A lot of that is for the same reason people dress nice or have nice accessories like watches and handbags: Conspicuous consumption makes it look like you have money to at least some people.
And anywhere there are vehicles there’s going to be a vehicle culture, from low riders to pickups to rice tractors
correct, and fast fashion, precious metals, and gems, etc for this are bad. it is a lot harder to deal with the fast fashion thing, because it took over the industry needed for clothing. but yeah, I feel the same about doing things like buying jewelry without concern for where it came from, as jewelry is something that can be easily boycotted. The big difference is, someone wearing a ring with a big old blood diamond on it will never inject its way into my life, and what I am doing, like getting stuck in traffic with some big coal-rolling d-bag, or someone whose muffler is replaced, or their stereo is as loud as a stadium concert, and so on.
I mean, you can make cars cool without making them obnoxious, inefficient, intrusive, poorly fit for local infrastructure, etc.
Unless you think things that cause greater issues for other people are the only ways in which cars can be cool. Then I don’t know what to tell you, at that point it is a personal problem.
Most of what are generally considered coolest cars are loud, inefficient, and hard to maneuver around a city. Think Lambos, Ferraris, Bentleys, low riders, hot rods, in addition to lifted trucks and fart-can Hondas.
It doesn’t have to be that way though. A lot of that desire was created by car companies using massive advertisement campaigns over decades, to convince people the cars with the most profit margin, and dependency on the system, are cool. All the reasons beneath the obnoxious parts, that ultimately are what people like, can be done differently now. You don’t need a loud car, with shitty normal road compatibility, to have a fast, agile, car, that could be targeted at the consumer. You don’t need loud, smog belching, monster trucks, that fit nowhere, to be able to do all the off road shit. The rest are aesthetic desires, which are easy to manipulate, through advertising, over time.
The whole car industry could just start an unrelenting ad campaign on the side of those who do not like coal rollers, and paint those using them as bad people, and, since a huge amount of the population hate them already, it wouldn’t be all that long before they are a thing of the past.
I agree that advertising did that for trucks, but race cars are loud and fast and terrible on the road and people will still think they’re cool because they’re loud and fast and agile. The loudness is because muffling the exhaust reduces horsepower, the lack of ground clearance is for handling. These are physics problems and people who want to go fast with internal combustion will always trend that way.
Plus if Lamborghini or Ferrari or Porsche could sell a fancy car without some insanely complex engine and suspension for the same amount of money they’d absolutely do it. Often those cars are built because there are rules in motorsport that require a certain number of production cars that often end up costing the company money.
And there will always be people who modify their cars for whatever reason. No car company in the world makes a car with an adjustable suspension that can make the car so low it scrapes the road, but people do it anyway.
But, like I said, car companies are doing a great job of making cars uncool by just making them electric, and then spitting out crossover after crossover after crossover that aren’t just ugly, but are also uninspiring. Cars are turning into appliances like microwaves and dishwashers, which are very much not cool.
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A lot of that is for the same reason people dress nice or have nice accessories like watches and handbags: Conspicuous consumption makes it look like you have money to at least some people.
And anywhere there are vehicles there’s going to be a vehicle culture, from low riders to pickups to rice tractors
correct, and fast fashion, precious metals, and gems, etc for this are bad. it is a lot harder to deal with the fast fashion thing, because it took over the industry needed for clothing. but yeah, I feel the same about doing things like buying jewelry without concern for where it came from, as jewelry is something that can be easily boycotted. The big difference is, someone wearing a ring with a big old blood diamond on it will never inject its way into my life, and what I am doing, like getting stuck in traffic with some big coal-rolling d-bag, or someone whose muffler is replaced, or their stereo is as loud as a stadium concert, and so on.
I think the best solution to this is to just make cars not cool anymore, and EVs are doing a great job at that.
I mean, you can make cars cool without making them obnoxious, inefficient, intrusive, poorly fit for local infrastructure, etc.
Unless you think things that cause greater issues for other people are the only ways in which cars can be cool. Then I don’t know what to tell you, at that point it is a personal problem.
Most of what are generally considered coolest cars are loud, inefficient, and hard to maneuver around a city. Think Lambos, Ferraris, Bentleys, low riders, hot rods, in addition to lifted trucks and fart-can Hondas.
It doesn’t have to be that way though. A lot of that desire was created by car companies using massive advertisement campaigns over decades, to convince people the cars with the most profit margin, and dependency on the system, are cool. All the reasons beneath the obnoxious parts, that ultimately are what people like, can be done differently now. You don’t need a loud car, with shitty normal road compatibility, to have a fast, agile, car, that could be targeted at the consumer. You don’t need loud, smog belching, monster trucks, that fit nowhere, to be able to do all the off road shit. The rest are aesthetic desires, which are easy to manipulate, through advertising, over time.
The whole car industry could just start an unrelenting ad campaign on the side of those who do not like coal rollers, and paint those using them as bad people, and, since a huge amount of the population hate them already, it wouldn’t be all that long before they are a thing of the past.
I agree that advertising did that for trucks, but race cars are loud and fast and terrible on the road and people will still think they’re cool because they’re loud and fast and agile. The loudness is because muffling the exhaust reduces horsepower, the lack of ground clearance is for handling. These are physics problems and people who want to go fast with internal combustion will always trend that way.
Plus if Lamborghini or Ferrari or Porsche could sell a fancy car without some insanely complex engine and suspension for the same amount of money they’d absolutely do it. Often those cars are built because there are rules in motorsport that require a certain number of production cars that often end up costing the company money.
And there will always be people who modify their cars for whatever reason. No car company in the world makes a car with an adjustable suspension that can make the car so low it scrapes the road, but people do it anyway.
But, like I said, car companies are doing a great job of making cars uncool by just making them electric, and then spitting out crossover after crossover after crossover that aren’t just ugly, but are also uninspiring. Cars are turning into appliances like microwaves and dishwashers, which are very much not cool.