I live in a quiet, now mostly family friendly, middle class suburban neighbourhood just around the corner from a primary school, nestled some 7km west of Melbourne’s CBD. The location is, for Melbourne’s housing market, at a premium and is pretty much impossible to buy into these days, so it was fortunate that I happened to be looking for a house just at the moment when there was an unexpected lull in the buyer’s market, forcing the prices down sharply. At the time of purchasing and moving, I drove a ‘99 Citroën Xsara 1.6L which had been handed down through the entire family before it came to me, having been well done over by a crook of a mechanic and over a decade of being relegated to the outdoors where the harsh Australian sun (lol) would beat down upon it most days of the year. But I digress, the main point was that I figured most of my neighbours’ cars would be something like that, and maybe the occasional family sedan.
I was wrong.
Just around the corner, opposite aforementioned primary school, were a spate of exotics. Not just the usual overweight bling favoured by soccer mums and the overcashed bourgeois that lived in such posh suburbs as Toorak, where the average daily drive would generally either be a Porsche Cayenne S, or a definitely-not-for-the-outback Landrover (both which were hence disdainfully nicknamed “Toorak Tractors” by the locals), but the less common picks, that would just happen to sit outside, most days of the week. Immediately I was suspicious, because until recently, this neighbourhood was part of a generally dodgy milieu, and so “rich and drives a flashy car” usually equated to “drug dealer”. But in truth, I suspect that most of the owners of these cars are just obscenely successful tradies who can’t think of anything better to do with their cash.
Let’s start here:
Sorry for the crap photo, it was taken with my old phone camera, and needless to say it was a crap phone camera. You may have to take my word for it that sitting on the driveway is a Maserati Granturismo S, and a Mercedes C 63 SL AMG. What’s in the garage? At one point, it housed a bright red '10 Chevrolet Camaro (with RS trim, but I never found out which spec it was)… and a Toyota Hilux, which is apparently the daily drive.
Just around the corner from that was this:
458 Italia, with carbon fiber hood, roof and spoiler.
I’m not going to bother posting a photo of the Bentley Continental GT, nor the Porsche Panamera… nor the hilarious 300C Chrysler stretch limo that occupies the same driveway as the Panamera (I’m guessing that the stretch limo is part of the owner’s job).
