The fowl side of car launches

As The Zululand Observer’s motoring scribe it’s expected of me to attend local car launches and official openings of new dealerships.

Not that there’s much for me to do there besides taking a couple of snaps of the only two people pretending not to be there just for the free food, and making small talk with staff before they get rat-faced on the free booze.

If it’s a car launch, the two or three models on display are usually just parking there, under hired disco lights, which makes it difficult to see how they really look, so it’s pointless because I don’t want to boogie with them, but drive them.

I usually end up in a dark corner watching the people.

Chicken is getting cold

For a dealer it’s important to have a good turnout at a launch, or else it says, ‘You and your cars are rubbish that even if you offer to fill our bellies and make us drunk, we can’t be bothered’.

Fortunately Zululanders love to eat and drink for mahala, so if Lasher should launch a wheelbarrow with GT-stripes and call it a super car, they’re guaranteed an audience, as long as there’s fried chicken.

Usually the cars are covered, and only unveiled when whoever’s in charge feels the number in attendance warrants the cost of the stage smoke, and that the crowd is large enough to muster a worthy applause.

Then someone will take a microphone and tell people how this new vehicle is the best thing since Carl Benz drove the first motorised horse cart out of his shed.

They will pretend to listen and even nod in agreement but, what they actually think is, ‘Please shut up because the chicken is getting cold’.

At any launch the chicken always goes first!

Labour unrest

I watch them, from my dark corner, all salivating while someone makes noises about kilowatts and fuel economy.

Val van der W

Then, as he lowers the microphone, it happens: They jump up as one and storm the food tables.

It will look like a labour unrest at Rainbow Chicken Farms.

Clean sucked drumstick bones being recklessly discarded, even inside the car on display’s cup holders, and hands dripping with fat being wiped clean on the upholstery.

After a few minutes, for those who chose not to risk their lives in the stampede, there will only be toothpicks and serviettes left to eat, except if you’re a cheese lover.

Broiler Seven-Seater

At a launch there’s always a cheese table with a fine selection of the most delicious fermented cow juice, but for the bunch of bird brains, it might as well be Rattex sprinkled with Blue Death.

You can drag a chair to the cheese table, sit down, and leisurely apply liberal smears of gorgonzola to biscuits, while watching small children get trampled on by overweight parents.

Before long all that’s left are scattered, dismembered carcasses.

They will then start sucking bones like lollypops to extract the last flavour, and when the bones start tasting like driftwood, they will suck on their fingers.

Car makers should take note of this; instead of giving a vehicle some fancy name, just call it the Rooster 1000, or the Broiler Seven-Seater, and shape it like a drumstick.

Then, maybe, they will also sell cars at these launches.