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On American Graffiti, Street Rod Shows, the Meaning of Teenage Rebellion, and Watching a Subculture Choose Death Over Diversity
In the past week, I took my dad to the annual Street Rod show in our hometown, where we walked around all afternoon looking at thousands of custom classics, running into a lot of the same people we’ve run into at the same show every year since I could walk. And I took him to see his all-time favorite movie, George Lucas’* American Graffiti, in theaters one night only for the 50th Anniversary of its original release.
At the film, and even more at the car show, I felt like a kid, like a teenager. Not in the sense of “Wide eyed wonder” or “remembering my own youth,” though there was plenty of that as well. It was simply that I, at thirty, was one of the younger people at both events. The people at the Street Rod show have frozen in time, always my dad’s age or older. Fewer and older every year, as they die off one after another. When I was ten they were older but still robust guys who could lift a transmission and you wouldn't mess with; when I was a teenager you started seeing canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and they’ve become more common every year since. This year, I followed two guys for hours across the show, on Rascal scooters, matching MAGA hats, chain smoking cigars. I wasn’t sure if I admired their IDGAF attitude (“I’m already on the scooter, why give up the cigars now?”) or if I was horrified at the idea. When two street rod enthusiasts see each other at the show and catch up, the conversation is all ailments and surgeries now. And then they all turn to the same question: where are all the young people? Why don’t young people care about these cars? Why don’t young people love Street Rods?
And the answer seemed blindingly obvious to me: these cars have a completely different meaning and symbolism for you than they do for me. Custom car culture still exists, but it’s not about Street Rods as defined in the show charter, not by a long shot. The National Street Rod Association describes street rods as a vehicle of 1948 or earlier that has had modernization to the engine, transmission, interior, or anything else and is a non-racing vehicle used mostly for general enjoyment. “The more family-friendly version of the hot rod.” Besides the obvious fact that cars from 1948 are less accessible to young people, it simply doesn’t make sense to modify a car for performance today.
Modifying a car for street performance purposes makes essentially zero sense in this day and age, doing so is entirely performative in nature. In 1962, the year American Graffiti is set, hot rods were fast because factory cars were slow. I’ve built and driven cars similar to John Millner’s “piss yellow deuce coupe” and while they’re fun to play with, they’re not really very fast**. It’s impossible to guess exact specs in a film that’s largely a nostalgic fantasy, but I’ve driven similar cars with more modern running gear, and it’s pretty hard to take that kind of platform and get a sub-7s 0-60 just by getting the engine running hotter. Now, in 1962, that car was fast, it was the fastest in the Valley!, because Steve’s ’58 Impala probably made 60 in something like 14 seconds, and the Edsel his girlfriend drives probably took 10 seconds or so. Even a brand-new ’62 Vette would have taken 6.9 seconds to reach 60. It really was possible to take a clapped out little old Ford that a teenager with a summer job could afford, slap a big engine sourced from a wrecked truck in it, tune it for power in your garage, and have a meaningfully fast car, a car visibly faster than other cars on the road, a car fast enough that other people would be impressed by it. You could have the bitchin’est car in the whole Valley, and the handful of mostly-foreign performance cars that could challenge you were rare as hen’s teeth in the American small town.
Today, factory speed is so widely available that not only is it impossible to hot-rod anything meaningful, it’s impossible to really street race without being more limited by balls and rationality than by the machines involved. The 2023 Vette runs a sub-3 0-60, in automatic, and costs less than $80k brand new Chevy sells 30,000 of them every year. A Tesla Model 3 Performance sedan can do 60 in 3.5 seconds, costs $55k, and is also a practical day to day car. Hell, for a little over $30k today, you can pick up a 2021 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid Prime which will get you to 60 in 5.6 seconds while being among the most practical and reliable family cars on the road. There’s no logical reason to modify your car to be faster today, putting an annoying exhaust, taking out comfort features and turning it into a penalty box, will still deliver less speed-per-dollar than just saving up for a used Corvette. Even if you just want to Mod, you’re better off starting at the Vette and modding that, on a dollar-for-dollar basis. You cannot build a meaningfully fast car on a budget today, at best you might be able to keep a clapped out old M3 on the road. The budget path to a meaningfully fast car today is taking a factory fast car that has deteriorated to a budget price and managing to keep it in shape. A friend of mine has a 2012 e550, I’ve driven it and it’s a lovely and incredibly fast car with over 400hp that will happily bounce off the electronically limited top speed, he bought it for $20k a couple years back, but it’s caught a case of electrical gremlins that are causing an engine misfire that the mechanics all estimate at $15k to fix, and wholesale trade-in on it is $11k, probably sell it for $5k with the engine issues. There’s nothing you can do with $6k in parts for a $5k Honda Civic that will get you anywhere near the E550’s 4.3s 60 time.
Factory speed is the enemy of custom car culture. When any chucklehead can just pay-to-win by buying a fast car from the dealership, having a fast car has no meaning. Think of the great eras of custom racing: American Graffiti memorializes the late 50s early 60s street rod era, and the first few Fast and Furious films commemorate the late 80s-90s tuner era. But the thing is, the 80s and 90s were a nadir for cars in general in America. The 60s and 70s had the great muscle car era, that was the death of the Hot Rod era. Post Embargo, common American cars wouldn’t achieve the performance heights of the Judge and the great SS cars until the mid 2000s. The C4 Corvette is a mediocre car by today’s standards, would be a Toyota 86 competitor, but in 1984 it was such a monster it was banned from SCCA competition because Porsche and Mercedes products simply couldn’t compete, the Corvette needed its own category! This was the environment that fueled Tuner and Ricer culture: you really could take an Acura Integra and make it meaningfully faster, fast enough to compete with a C4 corvette.
The irony is that “car guys” have always slavered over factory speed! They want car companies to make great performance cars! But they also love custom culture. These two desires are in natural conflict, factory speed drives customs out of the market. Today’s custom culture is all about art cars, interesting aesthetics, or over-loud audio. The very same guys complaining that young people aren’t into cars, created the environment where custom cars don’t make sense. Our desires kill the environment that creates and fuels those desires.*** Too much of what we want kills us. It’s the inherently elegiac nature of the Western: the cowboy sheriff makes himself obsolete, by taming the West he destroys the West he knew.
The restrictive definition that the National Street Rod Association uses sentences their shows to decline and death. I look out at the show, shrinking every year, aging every year, and I know the only path forward for this subculture. If they want young people, they need cars that mean something to young people! A 75 year old man wants the cars that were cool when he was young, so does a 30 year old man, so does the 22 year old man. I look at the park and think, cut it right down the middle, this half is T-Buckets and Golden Oldies, that half is Ricers and Reggaeton booming out of trunk mounted subwoofers. You can still have the traditional street rods, but limiting the show to traditional street rods leaves it sterile, unmoving, not going anywhere. Open the show up to everyone, and maybe they’ll also learn to love the traditional street rods. Sure, have the old timers, but have the young artists too! The only way to preserve hot rod culture, to really keep the spirit of John Milner alive, is to allow it to change and grow, to bring in young people customizing the cars that mean something to young people.
But the OGs, the NSRA Golden Oldies types, they have no interest in seeing things change. They don’t want Riced out Civics, they don’t want big subwoofers and Bad Bunny, they want what they’ve always had. And maybe they deserve that! Maybe the purity of that culture is worth it! But walking through the show, I’m very aware, viscerally aware, of the choice being made: the Street Rod show has chosen death over diversity. They’d rather the car show shrink than that it feature modern customs. They’d rather see it die than see it change. That’s the tragedy, walking around the show looking at these beautiful machines, and knowing that the culture that built them has rendered itself sterile, chosen not to reproduce itself for fear of change.
*This was, coincidentally, the film Lucas made immediately before becoming “the Star Wars guy” forever. It’s a cozy little realistic slice-of-life all-rounder of a film, no special effects to speak of. It’s fascinating to consider: if Lucas hadn’t made Star Wars would he have continued making movies like this for thirty years instead? Did we miss out on unmade masterpieces consumed by the Star Wars universe? I might write a bigger comment on the film later, the way it perfectly captures the really beauty and feelings of freedom of American youth, the unique Americana teenage culture of driving around with your friends that is disappearing every year, I wanted to include more of it here but this comment is already entirely too long.
**A forum comment I found from an old timer is the best summary on the topic of how fast Hot Rods were:
***Another example from my youth: Baseball Cards were something kids were supposed to care about. My dad bought me baseball cards and sort of informed me that little boys were supposed to like them. But whenever I actually played with them, he’d yell at me for ruining their collector value. I wasn’t allowed to flip them, shuffle them, make fake lineups, trade them: they were worth something. Because from the time my dad was a kid, his generation had made them collectable, made them valuable. As a result, I have no connection with baseball cards, really. I’m aware they’re collectibles, but I have no emotional attachment to them the way his generation did. The capitalist urge to create something special and market it, to make "collectibles," erodes and destroys the human meaning behind those collectibles.
Not sure how what this says about your overall thesis, but the "live fast, die young" car-guy/street-racing scene is still around in the Southwest at least, speaking from somewhat recent experience. They just have a basically non-existent online presence (outside of the occasional Instagram post), and are primarily made up of 14-25 year-old mostly Hispanic and black men. Heavy criminal elements, but what do you expect from a subculture whose "thing" is literally illegal. It also maintains a decent but smaller presence in some rural areas, mostly among Hispanics and Amerindians. Cars varied heavily, but each cultural group seems to have their favorite styles, whether that be speedy ricers or bouncing Caddilacs.
Just because all of us here are too internet-rotted to find them doesn't mean they aren't out there doing their thing. They don't usually show up at the car shows (even the ones that have no restrictions on the cars) because those are lame and don't tolerate the sort of insanity that the streets do. If you can't have a bunch of hot drunk women ride on top of your car while you burn donuts in a lot while 20 others do the same, is it even a car meet? If your car never leaves the ground, are you even racing?
The fact that it's mostly non-whites doing the real car-stuff is interesting to me though. The general draining of independence/gumption/wherewithal/determination/spirit inflicted by post-modernity really seems to have hit white people the worst (I mean just look at suicide rates.) At this point it's almost exclusively non-whites that I see out there doing the ballsy stuff, outside of a few old-timers that haven't lost the spark.
P.S. For anyone who gets the chance, flying down the road at 120+ MPH in the middle of the night in a shitbox knowing that you WILL die if you do the slightest thing wrong (or get unlucky) is an incredible experience and I 10/10 would recommend. This also goes for having your brakes go out on a steep downhill slope and knowing that you just have to ride your way down a mountain gradually gaining speed until you reach the bottom.
They are very much online. The unofficial meetups late night in parking lots don't happen through word of mouth. The number of weird project cars that have dedicated instas. Hoon culture spreads through videos of doing stupid shit. It's much like the old days but instead of VHS tapes passed around, zines and knowing a guy, the newer online variant of tiktok microuniverses, instas and group chats.
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Yes! That's exactly my thesis! If the old timers were willing to incorporate that modern street racing culture into their existing club structure, then they have a shot at continuing the existence of the club. Some of those guys might even come to appreciate each other's cars, over time, and see them as similar expressions of the same spirit and both worthy of celebration. Today's old timers were once yesterday's wild kids, the survivors of today's wild kids will be tomorrow's old timers.
But that would represent such a change from their existing choices that it seems like an unbridgeable gap. Which sentences the old timers to watch their subculture be extinguished.
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Most dangerous outdoor sports are overwhelmingly white with a few Asians. Look at mountain climbing or back country skiing or sky diving. Maybe it's not as dangerous as drunk street racing but it takes a hell of a lot more skill and physical fitness.
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Every modern generation has to come to terms with the fact that their world gets replaced, their traditions get tossed aside, and their life's work was ultimately worth very little to anyone except themselves.
It's another trick of modernity, where the constantly evolving industrial and technological society outpaces each generation and leaves them without any heirs or students to whom they can pass the mantle. In fact, seeing someone pick up their useless hobby to carry on the tradition would make a self aware person feel guilty and sad.
Prior to such a rapidly changing world, the bond between generations was held together through tools and technology that didn't get outpaced. That could be recycled and innovated again and again. The joy of cultivating a craft and knowing it will live on.
That being said a lot of people need to take a long hard look at themselves. Most of the things people devote themselves to today are useless junk. Prior to a more civilized world, having a useless hobby could very likely lead to something very bad.
The impulse we have to devote ourselves to things that work and to grieve their loss is a small reminder of just how far we are straying away from being human. We have impulses to grieve the lost world, but not to celebrate the fact it was lost under a pile of 'better' things.
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A couple of thoughts, as a car enjoyer:
I do believe there is still a modded car culture around these days, though yes, it probably involves taking an otherwise-good-enough factory car and adding new wheels and some other mostly-cosmetic modifications, backed up with some anime decals.
Similarly, I think the younger generations are also into old cars, though, yes, this probably takes the form of low-riders and such rather than street/hot rods. I think pre-1948 cars and such are just too inaccessible by their very-finite nature.
On the topic of taking Japanese cars and modding them for speed: much like with American cars, I believe this came about because the Japanese auto industry actually limited themselves to only so much HP per car, so design focus had to go into the rest of the vehicle's aspects and any tuners could pick up the slack after it left the dealership.
While the Kei cars are like that, the tax for cars larger than that was mostly based on displacement, hence VTEC and the widespread adoption of turbos 15-20 years before comparable American-designed cars would receive them.
He's referring I think to the Gentleman's Agreement among Japanese carmakers to limit their vehicles to 276hp, which held up to varying degrees for decades.
I for one wish it was universal that factory cars were 300hp max. Make it easy and legal to mod for more, but no warranty and no dealership. I'm vaguely shopping for a new car, and most of my picks land around there anyway.
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A word I hear more and more among car enthusiasts is "Special." As in "This car feels special" or "this model is special" or "driving feels like a special occasion." Car enthusiasm is less and less about raw performance, and more about find something that makes you say "wow" when you look at your driveway. That can be a classic evoking a time, an art car that has a very specific aesthetic, or performance mods that you did yourself.
It's less the Gentleman's Agreement and more the emissions and fuel economy regs that all automakers hadn't yet figured out, American econo-cars of the time were equally mod-able. Although there is a big dose of the geographic determinism that produces different car company cultures. America's Big Three were all Detroit based and products of the Midwest: big, flat, empty towns where you could floor it in a straight line any time you wanted and where you had to cruise across five hours of straight flat roads to get anywhere. BMW was the product of the Alps: curvy, twisty mountain roads where cornering was king. And Japanese carmakers were products of Japanese urban environments, where compact and practical had to co-exist with fun and exciting.
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This is a wonderful post. Thank you for making it; it's the sorts of beauty that makes me glad to be at home in this place, no matter the other material that comes and goes.
I have no incredibly deep other thoughts. The baseball card anecdote amused me, a little; a Dutch YA book includes a similar quip. An old, old man talks about the park ranger's folly: by fencing off pretty areas, telling kids not to climb trees, and being a general menace, he kills the sorts of enjoyment that drives kids into wanting to be park rangers. It's funny how this sorts of attitude can be seen across so many years and places, genuinely.
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I would just point out addressing the accessibility of performance and tuneability that there are very accessible 3s 0-60, 160mph+ factory vehicles for sub 20k USD. Super impractical as daily drivers if only because of things like snow and rain as well as nearly zero cargo space with very high injury and fatality rates from a complete lack of safety features, but they are still out there. Just not on four wheels. The smaller size and weight makes them more accessible for silly things like engine swaps (outside of dropping a performance motor in a clapped out old enduro/dirt it's a rarity though) and performance mods (though for various geometry and space reasons you can't exactly bolt on a turbo) but there is a bit less of that compared to car culture.
I don’t know where you guys all live, but there is a near constant stream of modded cars, side by sides, and crotch rockets going by my house all the time.
It’s actually very annoying.
(I live near a university)
Me too. Despite living in a boring suburb, people still feel determined to flaunt their small dicks by revving down the road at 11 PM. Oh wow, son, that stock Charger is so original!
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I live one block off a main street separating new development from an old neighbor with a history of poverty and crime so am also treated to nightly revving by people with more brake horsepower than brake performance. Modding a zero down 15% APY Charger with a fart can is not performance modding. Actual competitive performance is price prohibitive even with modern finance availability. And again, 600cc barely street legal modified track bikes are accessible, that was my main post.
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The reason people won't buy fast motorcycles is instructive as to why street racing is less common today: lack of balls.
I'll cop to it, that's why I don't own a motorcycle. I had a Kawasaki trail bike I was learning to ride when I was 17, 18 but then I got into a horrendous car accident. When I woke up in the hospital, the doctor told me essentially that if I didn't notice any effects in a month I was probably fine, but that concussions were cumulative and that I would be more suceptible to concussions in the future and they would potentially be more harmful. Instantly sold the bike, quit boxing. The risk of an accident that killed me or physically maimed me I could handle, but one that left me retarded? Too grim, I didn't have the guts.
Street racing slow cars at low speeds feels safer. A street rod that does the quarter mile at 80mph feels like something you can handle; doing it in a Tesla at 130-140mph feels insane. The quality of equipment has outstripped the drivers' perception of their own skills. This even though the newer car is safer at 100+ than the old jalopy was at 60.
To add, in most places there is A. more traffic and with that B. more cops on the roads and insurers that are less forgiving than in the past. Even in rural areas (and most teenagers don't live in rural areas, but either in cities with heavy traffic or suburbs that are likely to have plenty of bored cops) you'll get caught eventually if you make a habit of having too much fun, and my teenage hooliganism reached a fairly quick end upon getting slapped in handcuffs for speeding.
"Slow car fast" at least means you can hit the redline in second or third without going fast enough to be in "reckless driving" ticket territory whereas pushing something mundane by performance car territory like a Mustang or Challenger will get you "license revoked" territory quickly along with really outstripping the skill of your average driver (as compilation videos of Mustangs spinning out and crashing into stuff can attest).
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Lowriders and modded import cars are popular among young people. There will always be some small subset of the population interested in cars, but the type of car changes.
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Don't really have any feedback due to my complete lack of knowledge about the subject but I enjoyed reading your analysis and its an extremely interesting topic, and one which can be extrapolated to all kinds of divides between older and younger generations. My father is a huge fan of remote controlled airplanes and helicopters but he could never quite get me interested in them growing up. I find it difficult to enjoy something so intrinsically simple when i could just download the newest flight simulator from Microsoft and experience a superior version that is as close to a 1:1 recreation that can be achieved.
How does he feel about modern drones?
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Probably not, since he couldn't continue making Star Wars for thirty years either.
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Personally, I think both options are death. The fact of the matter is, as you correctly observe, Street Rods are an artifact from a very specific time and place, with conditions that are long since gone. And were they to choose "diversity", it would just lead to them getting chased out of their own hobby even sooner. Probably nearly instantly. Better to let them keep it to themselves until the last member dies, than have them suffer the heartbreak of having their hobby stolen from them, and themselves alienate from it, and then they die. Possibly sooner than they would have as a result of their devastating loss of community.
I agree, and this is something I've been thinking about for a while in terms of our larger culture. In the presence of any sort of incentives for growth or change, it's not clear how anyone or anything can meaningfully survive without first paying a huge one-time cost to conquer everything around it, then kill itself to some degree by removing its own ability to grow and change.
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I agree wholeheartedly. I don't view it as an easy choice. I don't think the Street Rodders owe it to the universe to endure Bad Bunny blaring from trunk mounted subwoofers to keep the show going a few more years, but the way I felt extinction coming, walking around that show looking at the visceral consequences of the choices made brought that to the front of my mind.
On the flip side, look at professional sports. Obviously my generation doesn't care as much about Mantle and Dimaggio and Berra, Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada and Andy Pettite were the Yankees of my youth. But because the Yankees and MLB and older fans at the Yankees Fan Club maintained that continuity and tradition, while also respecting the new players, and passed down the stories, Mantle and Dimaggio and Berra mean a lot to me, and signed photos of all three hang over my bar in my basement. Across sports you see the same thing: football fans of historic English clubs or NBA fans or NFL fans they all love to count up championships won before they were alive and brag about their team. If you continue to bring in the new generation and teach them the tradition, there is a path toward respecting the past while continuing to incorporate the new and grow.
I'm not sure which is the right choice and which the wrong one. Whether it's better to burn out or to fade away. But the choice feels so visceral.
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The list of options that are not death, when looking beyond the short-term, is, in fact, blank.
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They should found some preservation society, possibly a museum. It might not be curated and staffed from people cut from the same cloth, but antiquarians would see value here.
I doubt it.
I visited my hometown last weekend to meet a friend at a board game tavern. Across the street was the local museum. When I was a kid, they had some arrangement where you could donate, and they'd engrave your name on a brick. There was one there with my grandfather's name on it which I had wanted to find.
Or at least there was. At some point they had renovated it into some god awful post modern monstrosity and thrown them all away.
It also used to be a civil war museum, and it's been completely repurposed away from that as well.
If they had repurposed the museum into a board game tavern, there might be a clear-cut case that progress had been made. As it is, you describe and ebb and flow of human existence that is more melancholy and bittersweet.
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In summary:
The American Hot Rod Association gives an overly strict definition of hot rods which has been unwelcome to the newer generation of tuners. Due to factory cars being fast now, tuner culture has changed. The people still doing hot rods are getting old and dying off, and aren't interested in the types of things that have happened in response to this. They have chosen death over diversity.
My take:
Old hot rods are expensive AF, and like most cool things (hot rods and muscle cars are cool), the cost of them has gone to the moon. It's not that tuners are disinterested in...tuning, it's just that getting to the really high end is extremely expensive now. Still, having a car that will do 10 second quarter miles is seen as an extreme point of pride.
On top of this, most homes now either have a restrictive HOA, or an even more restrictive and powerful set of city "ordinances" which prohibit things like a teenager and his friends swapping an engine in their driveway. It's become de facto illegal in most places[1] to tune cars unless you can afford an enclosed workshop to do it in.
[1]: Obviously California is an exception to this rule where they have all but made it literally illegal to modify any aspect of you car and may or may not just impound it if you do: https://old.reddit.com/r/ElantraN/comments/11iks8c/final_most_likely_update_4_loud_exhaust_and_smog/
I can only wish that jackbooted thugs would impound the cars that shook my windows every day when I lived on a main road in California. Unfortunately, they didn't.
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I took a course in speed reading, and I got so good I read War and Peace in 3 hours! It's about Russia.
A lot of mid-tier street rods are actually getting harder and harder to sell, because young people (broadly defined) don't really care for them. This is the kind of dynamic I'm talking about: if you incorporate the newer forms of the hobby, some of those same people will respect and care for the older forms.
HOAs are the fucking worst. All the downsides of government and private industry combined into one.
Lmao, sign me up.
I'm curious about the libertarian argument here. Usually when I bring up HOAs libertarians start complaining about zoning etc. Idk, I think it's a thornier problem than most give it credit for.
My vote goes to the fact that we no longer have a shared moral fabric in modern Western society. Once you lose that things that were relatively simple become hard as hell to figure out.
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I think you've hit on one leg of a very important elephant.
I've noticed similar phenomena from gun clubs to veterans organizations to churches to beer-league sports. Commonly there is a life cycle, and if the initial stages are strong enough, the legacy can live on a while. But ultimately, unless external conditions are producing more of whatever fed that cause, it dies. I've noped out of a few organizations just because I didn't want to be the last guy holding the bag. When they start canvassing for board members, I'm done.
Some of it is just failing to adapt to the times, but if you adapt to the times too much, you can also crater your organization as it loses focus and splits. For example, if your Street Rod org started taking roller skates, it probably wouldn't help.
Another issue is that almost all organizations eventually end up being run by the people who can be assed to show up and do the clerical work necessary. This naturally concentrates power in the hands of a small minority who can steer the organization along their personal preferences. Occasionally this is done well, but that's a rarity.
A third is that any successful organization is going to generate good will and money, which are natural targets for idiots, grifters, con men, politicians and degenerates everywhere.
I had to actually google what a 'beer-league sport' is.
I expect no less at The Motte! :P
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The classic formulation of your final paragraph is Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths
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I think the arrival of the car represented something unique and special for young people, or especially young men, in America in the middle of the last century. Having moved to the new suburbs in the 40s and 50s, the car in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s (pre oil crisis at least) was freedom and liberty, it was teenagerhood itself in many ways. Today, the car is a commodity, fuel is much more expensive, and for the middle classes and above the 'freedom' of the teen years has been replaced by test prep, extracurriculars, helicopter parents, college applications, AP class homework and 'decide what you want to do with your life'. When my Dad was 16 or 17 (on the eve of the first OPEC embargo), he worked for summer and bought an old Cadillac. Today, not only is no job you do at 17 going to pay you enough to buy a decent car, a 'decent car' (that you buy with parental support, even) is going to be a 2000s Camry or equivalent highly functional, probably Japanese or Korean vehicle designed for middle class parents like your mom and dad. The opposite of cool, in other words. And I think that filters to 'cars in general'. Teslas are cool only because they're a tech product, like the iPhone (OMG it even plays Witcher 3 on it!).
Your baseball example is a similar thing. Like most East Coast men over the age of 50, every American male in my extended family of the Gen X-or-above generation loves baseball. Most (again, stereotyically) support the Mets ("the most Jewish team in the most Jewish sport" according to Tablet). Nobody I know my age does. Young people watch the NBA, NFL or NHL, especially basketball, maybe because it's more exciting and appeals more to the zoomer or millennial mind. Young people aren't interested in baseball, so why would they collect cards?
My uncle collects old rally cars and goes on (friendly) rallies with my cousins. It seems fun, but again, the cars cost him a hundred grand a year (and countless hours of work) to maintain (and more to buy), and my cousins aren't going to have that time or money or garage space until they retire in 40 years, if ever. Maybe if automation takes our jobs this kind of hobby will make a comeback (if UBI is enough to pay for maintaining the cars), but otherwise how could the average young, working person (without making extreme sacrifices) afford cars as a hobby?
I don't think I understand this part of your comment. I think you could buy either a very functional but uncool car like you describe, or a cooler car requiring maintenance along the lines of the old Cadillac, for $5k or so, which seems pretty achievable for a conscientious teenager to earn in three months at post-pandemic entry-level wages.
What's missing is that while you can get a cool car, actually objectively a much cooler car, for summer-job wages; having that cool car isn't meaningful in the same way it once was. In the old days, according to the old timers, having the fastest hopped-up car in town was a whole thing. It was status in itself.
Now having the fastest/coolest car is pay-to-win. Having money is a kind of status, but a different kind, and it isn't practically possible to boot-strap it.
FWIW, when I give teenage boys at the gym advice about buying a first car, I tell them that if they're buying a car to impress girls, the most impressive things are to keep it clean and make sure it starts. Nothing spoils a date like when your car breaks down. After that if you still have budget left, get a 4x4 truck or an old Wrangler and take her out on a dirt road in the mountains. The event will impress her more than any turbo-6 will.
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I don't think it's that simple. A teenager could buy a very old cool car that lacks many modern safety features (etc), but that's not really the same thing as buying a 1962 Cadillac in 1972, for example. Safety features that didn't exist then are now commonplace, and mom and dad usually get a say.
The combination of recent-enough-to-be-safe by modern standards, easily-ish maintained and cool is very rare on a teenager's budget. Post some examples if you think otherwise! And there's the matter that with oil inching back to $100/bbl, it has to be affordable for a teen to drive.
Toyota Celica. Mazda Miata is a bit more expensive, and for some reason the US got the wrong Honda Civic, not the fighter jet-looking one.
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I disagree. I recently bought a Mercedes E class from the late 00's for $4500. It runs great and didn't need any work. Oil changes are a little more expensive than they were in my camry and it takes premium gas but overall i wouldn't consider it expensive to maintain. I don't know if it's exactly what teenagers would consider "cool" these days but it's certainly cooler than my old camry. It's a luxury brand, and it rides very smooth.
Sweet car. Hope it runs well for you! That era of Mercedes just felt more special, more put together, than the new ones.
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I'm biased because I own one, but an 8th gen Civic Si can be found in reasonably good shape for $8-10K and bad shape for about $6K. It's not a fast car unless you put money into it, but it's fun to drive (8K RPM red line and VTEC, yo!), gets reasonably good gas mileage, and is reasonably easy to maintain (There's a Youtube video that tell you how to fix almost anything on it.) while having lots of airbags unlike the Fast and the Furious era cars from the 90s and early 2000s. A 7th generation Si isn't as much fun without mods (The stock one I had felt pretty slow and I traded out of it quickly but the other one I had with a 6 speed swap was super fun and felt like you were going fast.) but is basically an uglier Mini Cooper that's way more reliable.
An NB Miata (1999-2005) can be had in decent shape for $5-6K if you're willing to be cramped and have parents who don't care about safety, and in my experience a mildly tarted up one gets more attention than much nicer cars that cost more money. Like the Civic, you can find a video that'll show you how to fix almost anything on Youtube.
The funny thing about the MX5 frames up until maybe the ND is that you can fit a small block in there only needing to slightly modify or relocate the radiator and properly mate it to the drive train. Which is not that difficult a task and the weight balance does not change by more than a few percent forward.
Yes, the LS-swapped Miata is our generation's Shelby Cobra. I'd love to drive one.
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Given the area, that the cooper is automatic and its age, it's quite possible it's a unicorn listing rather than serious issues. There's probably several hundred to a couple thousand in rubber/plastic wear parts that need replacing though. Even low mileage those things are somewhat maintenance heavy just year to year.
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And it's Mini. Worse it's BMW Mini. While the original is absolutely cool, after 2000 it is the car for Golddiggers that can't land the properly rich guys.
Please don't leave comments that are just one-line sex jokes.
ETA: Oh, wait--this is one of those sex jokes where the poster didn't know they were writing a sex joke until after they had posted it. Never mind.
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The pre-48 era of cars is also an era where you are pretty much doing bespoke parts and full custom builds, which hurts the wallet even more than when it spawned tuner culture.
I expect that the reprogrammed and custom ECUs that define tuners are going to have a lot more legs than you express in this post as well, particularly as modern cars get scrapped due to obscure and poorly designed CANBUS problems at higher rates.
Kustom Kulture and the "live fast, die young" mindset is also to a degree what the streetrods you visited very much were created to exclude, as expressed by an attempt to family friendly. I don't think that the aging demographic there is going to much speak to that subculture. They might more be associated with motorcycles now tho. Car meets are still fairly regular in most of the country, facilitated by social media, and I know of some deeper levels where street racing is organized.
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I think you got it quite wrong. It was never about pure performance. It was always about the rush of the wins during the journey.
Do you know which is the most condescending, obnoxious thing in modern cars - the check engine light. It is the equivalent of the ban on twitter of old and Facebook - with you break our guidelines without telling you what is wrong. Not only it doesn't refuse to tell you the error - with 2 screens in my car there is not a single place, submenu or whatever where I can read the code, let alone the description of the error. You the user are unworthy of even knowing what is wrong with your property.
There is this meme/observation - in the 60s the car manuals included how to adjust the valves, Today the warning is to not drink from the washing fluid.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI - this is ad for Chevrolet from 1937 that gives the best explanation how differential works. This is a culture that creates petrolheads.
In days of old it was basic expectation of masculinity to know how a car works in detail, to be able to repair it (or at least keep it moving until you get to repairman) and maintain it. Nowadays there are guys that brag with their inability to change a flat tire (true story).
We don't live in a culture that can generate interest in cars. Or PCs for that matter. While the PC is still quite open it is too monoculturish (or oligoculturish) to actually generate deep interest in custom builds. The society tries its best to discourage the tinkerer, the inventor. Except in the confines of the big corporations. We don't want people to actually interfere with our plans for planned obsolescence I guess.
My washing machine has 12 programs. And there is absolutely nowhere info to be found about what time they take, the rpm and difference between them. Let alone regulate it or change it. My customer steam oven has all kinds of awesome fancy programs and yet not a simple way to create my custom one.
Nowadays we live in the opposite culture - knowing is discouraged. The car works by magic, the iphone works by magic, the washing machine too.
Huh? Put in an obdii reader and check the code. Tells you exactly what's wrong.
Which is a third-party prosumer item that not everyone has.
That's the point. You shouldn't need a third-party item to understand where the fuck-up is. Even if it's a hidden option in the background, cars come natively with enough computers that you should be able to pull up an error-code read-out without spending additional money.
Instead, we get new cars and trucks with 18 different cameras built in so the software can construct a to-down view when backing up and then wonder why everything is so expensive nowadays.
Grousing about a $100 tool for a car that cost thousands doesn't really make sense. Not everyone has a wrench set either. The obdii scanner pinpoints the issues much better than a few gauges on the dash ever could - it's a huge step up from how things used to be.
Cpi for new cars was flat from the late 90s until covid, so new cars actually got cheaper in real terms. Before that, prices followed general inflation.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETA01
Also, nobody can force you to buy a new car (it's against the law!).
It makes perfect sense. I'm already paying thousands for said car - why does it not include the necessary software already?
If I wanted to get a new car to replace the one I have(I don't), I couldn't even go with the latest make and model as they literally don't release them in America any more.
Nor am I skeptical that I could purchase one with similar performance and at a similar price. The MRSP for the model I own has gone up, not down. That's not normal.
Hopefully I won't have to find out any time soon.
Cars don't come with wrench sets either. What contempt for the user!
You indeed should not be skeptical, because until covid as I said car prices were getting cheaper in real terms for twenty years.
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I don't think either of us is wrong, a journey needs a destination to have meaning. Performance might be more MacGuffin than goal, but you need a MacGuffin to animate the characters to pursue the actions that create the plot. Without a goal, your journey becomes a walkabout, that of a Flaneur, and few people share that temperament.
The speed might not ultimately have been the fun part, but achieving and pursuing the speed was the motivating force behind the whole culture.
I was viewing mostly your paragraph about how fast modern cars are at factory defaults hurts the hobby. It doesn't in my opinion. Sorry if I wasn't clear. The same way a sharpener takes a cheap knife for fun - he knows it won't beat the Shigefusa or Sakai Yusuke - the high come from the improvement of the original car. It is the relative not the absolute performance of the car that moves the tinkerers.
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Isn’t the engine light strictly more information than you’d have had in an older vehicle?
All your same diagnostics still work. You can go pop the hood and observe, shit, I’m out of blinker fluid. Time to walk to the nearest phone booth and call for a tow.
I bet it’s easier to hack new washer cycles, too. Back in my day you only had one knob and one button.
No. While the ecu has a lot more information it is hidden. In the old soviet lada and moskvich you had a oil pressure gauge. The design was a lot more in your face.
The check engine light is like your wife being angry with you. What is wrong - if you don't know, no need to tell you. But something is wrong. Give me the fucking error code in plain sight. It was the same with windows when they changed the BSOD to smiley. Why ?
I doubt it. Manufacturers go to great deal to obscure the raw parameters - like RPM, duration and so on. Why?
So…which of those raw parameters was available in the good ol’ washer? From where I’m standing, if you desperately wanted to tune your washer, too bad. Today there’s at least a chance that the OEM left an open port somewhere in the machine. It has strictly more features than its predecessor, even if it doesn’t include all the ones you want.
The loss of an oil gauge is a shame. And a surprise—my car still has one! Why do you think they took it out? My guess would be cost-saving, or maybe wanting a cleaner visual presentation. Arguing that it was a corporate plan to discourage amateur maintenance…well, I find that less likely. There are plenty of better ways to make working on your car less appealing; just ask BMW.
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I’ve often thought that the lack of such maker cultures both in STEM and in the arts hurts the ability of the next generation of people to get excited about making things themselves. Everything is left to the professional, to the pro STEM guy to make an app for that, or for the artist to create the kind of content people want. I think some of the trouble comes from the laws. If someone does something stupid with their device settings and either breaks the device or injures themselves, the company might be liable for that. In the case of the arts, most mainstream characters and concepts are copyrighted to long past the lifetime of anyone who grew up when the concept was new.
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An increasing number of new cars don't even come with a spare tire, without which the skill is not necessarily useful. On the other hand, modern tires are far more reliable than our grandparents', and run-flat tires aren't that bad, from what I hear.
And it's not like most folks can change the tire on the rim at home anyway: that's a specialized skill these days involving some specific large power tools and esoteric knowledge of installing TPMS sensors correctly. And used tires have specific proper disposal requirements too.
I'm not sure I disagree with your take completely, but it's also interesting to see the grind of reliability engineering and the division of specialized labor make observable progress within my own lifetime.
Maybe not a full size spare, but compact spares are standard on 2023/2024 Camrys, Corollas, Accords (the one big exception of the four being hybrid models only have flat repair kits) and Civics (the 4 most popular not-SUV, not-truck cars of 2023).
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It's not that it is skill, it is the equipment for the rimjob (pun intended), but lifting a car, unscrewing 4-5 bolts, changing, putting bolts again, running till you get to the closest shop is useful. And it requires less than 60 seconds of learning.
From my experience modern cars are reliable until they aren't and they make sure that in that situation you are completely helpless.
I do my own oil changes and brake work, but I refuse to change flats on the road. Not because I don't know how to do it, but because the scissor jacks cars come with are absolute garbage and rather than dick around with one of these in the rain on the side of a busy road I'd rather just call someone to do it for me for free. At home I have a floor jack so it's not an issue, but if I didn't have a garage and instead, say, had to work on my car while it was parked on the street, I'd probably take it somewhere.
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Unsure if you are talking about the manufacturers of PCs or the enthusiast.
All the same, I do miss the days when the various manufacturers had more interoperability. Now you pick and AMD or Intel processor, and they must use a small range of AMD or Intel motherboard chipsets. It's all very homogenized.
I think the peak of enthusiast computer building was probably Socket 7. You had chipsets from Intel, ALi, SiS or VIA. You could use CPUs from Intel, AMD, Cyrix and a few other also rans. You could do all sorts of goofy stuff with clock multipliers and the front side bus. I'm still running a Pentium 233 MMX at 2.5 x 100 instead of 3.5 x 66.
You still had a plethora of motherboard chipset manufacturers for a while even after that. Nvidia got in the game for a hot minute. I'm not sure who hung on longest? Maybe VIA? I see they kept plugging along with Intel until the P4 era, and then AMD until AM2.
None the less it's all pretty boring now. You pick AMD or Intel, then throw the whole damned thing away in 3 or 4 years for a new socket. And often not because new hardware has really gotten all that better, but because Windows has gotten so shit it's slowed your PC to a crawl.
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Not to excuse the atrocious incapacity of your screens, but your car should also have an OBD2 port, right? For $20 you can plug in a handheld reader (or bluetooth dongle to use your phone as the reader) and see what internal code triggered the light.
And this is what I do. But once again - it shows the attitude towards the driver and the owner.
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I'm actually curious, what exactly is the brag here they were making? I've encountered people who can't change their own flat tires, but I've yet to encounter one who was anything less than sheepishly ashamed of this, much less proud enough to brag about this lack of ability on their part. Is it just that they enjoy such a luxurious life that they can just throw money at people to do this for them, even in unplanned emergencies?
I'm reminded of anecdotes I've heard from teachers mentioning that their students today don't understand computer filesystems. Everything is just done via app, and the idea of using a browser to download a file to a folder on their hard drive, then navigating to that folder in an explorer program, copying the file to another folder where it needs to be, and opening it with another application or whatever is completely foreign to them. It sort of makes sense given the environment in which they grew up and learned computers, and it seems similar to my own attitude towards cars, which is that they really are just
a black boxmagic, and if something goes wrong, I go to my localmechanicmagician to get it fixed. Because learning the magic myself just seems like more trouble than it's worth. When I was learning computers, I had to learn the filesystem to actually accomplish anything. Now, kids don't have to, so they don't.I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing or either.
Imagine you grow up in an conservative area where boys & man are all interested in cars, and being able to change tires is seen as the bare minimum of manliness. You're an awkward nerd that doesn't like cars but is good with computers.
20 years later, all the kids that made fun of you in school for not caring about cars are at best suburb normies and at worst still live with their parents. You went to google and now make literally 5x as much as the majority of them, while still not being able to change a tire.
It's not about the thing itself, it's about what kind of person you are. And young people pick this up as well, they see that being able to change tires is basically meaningless and anyone being proud of it is probably a loser at everything that matters, so they countersignal how bad they're at it.
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It went something like this - I had flat tire (due to stupidity on my part), the girl I was in the car with posted some kind of story on the social media. Some fuckboy wrote something among the lines her - hey hun, do you know how to change a tire. Her answer was - no, you? . His answer was - no I have guys for that.
For the other part - it was the damned iphone. Because android was open for learning and still is. But apple are actively hostile towards viewing their device as something different than magic.
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I love the irony that baseball cards from your father's era are valuable because kids played with them (and ruined them) and Moms threw out the collection later, while baseball cards from my era are still totally worthless because everyone from my childhood saved them in archival quality protetive materials (I still remember kids arguing about the merits of various cardboard boxes and plastic pockets sheets) for long term storage. All of our 1989 Ken Griffey Jr Upper Deck #1 were going to be worth a fortune because they were perfectly preserved.
Now I think sports collecting is driven by gamblers hoping to find ultra rare lottery prize like chase cards.
They are worthless because also too many were made and there is no community around them. MTG and Pokémon have a large community/fandom and utility in that they can be played. Powerful, rare cards are valuable for their in-game utility. baseball cards and comic books are static things with a much smaller community and no utility.
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The exact same thing happened to comic books, of course. At least that has the advantage of it not being too expensive to read old (but-not-too-old) series.
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Part of this is that anything sold intended to be a collectors item is generally made in too large quantities to be really rare. Think of that Beanie Baby divorce photo from 1999. On the other hand, I've heard that those originals are actually starting to trend up in value, so who knows.
I try not to collect things without specific uses, but I appreciate that others enjoy doing so. Sometimes it's actually valuable to historians.
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