An expensive car is the same as an upper class garment then. Driving is fairly anonymous so the need to have a high status vehicle remains.
Giant pickup trucks are doing the same function as big hoop skirts did then. Take up space unnecessarily, make everyone around give way.
Hard to sit gracefully in a hoop skirt. Hard to park an oversized pick up truck. Enter a crowded room and people need to make way, enter a 4 way stop and bully your way through first.
I call big, ego driven trucks pretty pretty princess trucks because they are no different than a woman in a massive hoop skirt. Exactly the same impulse - wealth and a need for deference - is being communicated.
For both skirt and truck, the size indicates driver/wearer is a delicate flower and needs to be treated as such!
futurebird