"Little Deuce Coupe"

A couple days ago, I listened to the two-albums-on-one-CD re-issue of Little Deuce Coupe and All Summer Long, and later I realized that there's a somewhat significant contrast in "Little Deuce Coupe," specifically in the line "But she'll walk a Thunderbird like it's standin' still."  The narrator's affection towards his car is such that he's anthropomorphized it to some degree, using a feminine pronoun to refer to it throughout the song ("She's my little deuce coupe," "She'll do a hundred and forty...," "She's got a competition clutch...," and so on), but a competitor's Thunderbird is still just an object and is referred to with the neuter "it."