Cars are cool. One global reminder of the interest people have in cars is the ubiquitous summer car show. I don’t mean the cars and coffee events, although those are great. I mean the cars displayed on the lawns with the little signs stuck in the ground in front of each bumper and the owner proudly sitting in a bag chair nearby. I have attended them since I was a kid, and still find them interesting– just ask my wife as to my interest in, “yet another car show”.
As boomers age, I am glad to see younger enthusiasts coming in the gates. Their passion is for 80’s and 90’s cars, and there were some good ones. I’m also glad to see that everyone is uniformly trying to forget the ‘lean years’ for good cars, when engines were choked by catalytic converters and 5 mph bumpers stuck out like park benches. #mercurymonarch.
What will be the future of the summer car show once electric autonomous cars kick in? The V12, V10, V8, V6, turbo L4 engines will be long gone from production cars by then. Long live the electric motor and then, there will be silence. Will the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2048 be quiet? Will the Pebble Beach Concours be a sea of metalic painted pods? Will old gear heads sit around and remenisce about the poor infotainment systems from ‘long ago’? I don’t think so. People love cars and their personality too much. Today, we admire cars from 60, 80 or 100 years ago. In the future we will do the same.
1958: “Daddy, what’s that crank on the front for?” “That’s how they started them back then.”
I consider myself a gear head. I’ve owned a few cars, worked on a few more, driven many and can name most of them. That makes me a gear head with lower case letters. The Gear Heads are much more advanced. To earn their capital letters, they rebuild engines in their garage and fabricate parts with a welder. I knew a real Gear Head once that had an engine dynomometer in his basement– no joke. Definitely a pedigree potentially worthy of an ‘all caps’ designation. In the future, what are we going to do? For the new cars, we may have to turn in our socket tools, welders and boxes of hard-to-get spare parts because it will all be about code real soon. But, we will still love the old ones.
2018: “Daddy, what’s that stick on the floor for?” “That’s how they shifted gears back then.”
Today, when someone lights up the tires at the Woodward Dream Cruise in Detroit every August, the police promptly issue them a ticket. Pretty limiting but people still like to do it and like to see it done. In the future, enthusiasts and gear heads alike will still like daring performance even if it is controlled and outlawed. Acceleration and cornering fun from great cars may be limited to ‘Experience Centers’ located far from public roads or reduced to ‘the video thrill ride’ sponsored by some salty snack. But, we will still want to experience it.
The autonomous era is coming. It will improve safety and lives will be saved. We will replace distracted drivers and idiots with cars that get it right. That narrative is hard to argue from a ‘needs of the many’ point of view and it most certainly means the person in 2048 will have to seek some special events to go see cool cars.
Am I fighting the future? No. It will come and I won’t get in its way. As a matter of fact, my day job is about helping it happen. As a part of making it happen, I believe there will still be a place for passion and personality in cars. Cars will have to remain distinct and unique in the future as they all chase the common denominators of connected, electric, autonomous and shared. A Nissan and a Nio must have greater differentiation than just four letters in a nameplate.
2048: “Daddy, what’s that big round thing for?” “That’s how they steered them back then”.
The racing circuit will change too. There will be no more drivers with personality, swagger and rock star status. In fact, there will be no more drivers at all. We may all be cheering for the autonomous race car with our favorite colored paint. The software engineers in the pits will then be the rock stars.
The gear head will summon his or her autonomous ride, go to the festival or the track in the summer and smile and enjoy the cars of yesterday. We did this years ago to see the old cars. We did it this summer, to see the old cars. We will do it in the future as well, for many of the same reasons. Our passion for automobiles and the individual personalities they bring will live on. The only thing that will change is what will be considered an old car. In the future, we will admire the old cars; the cars that used to be so quaint that you had to drive them. The love for automobiles will continue.
2118: “Daddy, what are those big round black things for?” “That’s what they used when cars had to move on the ground all the time, before they could fly”.
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