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One thing I feel like we discuss rarely here is cars.
I drive a late 90s/early 00s German sedan. When I made less money, I spent a good amount of time wrenching on it. I wanted to have some minimal competence and understanding of the car, and it was a great way to save money.
It still would be a great way to save money - I won't kid myself there - but the stress of preparing for a maintenance job, buying the specialized tools/parts, and working in my extremely cramped garage has lost some magic. I still feel accomplished doing little things but when I'm constantly under pressure to be doing work or parenting, there's less magic in DIY. Bike maintenance provides a similar dopamine hit with far less commitment.
That said, I just picked it up from the mechanic this week after a month-long absence and some significant work being done. I truly do not understand how people put up with newer cars.
This thing is absolutely sublime. It strikes a perfect balance between the precision and feedback from all of its systems while driving and what you'd define as "luxury" and comfort. I splurged on an aftermarket exhaust that fades into the background on the highway and absolutely rips when I'm driving like I stole it late at night on more empty roads.
Not to mention how it looks. Of course, any car you see as a teenager is what you base everything else on, but the slightly angular design language of this period right before everything turned into aero blobs for fuel efficiency and crash standards just really gets me going. I absolutely still look back at it when walking into the office and find myself getting excited when I step back into it after a long day.
Whenever I'm on the road watching hundreds of drones driving dirty shitboxes without using their turn signals or trying to drive efficiently, I fall into such a superiority complex. How could you care so little about something you do so much? For a country supposedly in love with its cars, it would be tough for Americans to give less of a shit about how driving feels and how they perform at it. For all I'm made fun of about the time and money I've invested in an older car, when I spread that out over the time I've used it and the joy I derive from it it seems like an obvious trade.
I care very little about food and despise cooking (mainly because it takes me a very long time to do it; while food prep time scales sublinearly with the number of diners, I'm only making for one), yet I eat more than I drive, to the point where I'd rather the twice-weekly ride out to get take out be more enjoyable than the food ultimately is.
Why else do you think they spend so much time texting behind the wheel, and why the industry has pivoted to making it easier to text behind the wheel? The very late-2000s through the mid-2010s was the era of car manufacturers thinking they knew better than your phone's software and voice recognition (spoiler: they did not), and then after that it was all screens for cost-cutting reasons (and also backup camera mandates, which given safety standards mandate poorer and poorer visibility was kind of a given at some point).
And given that most of the cheap cars in the 2010s were made by Kia/Hyundai, and are all ticking time bombs because of their engines, buying slightly newer isn't even going to help you. That's why you pick the slightly older cooler car, take heart that the market doesn't [generally] understand pricing (because for all Ford's/GM's problems, they at least don't tend to fail that catastrophically), and drive it until you cannot drive it any more.
You're tracing very well a significant fear I have around the death spiral of vehicular design. Safety -> Ugliness, Boredom, and Complexity -> Lower Engagement and Skill -> Safety....
And the general public will parrot the (very real!) reduction in injuries and deaths but barely consider the trades they've made for environmentalism and freedom. Using 5,000 pound cars to move a 175 pound human is a fucking farce, and all that nice GPS and cell-tower connected hardware is every 3-letter agency's wet dream.
I can't shake an overwhelming feeling of anxiety about the future of freedom of movement. I'm 140k into probably a 250k mile lifespan and don't know where I'll get my next car 10 years from now. The particular model still appreciates instead of getting cheaper, a replacement with more life in it will be expensive. I forsee a brief window where self-driving software for the masses makes more of my driving pleasant before keeping my hands on the wheel becomes outright illegal.
I love when folks get a $1,000 maintenance bill for their current car and then decide to buy a $50,000 car instead of pay it. It's fun breaking them down slowly by walking through how insane it is.
This has reversed in the United States in the last few years. Presumably some of that is Steve Sailer's deaths of exuberance hypothesis, but it also seems like idiots staring at phones is getting pedestrians killed at higher rates now too (I am referring to both the motorists and walkers as idiots, to be clear).
And pot. Potheads, unlike alcoholics, tend to think that they’re perfectly fine or even better driver under the influence.
When I was a kid the stereotype was potheads being pulled over for doing 35 under the limit, and complaining they were being profiled for their grateful dead and Legalyze Medicine bumper stickers.
Now they're tearing through red lights like alcoholics running from DMT demons, I don't understand it.
Hasn’t lot changed pretty substantially? Like it’s gotten stronger, at least.
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