Why are cooties such a potent force in today's car business?

Partly it's because we use cars to project our identities into the world, and we want to make sure that what we're projecting will have the intended effect on other people.   But we also have another, more utilitarian goal that's more important to the majority of us:  we want to get a reasonably good value on a reasonably good product.   What do cooties have to do with this?

Bear in mind that cooties depend for their existence on a sense of uncertainty about value.  They make no sense when we are talking about a kilowatt-hour of electricity, an ounce of gold, a barrel of oil, or a bushel of wheat.  When we can objectively state an item's value, cooties disappear.

What's ultimately at the root of the automobile industry's susceptibility to cooties, therefore, is our uncertainty about our ability to tell a good car from a not-so-good one.   We turn to more subjective issues of product image when a product becomes too complex for us to evaluate from the objective facts available to us.

Now, cars have always been rather intricate pieces of machinery.  And with the changes they have recently undergone in the area of computerized engine management, piled on top of plumbing to meet emissions control and fuel efficiency requirements, they have chased more than a few of us who used to do our own routine maintenance out from under the hood altogether.

But cars are not uniquely beyond our consumer comprehension.  In fact, we know a good deal more about them than we do about many other things we buy today.

For example, just about everybody knows what a V8 engine is.  Just about everybody also knows the difference between a manual transmission and an automatic.  Nor are terms like disc brakes or fuel injection or four-wheel independent suspension especially abstruse to us.  Yet all of these terms describe how the product accomplishes something, rather than just what it does.  As such, they indicate a certain level of buyer knowledgeability.

By contrast, when we evaluate other items--say, microwave ovens or cellular phones--we typically stop just at the level of what they do.  We might say that they have last-number redial, or that they can operate at variable levels of cooking intensity.   But beneath these gross functional capabilities, we don't have much of any comprehension of how the functions are accomplished.

If we were stuck at the same level of comprehension with cars, we would not be able to mention features like disc brakes or fuel injection. We would only be able to say things like "goes both backward and forward" or "speed can be varied by the person operating it."

If we were to describe cars in this manner, we would sound like extremely isolated aboriginal peoples--or like small children.

How would we sound, then, to knowledgeable people when we talk about today's products in general--most of which we comprehend even less than we do cars?