Driving A Luxury Car - Does It Promote Long-term Happiness?

It is true that a luxury car may make you feel better, although the feeling is usually only temporary. If you are the kind of person who really does feel better when you get behind the wheel of a luxury car, it is probably a sign of having some kind of inferiority complex. If you are not convinced that the good feeling is only temporary, the findings in the Journal of Consumer Psychology should convince you, and the feeling usually lasts for just a month or so.

Norbert Schwarz, who teaches psychology at the University of Michigan, and Jing Xu from Peking University carried out the study into how long a person feels good if they buy a luxury car. Schwarz pointed out that the common assumption was that you felt better, but that in fact it was not as simple as that. The two found that a new car owner typically feels better as long as he or she is paying attention to the car; once that stops, the owner no longer feels as positive. Most of us do instinctively pay more attention to a brand new car, until after we have owned it for a certain length of time, the novelty wears off. When a new car breaks down, it makes no difference whether it is a luxury car or not; at that point we begin to lose interest in it, points out the study. The positive and good feelings were correlated against the Blue Book value of the car, and the results were zero, statistically speaking. The study also points out that the time that you pay the most attention to your car and feel your best about it, is when you take it for a test drive, which of course is not at all representative of your feelings the rest of the time.

Although the study seems to suggest that having an expensive car does not really make you feel better - at least not permanently - luxury car makers would of course disagree. The entire car industry depends on this illusion that a luxury car somehow can elevate your lifestyle and it makes you wonder what would happen if nobody believed the illusion any more.

By: Daryl Shaw

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Daryl has been covering automotive topics for years. If you live in the northeast and need to get a car financed, he recommends Massachusetts Auto Loans or Pennsylvania Car Loans, depending on your state of residence.