Do you have any acquaintances who are just a little . . . intense? The kind of people who seem to be auditioning for the role of lovable lunatic left vacant when Hunter Thompson shot himself? “BrianDR1665” puts us in mind of people like that. It starts with his robotic moniker — we suspect he’s actually a cyborg assembled by ex-Saturn engineers who no longer have enough to do — and continues through his mysterious recollection of his (surely illegal) best drive, his dissertation-worthy opinions about in-car music and his withering condescension (justified, we admit) for what he calls “commuter cattle.” Oh, and if you wish to have so much as a demitasse sippy cup while sunk deep into one of the good doctor’s bucket seats, you might consider taking the bus instead. “If you spill anything,” he intones, “I clean it up with your face.” Dude, can we suggest yoga?

As lost (automotive) virginity stories go, this one’s good: His uncle once gave 19-year-old Mark Turner the keys to his Datsun 240, an early-’70s asphalt violator, with the sole proviso that “you’re paying for any tickets you get.” Turner, naturally, broke 100 mph — and his citation-free joyride instilled a lifelong appreciation for the virtues of avoiding Johnny Law. Cue up, then, his favorite driving song: a 1981 Rush tune called “Red Barchetta,” which George Orwell might have written had he been a leadfoot road hog instead of a socialist depressive. A leviathan government, you see, has banned fast cars, and heroic street warriors are hellbent on defying the rules. “Wind in my hair / Shifting and drifting / Mechanical music / Adrenaline surge . . . ” It’s not “If I Had a Hammer,” necessarily, but we’ll take it. Start your engines!

Ethan “Something” is a man of few words — Marcel Marceau with 93 octane and 300 horsepower under the hood. Still, there are a few things we can discern from his tight-lipped survey replies: He favors road rockets that keep “outside eyes glued to you” (i.e., he’s an unseemly attention hound). He doesn’t like driving in cold weather (i.e., he’s something of a patsy on ice). He likes road music whose BPM measures in the thousands (i.e., he’s on a first-name basis with the valet at the Viper Room). And he’s laissez-faire about car snacks. “Your food, your life,” he says. Actually, maybe that’s just a warning that he’ll kill you if you so much as pop a Tic-Tac in the passenger seat. That’s the thing about silent types: It’s so damned hard to tell. Pipe up, Ethan!

Getting lost, it hardly needs to be noted, is a proud road-eater’s tradition. Who among us hasn’t taken a wrong exit — maybe on purpose if we’re headed to the in-laws’ — and spent the next 45 minutes luxuriating along two-lane back roads? Edmund Heng, though, appears to be the Vasco de Gama (or maybe we should say the Amelia Earhart) of lost-getting: He speaks fondly of road trips with friends during which the where-the-hell? lasted “countless hours.” Yes, hours — it makes us think of those Cialis ads advising us to see a doctor if our, er, stick shift remains locked in fifth too long. We can only assume that Heng is one hell of a conversationalist. Or maybe his in-laws are especially hideous. We’d ask his friends, but all of them have been missing for days.

We’ll happily bow down to Stuart Cameron’s top five cars — a proving ground’s worth of vehicles that span much of automotive history, from the Great Depression (a 1930 Ford) to the Great Recession (a 2010 Ford). You go, Ford! But, um, his preferred driving music? Most of it’s fine: No one wrote better cruising tunes than the Beach Boys, and ZZ Top and hot rods go together like beards and cheap sunglasses. But Billy Joel, Stuart? The MOR creampuff who once wrote a song called “Christmas in Fallujah”? Would you really hit triple digits in your ’64 Mustang, top down, while the bard of Long Island belted out “Uptown Girl”? You would? Well, OK, then. We didn’t start the fire, but go ahead and start your engine. A man’s Ford is his castle, after all.