimed at boys. Pretty Car Dealer Sailor Hoon was the first to have a wide appeal, following the adventures of a young girl who was also a car dealer, but secretly a street racer by night. Her dual identity was a huge part of the appeal.

“Selling cars by daylight, doing burnouts by moonlight, running only from police lights, she is the one called Sailor Hoon!”

See, the crucial plot hinge was how Sailor kept good relations with mechanics and places that did car inspections by day, but by night, she was practically their worst enemy. It was a side of herself that she struggled to keep under control and always wanted gone, but the streets called to her. She needed to do donuts and burnouts and get involved in dangerous street races, like an addiction.

I hope they do it justice in the reboot, both the main character and her Sailor Hoon Squad. And I guess all the garages in Ringwood and Mitcham that do RACV inspections better be prepared, because the influx of tourists is gonna be HUGE.

-Dylan-kun