Your Guide To Automotive Beardness

With Murilee speeding in his Hooptie towards the Alameda sunset and the addition of (gasp!) "a gurl," Jalopnik could use some re-moustachification. I propose a new vehicular metric to certify what we collectively cherish: I call it "beardness."

(DISCLAIMER: I'm not trying to exclude women here! They simply lack the ability to grow beards! But there are analogues to beard growth. For example – Nude-faced : Beard :: Mom Jeans : Bettie Page. Simple? Here's another – Young Boy : Chuck Norris :: Jalopnik Calendar Girls : Sabine Schmitz. Clear? Please don't burn me with your laser eyes Ms. Motor!)

Throughout history, we've equated manliness with cars, and we've equated facial hair with manliness. It was only a matter of time until someone forged some sort of connection between facial hair and cars. After all, so many of our Jalopnik idols have sported something! Burt Reynolds! Karl Benz! Ferdinand Porsche! Dale Earnhardt! The /crazy guy/ that built the Killdozer! (linkto: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer) Chewbacca! Murilee Martin! To pay tribute to all of them, I did a lot of research over a six-pack of Shiner, and the best thing I came up with was "Beardness." Beardness is strictly defined as: "Could a bearded dude look good in this car?" It has certain parallels to the /How Jalopnik Is Your Car?/ (linkto: http://jalopnik.com/346367/how-jalopnik-is-your-car) point scale of yore, but it emphasizes who looks good in what cars. It's clear that a professional lumberjack simply won't look the same in a ZR-1 as, say, Wert. Conversely, our present nude-faced Wert will never be able to infiltrate the logging industry without looking a fool!

Anyway, if you need some clarification, just take a look at my patented Wankel diagram!

(kkwankeldiagram2.jpg)

It's like a Venn diagram, except it becomes less and less understandable the harder you concentrate. To help matters I'll constantly refer to it as though it were a map. On the left axis, try to find the date of manufacture of your vehicle. You'll notice that beyond a certain date, you're pretty much destined for follicular fortitude. On the right axis, take a look at your finish. If it's glossy, you might be glossy as well. And if its rough and brown, you might be Zack Galifianakis. And on the bottom, put up a guess of how much it weighs. I've provided images around the perimeter of the diagram to help you determine what you could or should be driving.

As you can see, there is a very specific sea of beardness roughly bounded by His Dudeness' rust-colorated Torino, Israeli armored bulldozers, Canadian logging equipment and pretty much all of Billetproof.

West of the Gulf of Beard is Alameda Island, well-known for its high percentage of coolness. Adjoining Alameda is a late-night-wrenching, beer swilling stubble zone surrounding the Land of LeMons. A moustache-filled land awaits you southwest of that, where vehicles become lighter and older. After all, Colin Chapman rocked a bitchin' moustache. And Ned Flanders drives a Geo Metro. I don't need any more justification than that, and neither should you. Every new Exige should come with a tin of wax and a fine comb.

North of Beard World is a handlebar-dominated region owned by the over-the-road trucking industry. Murilee's exact location within this world is unknown (as he is oft to travel), but I believe it is somewhere on the beard/trucker boundary, intersecting with Alameda Island and vacationing on the shores of LeMons. An itchy, rusty, salty rash of Project Car Hell contestants dots the landscape within.

Despite the fact that it occupies such a small portion of my Wankel diagram, the Beige Zone contains 92% of the world's presently driven automobiles, including my decidedly un-beardly Honda Civic. Very few vehicles escape from this zone. Keeping the Beige Zone in line is a tiny and underpopulated exclusion zone of police and pilots.

Fun facts: You can't tell at this Web-friendly scale, but unlike real Wankel rotors, the tips of these rotors last on and on into infinity. For example, the southwestern corner becomes exponentially more moustachioed the older and lighter you go. It terminates with the penny-farthing, ridden by dapper old-timey guys with waxed 'staches and bowler hats. The southeastern corner? Well everyone knows that contemporary steam train aficionados are perhaps the beardiest people in existence. And the north end? If you look far, you get Lewis Hamilton's smooth cheeks. And if you look TOO far, then you run the risk of encountering SLR Guy. You've been warned.

So then, commentariat: Where does YOUR vehicle lie? Is your face a fit for your ride, or do you need to lay off the baby powder? What enormous zones did I miss? Are you stuck in the inescapable Beige Zone or have you got a big itchy rust-colored Project Car Hell rash? How many of your cars are totally incompatible with this contrived 3-axis 2-dimensional graph? See you in the comments!

This piece was written and submitted by a Jalopnik reader and may not express views held by Jalopnik or its staff. But maybe they will become our views. It all depends on whether or not this person wins by whit of your eyeballs in our reality show, "Who Wants to be America's Next Top Car Blogger?"