Yes, the title is a question – maybe your question. So many of you are asking, “how can they love that boxy contraption?” Find the answers by taking someone who, in 30 years of life, never really cared about any car, except maybe a Jaguar, until they saw the Element.

Yes, the title is a question – maybe your question. So many of you are asking, “how can they love that boxy contraption?” Find the answers by taking someone who, in 30 years of life, never really cared about any car, except maybe a Jaguar, until they saw the Element. Right there you have half of Honda’s marketing demographic. Now, take these never-cared-about-cars people and match them with a famous cliche/taboo: can you fall in love with an object at first site? For 99% of the people who purchase the Element, the answer is: definitely.

…You’ll first imagine yourself driving it, of course, and then, you’ll handpick certain people and be amused with how they would look in it (it’s fantasy projection or vicarious fantasy, something like that – see a psychoanalyst for more information). “Yes,” you’ll say, “they would look cool in it too… but not as cool as I’ll look very, very shortly when I have one to have and to hold. And, oh yes, I will get one.” However, before you are able to purchase one, you’ll probably seek out a friend, or friend of a friend, who already does, so you can play “covet the Element.” When you do find this acquaintance who has the title to this somewhat gas efficient, EPA pleasing, multiple-use, small SUV, expect them to be both shocked and bothered that you need them to spend their entire Saturday morning letting you climb into it, arrange the seats back and forth into their various, space-making configurations, run your fingers along the shiny color-matched panel trims, and read various excerpts from the driver’s manual to you. If they have the camping accessories, like the tailgate cabana, they may be irritated that it’s the middle of winter, yet you still insist that they set all of them up anyway, including the spare tire cover which converts into a card table if you have the table leg kit. Maybe they’ll even give you a ride around in it and let you bungee various items onto their roof rack.

Then, you buy one. It’s a sweet, Fiji Blue Pearl, or maybe the Sunset Orange Pearl Element, which you proudly drive down the highway or main street. You turn heads every time. Not in a meat-market manner, but in a way that asks, “what kind of person drives one of those?” Sure, sometimes that question has the negative edge, because it also asks and says, “what a weird looking… well, what is it anyway?” A steady amount of the population also muses, “I bet that cult car looks cool inside.” With your head held high, you can say, “Yes, it does. It is very cool inside.”

Besides being a unique (understatement) vehicle with lots of features and accessories, the beauty of the Honda Element is that late-twenties and early-thirties parents don’t have to wear camouflage outfits and face masks when they return to their car at the local mall because they’re petrified that someone they know, or even don’t, will find out that they broke down at bought one. What this really means is that the Element is the cure for the common minivan. Sure, they keep making the minivan cooler, and maybe one day your friends without children will stop laughing at you if you get one, but for now, everyone remembers everyone’s blood vows to never buy one. The proud twenty-year-old inside all of us still believes that the purchase of a minivan, no matter how convenient for families, is the death marked curtain falling on their youth. Perhaps studies will find that not only does the Element give an option out of buying the cursed minivan, but that it is also preventive medicine for the mid-life crisis.