Why we can't live in the past any more #blogpost

10 Oct 2016

There are many wonderful people in the automotive community. And there are also some terrible people. There are young people and old people, people from all sorts of backgrounds, people from every single corner of the planet. Without these mostly brilliant people, there would likely be no such thing as ‘performance cars’. And that is why living in the past is only going to ensure our demise.

Imagine if, in the late 1800s, horse enthusiasts decided that they didn’t really like this whole concept of internal combustion. Horses had worked perfectly well for years. They lasted for a reasonable amount of time, and they still got the work done. What was the point in spending money on a more complicated way of doing things?

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

Over the hundred years since cars became widely accepted, they have become almost unrecognisable. In just a hundred years, we have made tremendous breakthroughs in just about every aspect of what a car is. A car is now better than a horse in every single logical way.

And that’s why I have such an issue with the shape of the automotive community today.

We constantly look backwards, worshipping cars that came out twenty or thirty or forty years ago, whilst simultaneously looking down upon new technologies that may produce a change just as pronounced as the one from horses to cars.

We complain that electric cars will be the end of automotive culture, ignoring the fact that they are even more interesting, even faster, and, with enough effort, even more fun, than anything powered by petrol. We constantly make fun of the Prius, conveniently forgetting that without it, we wouldn’t have the P1, Laferrari, or 918. We wouldn’t have modern LMP1 cars that are capable of giving F1 cars a run for their money. We wouldn’t have the BMW i8. We wouldn’t have the Koenigsegg Regera.

But there’s another idea that, if possible, terrifies some car enthusiasts even more.

Autonomy.

People are one of the biggest problems with driving today. So, we remove them from the equation. Boom. Less traffic and fewer crashes. That’s what we want, right?

But, I hear you splutter, we want to drive our cars! We want to control our cars ourselves! If we want car enthusiasm to survive, we have to be able to drive!

I’m not disagreeing.

Autonomy should not and will not be enforced. There will still be the option to drive cars ourselves, only in a world with less traffic and fewer bad drivers. And we can still use autonomy to our advantage.

Let’s say you’re at a track day. You go out for a bit, and do a few nice laps. You feel like it’s possible to go faster, but you’re not sure how hard you can push. So you could turn on autonomous mode, and let the car do a few laps. It will be able to drive faster than professional drivers. It will brake at exactly the right place, accelerate at exactly the right place, turn in at exactly the right place. And that will help you to drive faster. And you will have more fun.

Some people also say that automotive design was at its best decades ago. And, while I will be the first to admit that most classic cars are absolutely gorgeous, modern cars are just as, if not more, beautiful. Well, most of them.

Just look at a modern Mazda. Any single one. Mazda has managed to do the impossible and actually made a SUV look good. Jaguar has managed to do the same. Infiniti isn’t doing too bad either. It is difficult to find a genuinely bad-looking car on sale today.

The 2010s will go down in history as one of the golden eras of automotive design.

But electric motors and autonomy and wonderful exteriors aren’t the only new things out there. And that’s why the automotive industry is what it is.

Without diversity, automotive culture really is finished. We need variation. We need to be able to adapt. And that’s what we’ve gotten bad at.

Thanks for bothering to read my little rant :)

Comments

The minute they outlaw driving internal combustion engine powered vehicles is the minute I start living off the grid. Deep in the Alaskan Wilderness.

I absolutely agree with you, in 20 - 30 years, people who look back at the F40 being one of the best cars ever made, will say the P1, 918, LaFerrari were the golden shrine of automotive technology.

I agree with you, even tho how much i love classic cars and internal combustion cars. This is a well written post and should be noticed a bit more MattRobinson

Sorry, but I strongly disagree with your post.
I know that enthusiasts exaggerate the love for petrol cars and hate on the electric ones too much, but it’s the same with EV camp. Both parties have to look more realistically at the situation.
We look at the cars 20-30 years and so on for one thing only - they have soul and character that most of today’s car don’t have. And it’s the same with current range of EV cars and yes the sound has big effect on that. But for me that comparison is wrong.
I consider myself car enthusiast and when I let the feelings raise over the logical thinking I too want to hate on the EV, yet I see now that they are not bad at all. And they’ll be great commute cars, family cars and s.o., even better in that role than the current petrol cars.I accept that and as soon as Model 3 or some other EV of that sort gets a bit lower in price I’ll probably buy one as family car. But the electric cars are not and will never be the same object of passion and praise like the petrol ones. Yes, there will be enthusiasts loving them like the gaming community that loves some super spec Laptop, but it will never be the same - trust me, we won’t see some future Clarkson saying that for him Tesla model ZX is like a living and breeding creature.
And we’ll be lucky if the government let’s us drive our petrol cars on the roads and not only on the tracks.
Sorry but the part about the autonomous car helping you on the track is nonsense - it’s like playing those old car games where the computer gives you the racing line and tells you were to brake and accelerate. The fun part is finding your own limit not using a computer to guide you and babysit you.

If you think that proper cars won’t be banned once the autonomy technology gets far enough, you’re delusional.

Does’nt even need to be a ban: insurance will be cheaper for self driving.

I’m really not against electric cars, the thing is goverments are literally forcing us to use them and to throw away our combustion cars and that’s the main problem. We are all kids, when we get forced to do/use something we reject it right away.

Electric cars will be fun? I get your point and I 100% understand that car culture and racing will have to adapt. The thing is: i want to adapt, but I cant. I just dont get excited for electric cars. I know the Tesla has crazy performance, the Rimac is even crazier. I know that it is amazing engineering that modern formula 1 cars need so much less fuel and still have around 900hp out of these tiny engines, but all of these just dont excite me. There is no passion in me for these things. V10’s screaming to a 20.000rpm redline is what gets me going. The most importing thing about a car is that it excites me, not its performance. And electric cars cant, and I sadly think never will, excite me. The sad reality for me.

Totally agree. Electric cars have no gears, no noise and no engine personality. They take away some of the most important parts of cars in a passion sense and don’t add anything. I literally couldn’t care less about the fact that they are super quick to 60mph. It’s totally irrelevant.

Electric cars aren’t for me. No gearboxes or engine noise and linear power delivery just screams dull. Progress is fine but unless electric cars can offer something truly different rather than just saying, hey look instant Torque! I can’t say I’m excited……

NO… NO NO NO. Nah, fck off with that sit. I disagree solemly with every single point.

Golden era of cars already went past us few decades ago. What is left is greed, posers and disappointment spiced with boredom.

I cant and i wont tolerate the direction we are heading towards.

Proceed.

Golden era of cars already went past us few decades ago? Maybe for Euro and JDM, but American sport is seeing its golden years right now. USDM is now king of the car community.

http://www.chevrolet.com/content/dam/Chevrolet/northamerica/usa/nscwebsite/en/Home/Vehicles/Performance/2017_Camaro_ZL1_Reveal/Model_Overview/01_images/2017-chevrolet-camaro-zl1-sports-car-mo-mh-1480x551-em.jpg