Hot Cars Make Men...Well, Hot

It turns out all of the stereotypes are true: Driving fast, expensive cars causes a spike in men’s testosterone levels, according to a new study from Concordia University John Molson School of Business.

The study used 39 male volunteers and asked them to drive down a quiet residential road and a street loaded with pedestrian traffic twice, each time in a different vehicle. The cars? A 1993 Toyota Camry and a new Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet. After each drive, researchers took a saliva sample to measure testosterone levels.

It didn’t matter if they were driving on the pedestrian-heavy street with female onlookers, the men always had elevated and sustained testosterone levels after driving the Porsche (or maybe that was just the normal level and libido-sapping ’93 Camry was putting them into a coma).

The authors write that men use powerful, expensive cars as “sexual signaling devices” the same way a peacock uses his tail feathers. It’s nice to know that after thousands of years of developing our civilized world, men are still trying to impress women with hyper-expensive tail feathers.

Testosterone Makes Men Buy Fast Cars (Jalopnik.com)

Comments

This is exactly how I felt after selling my Mustang and buying a VW Rabbit.

I can pass a house with a Ferrari behind a closed garage door and get a boner!

I'll suggest an unpopular but plausible explanation: the fear of doing damage to the car was responsible for the higher testosterone in the Porsche, not every guy's innate love of performance cars.

That simply stated that those guys have complex of inferiority and needs to show off themselves.

This research is all well and good, but the question men really want to know is whether the ladies notice the "feathers" and what is driving them. Maybe the researchers should have conducted a test on the women watching the guys speed buy and see if it increased their hormone levels. LOL.

I think you put a women in a Porsche and her levels might peak too. I don't think it's just a guy thing.