The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Little Big Car

A journalist once asked Truman Capote after a hard days work just how many words he had committed to paper. "One," said Capote. "After working all day, just one word?" asked the journalist. "Yes," said Capote, "but it was the right word."

I may never be able to define a "Chick Car" so laconically. I am efficient, however, a defining what it is not and never will be. It will never be big. However once chooses to define the word, "big" will never be associated with a Chick Car.

That point was pounded home last week as I test drove a cute little Mini Cooper with some Road Rakes.

As of last week, the Mini Cooper had still escaped Any formal pronouncement as a chick car. As we Spirited the little cupcake around the Southdale parking lot (the dealer is inside the mall), I was feeling pretty nifty about its wonderfully linear torque curve, tossable handling and extremely well planted stance (the wheels are pushed far out to the corners for exceptional stability.)

Nothing, it seemed, could shake this car.

Nothing, until the world's largest portable boom box pulled into view.

To be clear it was the world's largest road legal SUV with a truck stereo loud enough to scare half the Galleria (except the women in Chicos— nothing shakes them). This beast is made by International Harvester. It looks like a shrunken semi. I guess it makes the ideal billboard for the Vault beverage drink it was promoting that day. It also made the Mini look Lilliputian.

I am not up to speed on my Jonathan Swift. I recall Gulliver's Travels, however, is satirical. Which is a fairly accurate description of the picture you see attached to this blog. The monster truck, which is too much and the diminutive Mini, which is too much for too little.

When I viewed the two, er, vehicles side-by-side, I was struck by the difference in size and price. The IH truck is about 50k more than the Mini. It is also thousands of pounds larger, more powerful and more excessive in every way.

It occured to me that if I ran a manufacturing plant attached to a salvage yard, I could junk just one IH truck and re-manufacture 15 Mini Coopers for half their current price (35k) and still make a handsome profit.

That's thinking big. Which is something the Mini does not encourage you to do.

So, is the Mini Cooper a Chick Car?

I still can't say. I only know its very small and that the International Harvester SUV makes Kevin Garnett look like Truman Capote. The definitive answer, as with all the really big questions in this world, lies somewhere in-between.