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

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 :)