Which do you prefer: the steak or the sauce?

Don’t answer that yet. At least until after you finish this story.

Any true chef will labor in the kitchen to create a steak that is so perfectly cooked and seasoned that asking for a bottle of steak sauce borders on insulting, if not openly so. Try to digest that for a moment (I couldn’t resist), and in that same light, do we take our cars the same way?

For me, the engineering of the car is the steak. It’s the meat. Men and women in white coats take great pains to engineer a car to run smooth, be reliable, yield efficient operation and drive well, sometimes to levels like that of Lexus (for refinement) or Subaru (for performance).

Then you have the sauce, which to me are long list of features on the shiny brochure they hand you when you walk in the door. There are cars out there that are fundamentally great pieces of engineering and design, but sometimes we get lost amidst the number of cupholders, SatNavs, Bluetooths (or Blueteeth?) and number of airbags that we forget about the important stuff like the engineering that went into the car. The same applies to exterior design.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a car which looks great and a nice list of features, as one of the essential features I look for in a car is a 3.5mm socket for my iPod. However, much in the same way that a sly cook will smother a mediocre meal with sauce or gravy to hide that it lacks taste, the same can be used to conceal dated or even bad engineering.

I know, I know, hyping engineering-speak on the dealer floor is not exactly a great selling tactic, unless you’re shopping for something like a Veyron, but perhaps thats the problem. Cars have become so complex, so well styled and oversaturated with power-that and automatic-this that before we even turn a key and feel what it’s like behind the wheel, we’ve already been distracted from what we should be looking for. A good car is only enhanced by its features and design, but a bad car is not made into a good one by them.

We could have forgotten what the steak tastes like without the sauce, and we could also have forgotten what the automobile is like without the features.

The steak is what we paid for, after all.

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Vince Pornelos

Associate Editor

www.autoindustriya.com

Tags: Automotive, automotive engineering, car shopping tips, cars