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

I don’t agree with the horse analogy. We aren’t going from a horse to an ICE car. We are going from a horse that has different legs and eats a different food - but is heavier and isn’t steered with reigns and doesn’t have a bit between its teeth and is laden with superfluous tat that adds nothing to the experience of riding it but impresses people in the same way an iPhone impresses people.
We have a long way to go before the electric car is a truly cheap and green way to get around. They will never sound interesting, or have as much character as a petrol car. People talk of how cheap it is to charge - it won’t last. As soon as the government’s start to feel the loss on fuel duty you can bet your ass they’ll tax the poop out of electricity and/or roads.
With regards to the automotive industry needing variation I believe that in this day and age we are moving away from it - sure it seems like we have more choice than ever but actually manufacturers are moving further and further to standardised modular products - the only difference is the body details and the badge. They are broadly the same other than that. This will only get worse with the electric car. Look at Tesla. Outside of the exterior design what’s different between an S, an X and the next one? A fancy pair of doors that take forever to open and provide little improvement or benefit over a conventional door and are just a gimmick that adds another electrical item to go wrong and create an expensive repair down the line… and a jacked up ride height.

I’ll keep my ‘89 mini with it’s twin carbs that are connected directly to the throttle pedal, with feelsome steering that tells me everything about the road I’m on, that corners with an amazing amount of grip, a 1 litre engine that loves to rev and sounds different throughout the rev range and has a sweet spot at 4500 rpm to die for and that occasionally pops on the over run and a 4 speed manual shift that is oh-so satisfying and pedals spaced perfectly to facilitate the art of the well executed heel and toe downshift, that smells of oil, petrol and metal and requires being properly set up to run as well as it does.

Tell me again about your Tesla’s latest firmware update?