"The truth is that motor cars offer a very happy illustration of the metaphysical distinction between 'being' and 'becoming'. Some cars, mere vehicles with no purpose above bare locomotion, mechanical drudges such as Lady Metroland's Hispano Suiza, or Mrs Mouse' Rolls Royce, or Lady Circumference's 1912 Daimler, or the 'general reader's' Austin Seven, these have definite 'being' just as much as their occupants. They are brought all screwed up and numbered and painted, and there they stay through various declensions of ownership, brightened now and then with a lick of paint or temporarily rejuvenated by the addition of some minor organ, but still maintaining their essential identity to the scrap heap.
Not so the real cars, that become masters of men; those vital creations of metal who exist solely for their own propulsion through space, for whom their drivres, clinging precariously at the steering wheel, are as important as his stenographer to a stockbroker. These are in perpetual flux, a vortex of combining and disintegrating units; like the confluence of traffic at some spot where many roads meet, streams of mechanism come together, mingle and separate again."
Evelyn Waugh, 'Vile Bodies' (1930)
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