What makes some cars special?

I've found that the singular mark of GREAT automotive engineering is that I simply forget it exists and find myself hours later in the country wondering what the hell happened. As you might imagine, this quality is very hard for a spec sheet or the consumer reports folks to get their heads around.

It would seem to be very easy for engineers to focus on the,

• Engine
• Suspension
• ETC

Being anal types, I'm sure checklists are involved. In any modern automobile there must be thousands of parts, and dozens of subsystems to optimize. All of this type of work is a necessary, but insufficient condition for greatness. And the modality on which it operates appears to be unable to find greatness with flashlights. To my way of thinking greatness requires an abstraction layer that many "car guys", and most car manufacturers don't get. As we saw with Socrates, the biggest sin these folks commit is that they don't even know they don't know.

I can only believe that greatness is the product of a single or small group of like minded people. A small group is critical because with the variables that exist in the interrelationship of thousands of parts there are clearly more ways to mess it up, then there are to make magic. It would seem more of an act of conjuring greatness out, but alas they do engineer it in.

It would seem that the root of greatness could be a simple one-stop thinking about the car. By shifting the focus from the car to the driver you make a significant alteration to the notion of what's being done. Greatness happens when an extension of a human is designed in the form of a car. The experience of greatness happens when the focus on the interactive components of a car are job 1. Do the interactive components communicate in a perfect manner. Are the physics of the driving experience communicated through mechanical energy? Is the communication in lockstep with the driving dynamic? Is the communication in lockstep with every other element being communicated at the same time.

Another point to understand, by my way of thinking, is that all of this communications is likely passing the frontal lobes completely and talking to the brain stem. Your doing something very similar to running or dancing. You are engaged in a very complex physical dynamic in which your body/mind are interacting with a massive amount of continuously changing data and making, potentially, life/death decisions. Frontal lobes don't work this way. As you are interacting with this machine any incongruity of input doesn't come off as "bad" as much as it simply communicates with you less. As such, for me a "bad" car is one that fails to communicate. With full communication I find that I simply forget the device exists, you are simply engaged in the driving dynamic with all core assumptions of the physics of the matter being supported by the driving device (aka-car).

It is with this line of reasoning that I can say the Z couldn't buff the tires of the s2000, or the Miata for that matter. The Chrysler 300 was the first US car to show hints of this dynamic, on a completely different level then the s2000 to be sure, but I'm in a stream of conscience mode and want to play with this idea so hang with me.

In looking at it, it seems to either be a breakthrough in my therapy or a stream of meaningless nonsense.