Salon’s even picked up the Xtracycle story.

I’ve gotta get one of these soon.

There’s a story that I want to tell, too, which has nothing to do with cycling, but does have to do with a lesser-known vehicular interest of mine: identifying and comparing car models. For someone who doesn’t drive, I pay an inordinate amount of attention to car models. One day I said to someone, while we were in his car driving down Willow Road, “Why do you think Scion has four car models, three of which are xA, xB, and xD, and the fourth of which is tC? Why not xC?”

The person who was driving said to me something like “I think you ask a lot of questions to which there are no really good answers.” We had a discussion for a while about my tendency to ask why about things for which there may be no satisfying answer to the why. He didn’t say as much, but basically he seemed to think it was silly, a waste of mental energy.

Time passed, and I didn’t find out the answer. But eventually one day I thought, I could actually look this up and find out if there are any theories. It turns out that the answer is pretty simple. Wikipedia says:

The name tC does not fit in with its stablemates the xA, xB, and xD, because the name xC has already been taken by Volvo for its XC60, XC70 and XC90 models. According to Scion, tC stands for “Touring Coupe.”

I think they made up the Touring Coupe backronym after they found out about the Volvo XC’s, but that’s pure speculation.

The moral of the story isn’t that all my why questions have (satisfying) answers, but it is that by failing to ask, and disengaging your brain from all these (sometimes exhausting) questions, you may miss interesting little tidbits like this, and the brain-reward that they bring: that feeling of something dropping into place, the world making just a tad more sense than it did before.

Besides, someday I’m going to win a Trivial Pursuit game with this little factoid.