I think the only way to determine if any of these cars have soul is to put them on a black top "dance floor" and then play some James Brown and have an 'ole fashioned tire squelin' rip roarin' tail spinnin dance off!!! !!!

 

Alright guys, since we're getting so pedantic about semantics...

We don't even know what exactly is a "soul", if it exists or if human beings (and/or other living things) have them, much less an inanimate object (albeit machines as amazing as the 12C or 458); I'm quite certain if "souls" do exist that inorganic objects don't have such a thing, technically-speaking.

On the other hand, if that's the best a reviewer can do in describing a car, i.e. whether it has a 'soul' or not, I'm not going to call the semantics police on them. I understand what s/he's getting at.

 

Jasper,

Seems I've struck a nerve, though I really don't know why, and I certainly didn't intend to. You asked me to show you where you said "nobody can be subjective." Well, you did say that unless it's measurable, it's not worth mentioning; you said, "If it cannot be measured, why mention it?" You said that anything that cannot be measured/quantified is "irrelevant" and has no place in any discussion. If that's what you really think, then that's fine, it would be your opinion. However, to illustrate your point you then chose to discuss "looks." How are “looks” quantifiable? What is the unit of measure?

I never said you should take my comments about a particular car's soul as gospel any more than I'd expect you to simply accept as incontrovertible fact if I said a particular car looks good. How good-looking a car may be is a subjective opinion, based on one's own impressions, just as one's opinion of a car's “soul” is a subjective opinion. Same thing. Neither is quantifiable -- why is one a valid topic of conversation while the other isn’t? As should be apparent from various posters here, when people discuss a car’s “soul” those people understand what each other is saying. Just like they do when they discuss why one car looks better than another. They don’t necessarily agree, but they understand.

To be clear, I said the McLaren does have soul. Also, speaking of making assumptions, please show me where I said the GT-R is the only car you've owned or driven.

Sorry to bang on about this, but we all discuss lots of subjective, unquantifiable topics, including aesthetics. Why shouldn't "soul" be among those topics? Surely cars are more than just their numbers -- it's their subjective qualities that give them much of their character. Oh no, there I go again, wanting to talk about a car's "character."

 

Good review. Thanks

 

This whole notion of "soul" and "character" is going to become even more important in the future. Performance by a purely empirical measure is being democratized. Simply put insane performance is no longer the realm of super cars. Computers, roboticized transmissions etc, have evened the playing field and made the "cost per tenth of a second" return on investment seem illogical.

If you ONLY care about going fast, you are in luck. Fast is cheap. Fast is actually getting too fast. I think we are getting near the limits of FAST.

But the fascination with the stop watch has overshadowed the true reality of owning a non race car. The EXPERIENCE of driving, the character, the soul of a car, these are not things a CAD program and an engineering degree can create. For that you need to take a position. You need to do some things instead of others. You have to have a point of view. You need vision, but you also need to have poetry.

I predict the poetry and pedigree of cars (at the top end) will be the only thing that truly separates them from the pack. There will be many, many affordable cars that can equal or best them on the track. But can the capture our imagination, will they make us feel better for their existence, will they interact with us the way art or music or cuisine can? I doubt it.

The culture of a car is a huge part of what you are buying. I learned that when I recently ALMOST bought a Ford GT (awesome car). It was many amazing things, but not an Aston.

I chose my Vantage v12 because they care about the person the wrist watch is on.

Other cars can race to be the most efficient 3 min porno clip, I will stick with the ones that produce the real thing.

 

That's a rep point ...