RX8Club.com - Cars & Coffee Portland

I was at the newly reorganized Cars & Coffee Portland this past Saturday, at the new location in Wilsonville. It was a great car ‘show’, and if you were coming purely as a spectator, there was a lot eye candy to drool over, probably over 500 cars. But, it was also a bit of a letdown. My disappointment - which I know was shared with some other attendees - is the creeping pretentiousness and class discrimination that has infected the meet.

Cars & Coffee Portland has changed a great deal in a short period of time. It used to be a very casual, informal gathering of car guys and their rides, who would all freely and openly mix together in the same area. There were always some cliques, and the late-model BMW/Porsche/Mercedes elitists would tend to cluster together and talk about which of their ‘favorite Porsches’ from their ‘collection’ they’ll bring next week, but it was all good, and everyone mixed it up together. Everyone talked and interacted with each other, and it was a lot of fun. It gave the gathering a lot of its character, that you could find a hopped-up Subaru, a 1930’s Packard, a new Ferrari, a 1960’s muscle car, an RX8, a new Challenger, and a slightly dinged up original Falcon station wagon all parked next to each other in a row (though all the times I’ve been to C&C, I’ve always been the only RX8 – where is everybody else?). It was like a little treasure hunt, not knowing what you’d see next, and mirrored the eclectic personality of Portland.

Something fundamental has changed in this new location. Now there are ‘class’ distinctions. The first is the ‘exotic’ area for a small number of cars. I understand that owners of truly rare and ‘special’ (= expensive) cars want the premium treatment, so a special parking area is reserved for them. C&C even pretentiously had it on their FaceBook page, “If you have to ask if your car is exotic, then it isn’t”. In addition to the small “exotic” lot, there’s a large main parking area next to World of Speed, and a second parking area across the street. C&C said they would fill these two areas sequentially. That’s not how it played out last Saturday.

The organizers at the entrance seemed to be making some kind of instant judgment on the cars, and directing high-dollar cars into the main parking area (things that seem to cost low six figures and up), and directing more common cars (things that seemed to cost mere five figures) into the ancillary parking across the street. It seems that most Japanese cars were relegated to economy class, even a bunch of Nissan GT-R’s.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed this. Other people who were relegated to tourist class also felt put off by this apparent discrimination, and left early.

Is this kind of ostentatious segregation really needed? Are the owners of the mega-buck supercars really worried that they’ll catch some sort of disease from those of us with more lowly cars? A couple of months ago, when C&C Portland was looking for a new location, one of the organizers commented that they wanted to keep C&C more “exclusive” and not have it diluted by “common cars”. I guess this first class/business class/economy class structure is the result of that desire, to make owners of “common” cars (like mere Mazdas) feel unwelcome. If that’s the goal, why don’t those allowed into the ‘premium’ area just put their bank statements of net worth on the pavement and show them off, it would be easier than driving to Wilsonville.

Someone sardonically commented that it was just another sign of the Californication of Portland, of transplants from Silicon Valley remaking it into Palo Alto North. The money flowing into the area may make that devolution inevitable, but something unique will be lost.

Maybe we should get together and form a Cars & Coffee for the 99% of us that don’t own half million dollar ‘exotics’?