Monday, September 8, 2014

Why 'The Death of Car Culture' is a load of s**t--and the problems that turn people off of car culture.


It's 11:47 PM on a Friday night and I'm standing outside the newest Wawa convenience store/gas station built in my area just off of the Oaks Exit of US Route 422 West drinking a F'Real chocolate milkshake blended thin and taking yet another frickin' picture of my car, Wendy. I had just gotten off 422 from King of Prussia, visiting a place that I drove to out of a sense of nostalgia. Don't worry, that will soon be relevant to the focus of this article. What I do want to talk about today is the supposed 'death' of car culture. Some journalistic hack who thinks that their annual small-town car show, or movies like 'American Graffiti' and 'The Fast and the Furious' represents all of car culture as a whole, invariably writes an article with this as the heading every few months, because of reasons like young people not buying new cars, or young people not learning to work on cars with their parents, or electric cars getting more popular, or whatever other trend/phenomena they are pointing to that signals the death knell of all things cool about automobiles. I'm writing this to tell whomever reads this and has a little bit of common sense that such baited headlines are more full of crap than the most constipated person in the world. You don't even need to be an automotive enthusiast to understand that-- you just need to take a closer look.