The bit of off-gassing below predates this blog, but that's okay, because it pretty much reflects the philosophical direction in which Reactionary Motors is headed.
What it doesn't do is outline the scope of things about old cars I hope to cover in posts to come, and probably gives the impression that I'm just going to whine a lot about good old days I was too young to appreciate as they happened, or missed completely by foolishly being born after they were over.
Nor am I the final word on anything automotive, even if I tend to write that way. There are everyday experts out there who bleed oil and weep gasoline and sooner or later after I have posted some bit of questionable opinionated piffle that I should have better researched, they're going to call me on it. Against that day, I say now: Hey! Get your own blog! because I'll probably be too busy back-pedalling then for it to have any effect.
P.J. O'Rourke has claimed that America's romance with the automobile is over; that in essence what we have now is the equivalent of a marriage of convenience thirty years in. As one still smitten with the cars of my youth, I have to agree. None of the current crop of automobiles – and by current I mean anything designed or built after 1976 – arouses in me anything remotely covetous. I know that the technology squeezed into each and every new car is vastly advanced over the 3800 pound, chrome-laden, befinned behemoths that I love – and I don't care. I know that air bags, crumple zones and the fact that true hardtops lie more than three decades in the past all make my life safer – and I don't care. I know that modern handling is superior, acceleration quicker and that new cars will sail past two out of the three gas stations that I keep in business – and I don't care. America, and by the cultural extension that we try to pretend does not exist, Canada as well, fell out of love with the automobile because the automobile fell out of love with us first. But I am still in thrall to the cars that came before the romance faded.
As a class, new cars are all about guilt – theirs and ours. They apologize for existing in every line and plane of their sheet metal, and they expect you to apologize for wanting them to look good. They achieve their high mileage at the cost of character, pay for it with bland sameness and compromise. They coddle their drivers, treat them not as owners, pilots or commanders, but as weak children to be swaddled, belted and cocooned away from danger. We're fragile cargo, and they never let us forget it. Claiming the best of intentions, they smother us. Every possible danger of any sort overrules every possible styling choice. Their designers are enslaved to bureaucrats and legislative nannies, to pressure groups and those who use the environment as a club to batter everyone else. They are things of approved financing and bank loans, leases and payments, of crowded roads, crowded parking lots, cramped afterthought garages and and family trips that cannot succeed without on-board DVD payers and built-in GPS. In short, cars became our mothers and not our mistresses.
They are slaves to their computers, their sensors and their fault codes. They are complicated beyond the reach of a shade-tree mechanic, and ruinously expensive to fix because everything under the hood or dash is so close to everything else. The cars that mean anything to me don't have to be torn apart just to get the transmission out.
Almost every new car has air conditioning, with all its concomitant costs and potential for mechanical failure – because none of them have anything as old-school as vent windows or that happy arrangement that brought fresh air in from the cowl to let it eddy around your feet on a hot summer day. Put the windows down on the freeway if the AC dies and all you get with today's car is an annoyingly loud slipstream that doesn't actually come into the car – or some painful cavitation effect where the air is sucked out, then forced back in multiple times per second until you swear in frustration and run the glass back up and just swelter. You're going over the speed limit anyway, so your agony will be over soon – your new car feels slow and under-used at 120 kph and can easily do 140. And it will, without you noticing it, right up until the police nail your hide for speeding. The trip is just something to get through. The designers know you don't want to be there.
And you know you're going to need AC; they're all sweat boxes without it. Isn't that sort of anti-gas saving?
You don't plan on driving your new car to the point where the air conditioner fails? That's what maintenance, trading in, moving up, leasing something new is all about? You are right: all of that is perfectly valid in the face of a breakdown by a mobile appliance with which you have no personal connection. But my point is that we are out of love with the car because new ones allow us no personal connection.
Once upon a time, you had overwhelming choice when you bought a car; given all the possible models and options of colour choice, interior trim, mechanical parts and accessories; Chevrolet could have done its entire 1957 production run and not made two absolutely identical cars. Now the palettes are minimal, interiors limited, restrained, unimaginative and with no choice beyond cloth or leather, maybe two colours of each. When was the last time you saw a new black car with a red interior? When was the last time you walked into a dealership and could order one that way, if you wanted it?
Old cars of the sort I love may have lied to us, when you judge their actual performance against the exuberance implied in their sheet metal – but new cars are earnest and sincere and unforgivably dull. They have gone in exactly the opposite direction – their superior performance is undone by the spirit in which they were made. They don't say: “Jump in and the drive to a better place starts the moment we're under way!”; they say: “There is no better place.” They say: “This is as good as it gets, and we're not going anywhere until you buckle up.” They say: “You can't afford the luxury of personal space, and what's more, you don't have the right to expect it.” They say: “There is no God but Government Standard, and Ralph Nader is its prophet.”
There have been a few attempts by the car designers over the last decade to win back the public with throwback automobiles, so few that I can name them all in one easy go: the Viper, the VW Beetle, the Prowler, the new Challenger, Mustang, PT Cruiser, HHR, T-Bird and Camaro. Some of them come closer than others in evoking what we have lost, but most fall short for one simple reason. They just look like our lost loves, and only kinda sorta at that. Under the skin, which never goes into full bore seduction, are the same insanely expensive complexities of design, of interference from rampant nannies with their yards of bubble wrap, mandated bumper heights, CAFE standards and roll-over tests that you find in the ugly stepsisters. Not one of them dares to be the dangerous girl you ought to leave alone, but all of them pretend to be, or at least to know her. And these cars fill a small niche market, and their parent companies are forever threatening to take them out of production, or already have done so.
The companies tease us; the new Challenger started out as a proper hardtop, and shows up in production with a solid B pillar, to keep happy somewhere an appointed government standards weasel. Heaven forebear that a lawyer might sue because we want an unbroken body line with the windows rolled down, or are old enough to know and accept the risks that implies.
And the land yachts, the status cars, the twenty feet of steel that told the world you had made it as an adult – nobody has any plan to bring them back. It's all neo-muscle cars, or little cutesy things celebrating the cult of the perpetual teenager. I have no complaints about muscle cars, save that they were only ever half of the story, and not the definitive answer to what driving in the 50's and 60's was all about.
Human beings are not happy when caged – but in the modern world, there is no frontier left that most of us can reach. In truth even when there was a frontier, most of did not go to it. It was enough to know that we could. The automobile used to promise four hundred horsepower motors to take us there, with the wind blowing in our hair every inch of the way.
