Vitor Zanetti

On the second day of a road trip I took last year, my trunk was already full and my mother was sharing the back seat with four bottles of wine, two hats, a few liters of apple juice and a box of apples from Hirakami, a regional company, because when you’re passing through a city you buy from the local producer and you fit it in the car somehow. My current car is a compact Ford hatch, perfectly adequate, and I remember thinking, somewhere on that highway, as the car starting to show its struggle going uphill with all that extra weight, that a larger car would solve this specific problem. That thought lasted approximately four seconds before being replaced by the one that had always been there underneath it: I want a Mercury Grand Marquis, and I have wanted one for long enough that the wanting has become “part of the furniture”, and those apples from Hirakami are not really the reason.

The car market here has a specific pathology that I find genuinely difficult to look at without some version of irritation. The compact SUV, which is not compact and not particularly useful as an SUV, has become the dominant aspiration for a very specific demographic that believes elevation equals safety, or success, or both, which are different beliefs that produce the same purchase. The Corolla Cross costs more than the regular Corolla, is less comfortable than the regular Corolla, and is approximately the same size as the regular Corolla except taller, but only because it’s deliberately placed higher above ground, which means you sit higher, feel larger and pay more for the privilege of that feeling. 

Who exactly is being protected from whom is a question the market has no interest in answering. And then there is the BMW 320i, assembled in my very own, small and beautiful state, sold at prices that approach the cost of a modest studio apartment, bought by people who want the badge more than the car — which is their right, must I say — but ends up producing a specific kind of dissonance when you consider that a 320i is essentially a Corolla that went to a fancier school. At least one with a fancier name, that is. Nevertheless, I don’t begrudge anyone their choices. I just think that if you’re going to spend that kind of money on a car, you should at minimum be buying something that makes the money feel inevitable rather than arbitrary. The Grand Marquis, imported, taxed into absurdity, a $6,000 car arriving at $25,000 with no installments available for those extra 17.000 dollars in taxes (yes, only taxes, and in this little ballpark of mine I have considered a $2000 shipping price) makes the money feel inevitable. You look at it and you understand immediately why it costs what it costs to want it. I will try to focus on the price as valued at in the US, but not considering the overwhelming weight of all that taxation (to protect a so called “national industry” that is composed by Chevrolet, Ford, Kia, Toyota, Honda, BYD, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Renault, Peugeot, even Chrysler of all brands on Earth and has never fully produced a national car — and never will, but that’s a whole new text —, specially a full-size sedan) is just impossible for me. I like to complain. I am, above all else, a complainer. Big one. And paired with my desire to talk all the time, I know I must immediately go shush myself right now. 

But I digress. 

I’ve been trying to understand for some time why the Grand Marquis specifically, why any large American sedan specifically, why not the Crown Vic which is also fine, also large and also has that quality of existing with the full knowledge of what it is, except that the Grand Marquis is the complete package in a way the Crown approaches but doesn’t quite reach, and why not the Mercedes S500 which is objectively more refined and would make more conventional sense as a dream car and which I would accept immediately if offered and still, the following morning, want the Grand Marquis instead.

Do a u-turn?! What the hell is that, we’re driving a Cadillac Fleetwood 1975!

The answer I keep arriving at, tentatively, is something like roominess as birthright. The large American sedan peaked in a specific postwar moment when the American middle class was at its most expansive and the car was the physical expression of that expansion, not status exactly, more like space as the natural condition of a life lived correctly, the assumption that you deserved room, and that such room was the baseline rather than the luxury. The sedan got large not because large was functional but because the life it was supposed to contain was assumed to be large. Family, luggage, road trips that lasted weeks, a box of apples from a producer you passed on the highway. The wagon in Europe answered the same desire with a reason: you carry things, so here is a car for carrying things. The American sedan never had that reason. It was just large, the way the road was just wide, the way the continent was just there, the scale therefore absorbed into the object without anyone deciding it should be.

Which means the Grand Marquis, still carrying that assumption into 1996 and beyond, is almost archaeological. It contains a moment that America itself has largely abandoned in favor of the SUV, which is the same assumption wearing different clothes but less honest about what it is. And I, in Florianópolis, want to import that moment at $25,000 with no installments and an insurance premium that would require creative accounting and a garage situation that remains genuinely unresolved.

I also have never lived in a house. Always apartments, always walls closer together than I’d like, always the negotiation between the space available, what’s truly affordable and the space that feels right. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Roominess as birthright is not something I inherited; it’s something I recognized, from the outside, as the thing that should have been there.

There is a practical question that arrives whenever I mention the Grand Marquis as my eventual car, the one I will own at some point, in some configuration of life that makes it possible, and the question is always some version of “but where will you park it?!” Downtown Florianópolis was not designed for a car that is, depending on the generation, somewhere around five and a half meters long. The parking spots downtown were certainly not designed for it either. My favorite supermarket has spots that can fit a 2020 Camry with a little of the front hanging over the line, which means the Grand Marquis would require two spots, which means I would take two spots, which I have told people I would do without any particular guilt because the black license plate — for collection cars — would explain the situation and people would see the car and understand and perhaps even feel that the two spots were warranted!

I want to be clear that this is humor. I don’t actually believe people would not think I was an arrogant jerk. I do actually believe I would need the two spots, though. Both things are true simultaneously and neither of them changes anything about the wanting.

The embarrassment lives here, in this sequence, in the gap between the desire stated seriously and the parking spot that doesn’t exist. I notice the gap and I find it slightly funny. I close it anyway and want the car with the same completeness I wanted it before the gap appeared, which can be either a character flaw or evidence that the desire is operating somewhere the practical objections can’t reach, and I’ve stopped trying to determine which.

There is a version of this desire that would be satisfied by something else, and I have looked for it sincerely. The Toyota Camry or the Lexus ES350, any generation, are genuinely great cars and I would drive one happily and find nothing to complain about. Same for the Honda Accord and the Kia Cadenza. The Crown Vic, which is large and knows what it is and carries itself with a certain dignity, comes closest; I would love a Crown Vic, I think about it with genuine warmth, and I would still, the following morning, want the Grand Marquis instead. Even the Mercedes S500, which is objectively more refined than anything on this list and represents a kind of automotive achievement that deserves respect, would not resolve the wanting. I would accept it immediately if offered. I would appreciate it deeply. But I know for a fact I would think about the Grand Marquis on the way home.

This is not brand loyalty, I have no particular attachment to Mercury or to Ford, the nameplate is not the point. I do like them, yes, at least Ford since Mercury never officially sold any cars around here. I believe it truly is beyond a mere explanation, but I had to point and scream at a reason why, it would be something about the specific proportion of the thing, the way all generations after 1992 share a family resemblance that is also a philosophy, long and low and slightly formal without being stiff, the kind of car that makes a highway feel like it was built specifically for this purpose. I remember once seeing a comparison that made me understand something I hadn’t been able to articulate: if you aligned a small two-door hatch with a Grand Marquis starting from the trunk, the hatch would end before reaching the driver’s seat of the Mercury. I found this not alarming but clarifying. That is the amount of car I want. That is the complete package. The Crown Victoria is close. Nothing else is close.

I have never owned a Grand Marquis. I want to be precise about this because everything I know about how it feels comes from accounts, from videos, from the specific quality of attention I’ve paid to something I don’t yet have, which is its own kind of knowledge even if it isn’t the same kind. What I know is this: the suspension was tuned for American highways, long straight distances at consistent speeds, and the result is something people describe as floating, not the artificial floating of a modern luxury car that has been electronically smoothed into submission, but a physical floating, the car’s mass working with the road rather than against it, absorbing imperfection the way something very large and very calm absorbs small disturbances without registering them. The engine, a 4.6 litre V8 in most configurations after 1992, doesn’t accelerate so much as it proceeds, with a kind of unhurried authority that makes the question of speed feel slightly beside the point.

I have sat in furniture that costs more than some cars I’ve considered owning, in stores where the salespeople speak quietly and the lighting is warm and everything is upholstered within an inch of its life, and what those couches offer is a kind of performed comfort, comfort as statement, comfort that knows it’s being evaluated. The Grand Marquis, from everything I understand about it, offers something different; comfort as default, as the natural condition of being inside the car, not because someone decided comfort was the product but because the dimensions and the materials and the engineering philosophy all assumed, without discussion, that the person inside deserved to feel that way. Roominess as birthright, expressed in upholstery and suspension travel and a dashboard that doesn’t demand anything from you except that you point the car in a direction and proceed.

This is what I mean when I say no other car resolves the wanting. The Camry is comfortable. The S500 is exceptionally comfortable. But comfort in both cases is an achievement, something engineered toward, a problem solved. In the Grand Marquis it isn’t a problem but the premise.

If I received a job offer in the United States or Canada tomorrow, where the Grand Marquis was also sold, where a clean example in good condition costs approximately what a decent laptop costs here, where gas is cheap enough that a 4.6 litre V8 stops being a financial position and becomes simply an engine, I would buy one. This is not a hypothetical I entertain with any particular anguish; it’s more like a fact about a version of my life that hasn’t happened yet but whose details I know clearly. I would buy it, I would drive it, and I would love it with exactly the same completeness that I love it now, from Florianópolis, at $25,000 with no installments and a still unresolved garage situation.

This is the part that clarifies everything, I think. The desire doesn’t depend on the restriction. The restriction is just the current address of the desire, the specific set of conditions inside which it exists at this moment, and changing the conditions wouldn’t change the desire, only its circumstances. People sometimes assume that wanting something difficult to obtain is really about the difficulty, that the obstacle is secretly the point, and that removing it would dissolve the wanting into something more ordinary. But that’s not what this is. Remove every obstacle tomorrow and I’d still want the same car for the same reasons, floating down the same highway, proceeding rather than accelerating, the box of apples from Hirakami in the trunk this time because the trunk is large enough and there’s no negotiation required.

The wanting is self-sufficient. It doesn’t need the obstacle to justify itself. It was there before the obstacle and it will be there after, which is either the definition of genuine desire or the definition of something more stubborn than desire, and I’ve stopped trying to determine which.

There is a Lincoln advertisement I remember, or half-remember to be precise, because it was lodged somewhere without my permission, but still: the selling point was that the new Lincoln was a few inches longer than the new Cadillac. Not faster, not safer, not more refined in any technical sense — longer. Perhaps it was three inches, which were the additional length presented as the conclusion of an argument, the final word on a question that the advertisement assumed you were already asking. And I remember finding this either very funny or completely correct, and I still haven’t fully decided which, because the more I sit with it the more I think it might be both simultaneously, the way some things eventually arrive at.

The question underneath the advertisement is one I find genuinely interesting and equally unresolved: does luxury mean large, or does large mean comfortable, and at what point do those two lines cross and become the same line, and where does the tangent begin. Because they’re not the same thing, clearly; there are large cars that aren’t luxurious and luxurious cars that aren’t particularly large, the 320i assembled in Santa Catarina being an example of the latter, luxurious by badge and modest by dimension, which produces a cognitive dissonance when you sit in one and find that the space available is approximately what you’d find in something that costs a third of the price. And yet the Grand Marquis, which was never positioned as a luxury car in the European sense, which was a fleet vehicle and a police car and a taxi and a family sedan and available at a price that put it within reach of the American middle class at its most expansive, feels more luxurious than most things currently sold as luxury, because what it offers is space as premise rather than space as a premium, and that distinction turns out to matter enormously in practice.

I don’t think luxury means large. But I do think that large, done correctly, produces something that luxury is trying to buy and frequently can’t, which is the feeling that the car was built around a human being rather than a price point. Lincoln knew this, which led to an advertisement that was both funny and completely correct.

The garage situation is not unresolved. It is resolved, just not in my favor. See, the car cannot fit through the corridor at my parents’ place, a fact I knew this before I started wanting it, and I continued anyway, which tells you everything about the nature of the wanting that the rest of this essay perhaps didn’t make sufficiently clear. If I had the money to buy it outright, I could also afford a garage. Or I could do what some people do at the supermarket near my parents do, that is, leave it at the bottom floor covered with a protection fabric, which is either a humiliation for a car like that or a perfectly dignified arrangement depending on how you look at it. But I digress — I find I can look at it either way. The desire that survives every practical objection, including the corridor, including the fabric cover on the bottom floor of a supermarket parking structure, is its own kind of answer, even if it isn’t an answer to the question anyone was asking. I’ve stopped expecting it to become something more manageable. It won’t, and that’s more or less the point.