Nope, no car culture here.
There’s a Washington Post article proclaiming that, once again, car culture in America is diminishing and it’s largely due to millennials losing interest. I trust I’m preaching to the choir when I tell you, a passionate Hooniverse reader no matter the age, that this is a load of crap.
The author of the Post article is far from the first expert to rant about our dying car culture, but what sets this one apart is that this guy has hard evidence in the form of… a few people he talked to that happened to agree with what he wanted to prove. The article reads like a eulogy for a time when the cars were better and everyone loved them, only to be unceremoniously killed off by cars that operate themselves and are treated with contempt. Times have certainly changed since the 50’s and 60’s – a time the Post article compares everything to – but that only means car culture has changed too in order to adapt and survive, and survive it does.
This article has already spawned off several good rebuttals on other automotive websites, but as our resident young guy (23) who devotes virtually all free time to car culture in one way or another and happily writes about these things every week for cheap, I felt the need to respond to someone trying to tell me how I’m killing it.
Car culture in America – perhaps the world, even – is not dying at all. Rather, car culture is just changing as the world does. Everything is more complex and our needs have evolved. The world is vastly different than it was in the 1950’s and 60’s, a time when car culture was arguably at its golden age (as the original author, Marc Fisher, alludes to several times).
That also means car culture is just one of those things that’s changed too and I’d say what we have now is still a very active and healthy car culture in 2015. It’s huge now. This culture of ours spans continents and manages to be all-inclusive to anyone that shares the passion. That’s something car culture could never become until now given the wonders of the 21st century. Everyone reading this knows that all very well, but somehow there are others trying to tell the rest of the world that it’s not really that big. It’s not as good as it used to be. Because our car culture today doesn’t look exactly as it did years ago, it hardly exists at all.
In the Post article, Fisher and the boomers he screened for interviews compared modern day car culture to how things were back in their day, as people do. In their words, it was a time when everyone worked hard to buy their first car because a car brought unbridled freedom. They cruised down boulevards at night and met up with friends at a diner to do whatever it was that young people did in the glory days. Cars were essential to culture back then and everyone loved them. Life was perfect and the cars had tail fins and stuff so they were perfect too. Fair enough.
But they then go on to make disparaging comments about how people today – mostly millennials – made everything worse.
Teens apparently no longer work hard to buy their first car since everyone is connected by social media now, clearly negating the need for a car to actually go see the people they’re talking to. Parents are also too protective these days so a car doesn’t bring freedom anymore either. People stopped driving to meet up at restaurants and movie theaters as soon as Domino’s and piracy became a thing. Now we only use our cars for commuting and after the cars lost their tail fins and shifted focus on reliability (paraphrasing Fisher’s actual words), we lost interest too.
Most millennials can’t even open their hoods! Not that they’d need to, because reliability dramatically improved when automakers ditched fins. And since cars all have computers now, it’s impossible to become attached to anything new.
No fins. Just wings.
Those are all things we’ve heard millions of times by now (except for the tail fin thing… that’s hilarious) and they’ve practically become a cliché that people like Fisher fall back on when they’ve run out of other things to yell at us about.
Nobody is denying that the “glory days” of car culture were wonderful, but to say “nobody cares anymore”, “cars are computers now”, “it’s just not the same”, etc. as “proof” that we’ve lost our passion for cars is as short-sighted as saying “rock is dead because people don’t listen to The Kingsmen anymore”. They’re missing the big picture, and quite frankly, they’re also missing out.
The cars are different and the new generation of people that love them are very different, but the passion for cars among those that possess it is as strong as ever. There are still car enthusiasts among us and there is still a great culture to explore. How do I know this? Because I’m one of the many that have explored it. It’s clear that Fisher didn’t do much of that for his article. It’s like a guy standing outside of a bar ranting about how horrible it is whilst the people inside are just having fun being drunk off their minds.
Even though I’m not drunk (right now) I can’t comprehend how people like this look at everything we have now in this culture of ours and say it’s diminishing.
They must lament about how cars don’t have tail fins anymore and how everything looks the same, but nobody said car enthusiasts have to drive flashy cars. They must also drive past some tattooed millennial driving a slammed Jetta that scrapes on every grain of asphalt and think he’s just some dumb kid, when really he’s someone who cares enough about cars to make something personal and unique out of whatever he can afford with two jobs and tuition payments. Then they’d see a teen driving a beat up ’93 Civic thinking she doesn’t care enough to have something with tail fins, not realizing she rebuilt it in her driveway with few tools and no prior experience just because she cared enough to learn.
There are still people like that. Young people, too.
So many in fact that Atlanta’s Caffeine and Octane car show can bring ten thousand spectators of all ages to a mall parking lot at the ass crack of dawn with nothing on the agenda besides looking at any car that shows up. That also means they wouldn’t see a young kid’s reaction to a cool car or the owner’s elation that someone was interested in what they own. And they’d definitely not see the huge crowd of people gathered around a BMW i8 that just got parked up front, proving that people can still be blown away by a new car filled with enough tech to practically “drive itself”.
Is none of that car culture?
And what of all the car forums? The thousands of YouTube channels dedicated to nothing but cars that people dedicate their livelihoods to running? Just more proof that people don’t need cars to talk about cars because they do it online now!
And pay no attention to Autoweek Magazine either or else they’d find enough young car culture to fill an entire magazine. Yours truly even got to help with that and it’s already happened twice since last fall. A major automotive publication that first came to print in 1958 – during the “golden era”, mind you – thought young car culture today was important enough to dedicate two whole issues to. They wouldn’t have done that if it wasn’t worth their time, but clearly it was.
To sum up a rant…
Nope, nobody uses motor vehicles to be free anymore.
There are people of all ages that are still keeping car culture alive in the 21st century and it’s sad that people ignore those efforts by saying it’s all going downhill. We have just as much passion about cars now as our elders did in the 60’s; it just looks different now.
Until people like Fisher give enough shits to go out and actually try to be a part of modern car culture, they’ll just assume it’s not active anymore. That’s not fair to the people still making cars a part of their life. It’s not fair to the young people carrying tradition and it’s not fair to the older enthusiasts who happily pass down traditions.
The belief that car culture is dying in the 21st century is a myth. To imply that young people are the ones driving it into the ground is insulting. Meanwhile, car culture goes on. All are welcome.
For a great bonus rant with more snark and factual evidence, check out Patrick George’s rebuttal on Jalopnik (and cheers for the shout out).
[Sources: The Washington Post, Jalopnik, Autoweek | Images © 2015 Hooniverse/Greg Kachadurian]
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