driverchris: July 2008

Seat of the pants

Hmmmm... another one to file under 'car enthusiasts will buy any object that is branded by their favourite automobile maker'? Welcome to racechairs.com

... chairs are made from the authentic high performance seats from exotic racecars such as Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini, and Porsche ...

On the one hand it is actually a piece of original equipment made by the oh so aspirational carmaker - but on the other hand it's completely out of context, like a tub of raspberry flavoured lube in a nunnery.

There must be a few folk left who like their possessions to be the best designed and executed product one can possibly buy for a given purpose regardless of price point or branding? Surely? Or are there really people who'll buy a piece of furniture because of a dubious brand association without a thought for how it will actually perform.

Here's the thing. Seats in racing cars have a very specific job. They clamp you into position. Tight. They should be just nudging up against painful if they are working correctly. Is this how you'd like to be at your desk all day?

I mean who's gonna buy one of these?... You'd like to be involved with motorsport but spend a lot of time with paperwork. You like Ferrari. You are looking forward to being tightly constrained in leather and made to feel downright uncomfortable...

"Chair for Mr Mosely!"

Get Bentley

Time to add to the pile of things branded with swanky automakers logos for that classy 'halo effect'. But this is no mere Ducati memory stick, or Ferrari aftershave.

At the British Motor Show this week Ego, Dutch maker of "luxury notebooks,"unveiled their Bentley laptop.

They say the computer features colour schemes taken directly from Bentley automobiles, and is hand-built and wrapped in custom-stitched leather. Computing is handled by a 64-bit processor with 160GB hard drive, running Microsoft Windows Vista. Now I know cock-all about PCs so I have no idea if that is a high-end machine or not, but I do know that in 6 months time it will be the computing equivalent of a Speak & Spell. And that's pretty hard to swallow when you paid £10,000 for the fucker.