On Leather and Cars

Back in August, I thought I was being confronted by the most difficult problem yet: Which car to buy/lease when you’re an animal person and environmentalist. I needed a rig to carry my two greyhounds who don’t ever sit (one stands, one lies down), my optimal car would have been a hybrid, and leather interior was out of the question. I was left with two cars: the Hybrid Toyota Highlander and the Honda Element. I chose the latter, which is far less expensive, gets great mileage, and is low to the ground so the dogs don’t have to jump high to get in (one doesn’t jump at all and weighs 80 pounds, so I’d have to pick him up and put him in the car, and there’s no way I’d sign up for that if I could avoid it). Fine. The Element’s in the garage as we speak. Love it.

But now I’m finding that choosing a car when you’re an animal person and environmentalist is nothing compared to what occurs when you add another component: luxury. Enter my husband, who recently stopped eating meat and his lease will be over soon. He’ll need a new car, and I have yet to find a suitable one that has cloth interior as an option. He’s a higher-end kind of person than I, and though he has no legitimate needs in the car department other than it gets him from point A to point B, he’d never consider a Prius, which would be my first choice for him. And the Lexus hybrid has leather all over the place. For the next couple of months, I will embark on a journey to find him a nice car without leather and preferably with great mileage, and I’ll alert you of my progress. Which companies offer–or will make–him a car with cloth interior ("leatherette," like Audi has in a few of their basic cars, can’t be great for the planet, but neither is leather. Check out Ride Without the Hide for more on the car industry, leather, and the environment.).

Let’s deconstruct:

• When I get into particularly the new cars of friends, one of the things
  that makes them giddy about their new acquisition is the smell of the
  leather. We here in the US of A have been trained, conditioned, to associate the notion of luxury with the smell of cow skin. But what is so inherently luxurious about skin? Nothing. In fact, it’s kind of creepy to call it "skin." But that’s what it is. It’s like calling meat "flesh," which is what I did in my twenties just to annoy people. (Something I like to do when the topic of food comes up now is to say, "I don’t eat animals." Try it sometime; it’s far more powerful than saying "I’m a vegan," yet less in-your-face than saying "I don’t eat flesh").
• The only way we’re going to dissociate luxury and leather is to talk about it and question it. The connection isn’t going away of its own volition. It needs to be outted, deconstructed, and resolved.
• Many car brands have lower-end options with cloth interior; the issue isn’t a car without leather, it’s a luxury car without leather (and that includes the steering wheel and the shift knob).
• If you’re ever going to request something special on/in a vehicle, you’d best be purchasing. There’s no incentive for them to do something out of the ordinary for a vehicle they’ll be renting you for four years. Though I know Mercedes offers a leather-free seats for most of its cars, none of the cars are completely leather-free. Let’s see how accommodating they are. Let’s see how all of this plays out in the real world. After all, according to PETA, I should thank Saab for offering non-leather alternatives, yet when I checked out their station wagon, which is loaded with leather, they told me there was no option.
• My husband isn’t really a Mercedes kind of guy, and I’d hate to think he’d be relegated to MB by necessity. I’d like for him to have choices.

It’s time to start publicly challenging the idea that leather is desirable and luxurious, and see it for what it is: the skin of a slaughtered sentient being. That’s what I smell when I get into a "luxury" car.