When we moved to Luxembourg from London, we brought with us our own cultural blind spots and a few illusions: that status was subtle, that intelligence and education still counted, and that the car you drove said very little about who you were.
Our dentist in London drove a VW Beetle. So did we. It wasn’t a statement. It was just... a car. Practical, small, occasionally whimsical. Nobody cared. In fact, in certain circles, driving a car at all was slightly gauche.
Luxembourg, as it turns out, disagrees.
The Cult of the Car (And Why Size Still Matters)
There’s a long tradition in Luxembourg, and indeed, across many small or large, status-obsessed nations, of material cues standing in for personal credentials. When people don’t know who you are, they look at what you own. And when they’re not sure what to make of you, they look at your car.
The car is immediate, legible, parked in full view. Unlike your education or career (neither of which is plastered to your garage door), it speaks a language everyone understands. And it tends to speak loudly.
This wasn’t always the case. In post-war Luxembourg, the ultimate status symbol wasn’t necessarily a Porsche, it was land. A large house. A good roof. You climbed the ladder through ownership, not necessarily through chrome.
But over time, as the country grew wealthier, the car became the mobile façade. A rolling résumé. And in villages and towns the driveway became the stage.
Vehicular Theatre
When we arrived in our historic village home, thoughtfully updated, and, dare I say, quite beautiful, we expected mild curiosity. Maybe even a neighbourly chat about stucco or rain gutters.
What we got was polite distance, almost disdain and a learning curve about unspoken social codes.
Respect, it seemed, was not anchored to the architectural effort. It came down to what was parked out front. Our loyal blue VW Beetle - charming in London - here seemed to signal a lack of ambition. Or worse, a lack of means.
The real revelation came slowly. A sense that certain conversations required different credentials. A raised eyebrow during a casual driveway conversation. A sense that we’d missed a memo everyone else had read.
Eventually, it became clear: we seemed to have failed the local “visual audit” and we seemed to be navigating by the wrong map.
When Sustainability Meets Status Anxiety
We had, until then, clung to our small-car principles. One vehicle, low emissions, minimal footprint. Sustainability in action. A little naïve, perhaps.
But the social signals around us grew too loud to ignore.
We finally bought two more cars. An electric one, to soothe our principles. And an SUV, because nothing else said, “Don’t underestimate us” quite so effectively.
It worked. Subtly. Conversations became warmer. The Beetle, though still technically present, had been neutralised. The social dynamic quietly recalibrated.
And with it, any last illusions about sustainability as a community value and our own consistency quietly dissolved. It’s easy to declare sustainability as your core value when it doesn’t cost you socially.
This isn’t unique to Luxembourg, of course. Every place has its codes. London had its own hierarchies. They were just written in different symbols. Private school accents, the right postcodes, using the right words in contexts. At least here, the rules are more …visible and ultimately easier to obtain.
What Drives Us
Of course, none of this is really about cars.
It’s ultimately about architecture. In towns and villages where buildings are no longer expressive, where old houses are stripped of identity and new builds are aggressively neutral, the car becomes the substitute. It performs what the architecture no longer does: it signals value, taste, and place.
We’ve built a world where façades are flattened, homes are anonymised, and silence fills the gaps once held by ornament, eccentricity, or craftsmanship. And in that vacuum, the car roars.
Final Thought: The Quiet Cost of Status
We joke now, of course. That you can have four degrees and a vintage terrazzo floor, but if your car isn’t at least five metres long, you’ll remain firmly in second tier. That you could invent the fountain of youth, but if you park it next to a Dacia, no one’s calling you for brunch.
But behind the humour, there’s something sadder. A social ecosystem where respect is calculated by cubic volume. Where sustainability, though publicly adored, is privately penalised. Where heritage matters less than horsepower. And yet, not all residents follow this pattern. But the pattern is visible, and hard to ignore.
So, the question remains:
In a place where the car often carries more cultural weight than the home, what are we really driving toward? And what does it tell us about the spaces we have created to live in?
written by Helen M. Krauss