One thing I remember from TV was Barry Meguiar talking about car guys, or as he even told a little girl who wrote him about her passion for cars, “Even girls can be car guys”. But this seems to have been a dying thing, and maybe it’s the technology in cars or just that the fact that most old cars that are still new enough to be cheap (not like the classic muscle cars that have become high dollar buys) just aren’t cool enough to turn into hot rod project cars anymore. But the whole car guy scene is just dying out.
And I’m not just talking about the physical working on and having of a car, but just that passion, and the iconography that came along with it. I guess this was all inspired when I was thinking of all the cool logos that used to be on the plain white t-shirts you could buy at Pep-Boys, or the stickers in the back windows of muscle cars to brag about the parts they were running, and how over time these things just kind of silently went away. It’s much along the lines of how products on TV don’t seem to have jingles like they did when I was growing up. You know *bursts into song* “The best part of waking up, is Folgers in your cup!”, or “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid..”. It’s like the whole culture of products have gone away, and so has the desire of advertising through catchiness, as it seems advertising has gone the route of brainrot annoyance. I mean when was the last time you saw any of these once glorious logos?
And not just the logos, but the art in general, there’s no modern day Von Dutch, or Big Daddy Roth making Rat Fink stuff. Car culture has just fizzled out and died, it seems like most cool custom old cars are build buy a handful of builders, and the kids are just throwing NOS, and fart can exhausts on things, and putting graphic stickers on the cars. I guess they would have like “Amazon” and “Temu” stickers on their cars these days… AliExpress Racing.
So let me get to what my whole point of this is, so this whole culture dying out has brought about a serious issue, not just the camaraderie of motorheads working on an old V-8 together while heavy metal music blasts from a Sears boom box in the corner of the dusty garage, but just the fact that the whole maintaining of cars is a thing of the past. People used to actually change their oil, and inspect their cars, and take care of them. Today’s kids are told “oh this car was built to run forever” or “It’s just broken in” and then they just drive it until something breaks. Could you imagine if the car care mentality of the classic and muscle car era was applied to this technology of today.
I’ll come clean though, I’m 50 years old as I write this, and I really don’t like crawling under my Subaru to drain oil, I don’t even like jacking up my motorcycle to change the oil. So in a way I’m just as guilty as the kids. But I do get hands on enough to constantly know the condition of my vehicles. It wasn’t long ago that I caught the firestone place trying to rip me off on unnecessary car repairs when I took my old truck in for an alignment. “We can’t align this until the steering stabilizer is replaced”, sorry buddy, but I know enough about cars to know that doesn’t affect alignment. Or when they tried saying my taillight was burned out when I check my head and tail lights a few times per week.
But it’s like I was telling someone how much it sucks because NOW a days, you’re almost always buying a used car from someone who knows nothing about cars, and just hope that you’re getting a car from someone who could afford to have a mechanic do all the regular maintenance that is required and stay on top of the little things that you can fix before it wears out 5 other things. I can’t help but wonder if the passion for cars died out when they all just started looking the same, and body styles changed every 20 years… or if companies just stopped caring about making cool cars because the whole passion for automobiles died out. But man, it really sucks.