It’s you, your car, the road, and the night…why does something as seemingly trivial as driving at night become something to savour?I’m treading into this blog with some trepidation as most people’s perceptions of night driving are negative ones – being tailgated on unfamiliar roads by someone in a modified Golf GTI with their brights on and 13 000 bpm techno thudding from the cabin…but night driving does not have to entail intimidation, stupidity, and showmanship. It can bring out an aspect of driving your car that daylight seems to dissolve.
I’ve always enjoyed taking my car for a brisk run on the back roads in the dark ever since I lived in England. Yorkshire was riddled with narrow country roads that stood silent in the dark and were wonderfully bereft of traffic. By day these thoroughfares were little more than a means of getting the Massey Ferguson from one cornfield to another, and were consequently shunned by those wanting to get anywhere in a hurry. Thankfully, the association of these roads as something of a go-slow remained intact by night, making them perfect for a nocturnal sojourn behind the wheel of my Mom’s 1,6-litre Honda Civic.
On the face of it, driving around dark, narrow roads in a reliable Japanese hatchback doesn’t sound like great fun. But with darkness blotting out the landscape, your sense of distance and perspective is all but absent – the hedgerows and the beams of your headlights are the perimeters of your world during this weird session of road-going sensory deprivation.
I know this blog has taken a turn for the esoteric, but I’m not going to describe the balance between the attention you pay the road and the slow disengagement of your daytime thoughts as Zen-like. Rather, you sort of hover between becoming a more intimate part of the driving experience, the attention you grant to the potential for random bits of wildlife/landscape cutting your journey short, and the sensation of all of the day’s nonsense and stress ebbing away.
My love of nocturnal motoring has followed me here, although I’ve had to trade my country roads in for narrow, forested hill passes which, unfortunately do not dissuade truck drivers from pondering up them in first gear and the aforementioned idiot in the modded Golf dicing with you every inch of the way.
Still, the essence of night driving still remains. My E30 325i coupé becomes the four-wheeled cocoon of choice and the darkness seems to shroud any scratches, rust spots, and creaks, leaving the six-cylinder snarl and the amber glow of the instrumentation. It’s a bit of a step up the Civic…but there are cars out there that really lend themselves to this kind of motoring
A prime example is the Audi RS6. This car manages to be intimidating by day, but in the black livery of our test unit becomes menacingly wraith-like in the dark – its presence only given away by those angry slits of LED lights and a metallic bellow from the tailpipes. Piloting this car through the darkness is about as close as you can come to having your being melded with a powerful machine. The dark cabin has no dimensions and you seem to hang in a cosseting space punctuated by the odd readout and LED. Suddenly you’re part of the night, just as sinister and unknowable as anything looming in the blackness. You know there’s the mechanical equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah emanating from the engine bay but now you’re a part of this road-devouring entity. In the dark, with the road snaking towards you and night at your tail, it’s difficult to discern where you end and the car begins. You don’t even have to drive it like it’s stolen – with this much power and ominous presence there are few likely to stand in your way.
As you can see, it’s enough to bring out every bit of hyperbole and metaphor in my writing. But that’s just it; it’s an escape from everything your day throws at you, trivial or otherwise. You don’t even need to drive a four-wheeled force majeure such as he RS6 to appreciate what night driving brings out in you and your car. All you have to do is wait for darkness to fall…
