If my car is my castle, I live in a rabbit hutch.

Once again, Natalie Neff's being raked over the coals for her latest column on AutoWeek.com; the forum posters over there make The Car Lounge look tame by comparison. Her piece, a lighthearted bit advising her brother to evaluate prospective tenants by their cars, is being criticized for being irrelevant.

Point A: Perhaps, in the context of AutoWeek's usual content, this is true. That's why the story's on the web and not in the print issue.

Point B: The more pressing issue is that Neff's argument is entirely relevant. How often do we judge fellow motorists based on their vehicles, and how often are those assumptions correct? When my husband and I lived in Milwaukee, we spent a few hours at the laundromat every weekend, and passed the time by trying to match each laundromat patron with a car in the parking lot. Our track record was scarily accurate.

Bear with me, if you will, and check out the cars parked at the local Wal-Mart. Go inside, if you can stand it, and watch the customers. I will never be convinced that these cars, usually comprised of rusty Toyota minivans, early '90s Civics riding on cut springs and spinner hubcaps, and the famous periwinkle blue Plymouth Neon that shed paint in Frisbee-sized sheets, are not indicative of Wal-Mart consumers' average economic and physical health. Take a trip down the road to the closest Target, and bask in the brighter, cleaner, friendlier, and more pleasant atmosphere .

I know where I prefer to park my cars. How about you?

Such observations are, indeed, a part of automotive culture. The market research geniuses have known this for decades.

"Take my pulse and take my picture, I wanna be a household fixture."

There's nothing quite like the rush of seeing my own work published, and it's an experience to which I haven't yet gotten accustomed.

Not quite as exciting, but almost, is browsing through a print magazine and spotting a car with which I am intimate. It happens pretty regularly--honestly, it happens more often than I get published, which is kind of pathetic. Even more pathetic, I know all these cars by sight, or I know the owners, yet it's very rarely my car that's pictured. My GTI was in Performance VW's Reader's Rides, and my dearly departed Audi 4000 was in an advertisement in Eurotuner under its previous ownership. So much for my exciting life.

A couple weekends ago, I was at Barnes & Noble with the honey, on the monthly mission to check out the Euro/VW tuner mag competition. My interest was piqued when I found coverage of Atlanta's DurtyFest, since the show is managed by acquaintances and I am familiar with their cars from both VWvortex and my brief period of Atlanta residency.

In the front and center of the lead photo sat Volkswagen's Thunder Bunny. At first, I was amused that so much attention would be granted to a show car commissioned and owned by a manufacturer, rather than giving the magazine's own consumers' cars precious photo space in a time when the magazine can no longer afford to print the monthly cover car poster insert that used to be included with each issue. It seemed like a weird editorial decision, but that's not my domain--I'm happiest taking my red pen to this particular magazine's copy for fun, not as a means of drawing a paycheck. But I digress--back to the Thunder Bunny.

I've ridden in that car. I've driven that car. And I'm quite fond of it, not only because my own white Rabbit is currently slated to get one of the first Thunder Bunny ground effects kits available (which inspired a series of photographs of the two cars together, one of which currently sits framed in my cubicle).

I like the Thunder Bunny because it's exciting. It's sporty, eye-catching, and most of all, attainable. I'm becoming accustomed to the perks of my fiance's job--we might get tossed the the keys to the R GTI or a new 3 Series for a weekend, or get chauffered around in an R8 for few precious stolen minutes--and even though we have the privilege of zipping around on a free tank of gas and showing off, the car, in the end, must go back. It's never ours and never will be.

But the Thunder Bunny's different. Although the production kit won't include the one-of-a-kind pearl white body graphics or custom interior bits, it's still within my grasp. It fuels my thirst to once again daily-drive a modified car. And standing in a bookstore in Chicago, admiring a picture of the Thunder Bunny amongst a crowd of enthusiast-owned cars in Atlanta, felt like I was seeing an old friend.