A Little Car Mania

This is a story about a little boy who wants to be a car designer in the future. (Some efforts actually for this. Once he wanted to be a taxi driver who drives an austrailian Holden's sedan Statesmen as you know.)

(At Yongin Speedway. We watched the motor race for the first time-Last Spring)
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He draws cars a lot. Various cars from old-time sedans to brandnew SUVs. Perfect views from front, rear and sides. Interiors with cool front dash panels, or well-defined engine room arrangements. Sometimes I'm surprised at his complex drawings on mechanics, but it's not common. Tyres and wheel styles are rather often seen. That's fine anyway though I hope him to draw trees, flowers, mountains, or any other parts of the nature. Perhapse we should have brought him more often to somewhere full of the nature.

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He talks about cars a lot. Usually used to read books like Busy Town(Richard Scarry's) or tell elephants' stories when he goes to bed before. These days, however, he picks up two or three brand-new car brochures, talking about what the new features are or what kind of instruments are upgraded. Well, knowledges on new or detail technologies are fine but I don't like he is reading the commercial copies car companies suggest- cheap expressions. Anyway reading such ridiculous things, he goes to sleep happily with imaginations of fully equipped cars.

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He is interested in cars a lot. He is surfing on the Internet, gathering information about Motor Shows (like Geneva, Detroit, Frankfurt, and Tokyo including Seoul of course) and suggests trips for joining the show. Actually we had joined in Seoul Motor Show last year, and he was really loving the crowded and tired place. Anyway it can be a good motive for me to push him to learn English even though he hates to go to the canadian language institute on every saturday and I don't know if we can go to some motor shows overseas in real.

One more thing I'm worrying about is his paranoid-like serious interests on cars. I feel a little bit unbalanced. Can you imagine a 5-years-old-boy(6 years old in Korean) who is intersted in how to change cooling waters, batteries and engine oils? Suspecting how much he can understand it, I feel I need to control him for the Internet access.

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It's natural for him to go dealer shops in neighbor whenever a new car is appeared. He gets in the cars in display, examines for its design and changes if upgraded, gets new brochures, and sometimes test-drives with me.

GM daewoo's brandnew SUV Winstorm(Chevrolet Captiva in the US) was the case on the last Saturday. Most recent test driving was the luxury SUV-Rexton2 and my own car is also SUV, so I thought it's a good opportunity to learn the so called GM technologies because they are advertising it is the first car made by the company after Daewoo was sold to GM.

30 minutes was enough for identifying it. Its cost-performance ratio looked impressive, especially for the fuel consumption: 11-12km per litter. But that's all, I thought. The power train, acceleration and gear shifts were so and so: no problems for downtown driving but not sure for off-road driving or high-speed highway driving. Expected more comforts and less noises.

My son was frantic, however, especially for its style. Yes, I agree his taste is quite different from mine. I like leather seats, black leather seats but he prefers to woven fabrics-grey or beige. He says always the bright beige interior is the most refined color matched with pearl whites, light blue or pleasant wine colors. In additon, he doesn't like the feeling of cold/cool which the leathers cast at first.

It has a big LCD monitor for 3D navigation and separate audio consoles in the center fascia. It looked better than mine at least. He liked it very much. His continuously muttering with the salesWOman during the driving, I stayed in calm and quiet without a complain for the car. He looked very pleased and happy.

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By the way, it's when we found there was no brochure available at the moment after enjoying the test-driving, that he looked panic. (He's just a little boy !) He failed to add a brochure to his collection, but he said fine, and agreed to get the brochure in the next visit. It was determined to be a problem later. He had been complainiong continuously at home, for not visiting another dealer shop for the brochures. Finally I got annoyed and scolded him in not keeping his words for a day. Regret no need to scold him. Didn't go to other shops on the day.

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In the next weekend, I'm thinking about goint to Seoul Auto Salon(expensive tuning cars show) with the little boy.