My car is sentient.

I know, I know; it sounds crazy. But what other explanation could there be?

This past weekend, I replaced my car’s fog lights because one of them got cracked by a rock. After the new lights were installed, the car ran smoother, was quieter, and had more pep. The car seemed happy. Honest truth.

After I washed and vacuumed my car tonight, the same thing happened: everything got quieter, smoother, and tighter. The car was content.

A similar phenomenon emerges whenever I think about selling my car. The car spontaneously runs better, as if it were trying to convince me not to part with it.

The left half of my brain assures me that it is merely my perception that has changed, just a placebo-type effect. The right half isn’t convinced that the observations can be dismissed as illusion.

I was talking with my grandpa once about cars. He commented, tongue-in-cheek, that his cars kept running better and better as the years wore on. They just kept getting quieter and smoother! Never mind that his hearing was going out; that was completely unrelated.

Who’s to say that cars aren’t affected by human perception? The common adage that “the best way to have a strange noise go away is to have a mechanic try to hear it” holds some anecdotal water.

Obviously, then, the best way to fix a car’s mechanical problems is to replace a few cosmetic parts, give it a good wash, and have an old person bring it to a mechanic equipped only with a stethoscope. It’ll be purring after that.