The Guardian has a really interesting story this week about the decline of the auto industry:

Latham says his students no longer see their cars as an essential expression; their Toyotas and Hondas are just vehicles. They boast of iPods or computer games, not their ‘wheels’.

‘They are like walking cyborgs with all these things attached to them. Cars have become functional. They are not statements anymore. Electronics are,’ he said.

Lord agrees: ‘Young people do not have that same set of cultural signs. Their cultural landscape is about technology and the internet, not about convertibles and driving across America.’

The Age of the American car is passing into nostalgia. Latham once studied a slew of road movies from the early 1990s in which old American cars were nostalgically treated. The most famous was Thelma and Louise, in which two put-upon women find freedom in an open-top T-Bird. At the end of the film, the heroines hold hands and drive off the edge of a cliff.

It is a fitting image for the death of a slice of the American Dream. After decades of the car being so much more than just a mode of transport - of symbolising industry, art, freedom, sex, a triumphant America - it has now become simply a way of getting from A to B.

In part, it’s true. My newest acquisition is a 1994 Nissan Sentra. I bought it over break. In fact, when looking for cars, I looked almost solely at foreign ones, precisely because I knew I would get a better value and better reliability from one. There’s no secret to that.

Moreover, there’s certainly no secret to the fact that “kids these days” spend their money on a lot of things other than cars. I didn’t get a car till my senior year of college precisely because of the other things that I could afford if I didn’t buy one. That was a good decision.

But is the American dream of the car truly gone? My friends and I are busily planning a road trip spring break. My favorite story growing up was always about my dad’s cross-country motorcycle trip. I still like to go for long drives, and I enjoy tinkering with my car–so far as my meager abilities will allow. Has the American dream of the car been abandoned, or just revised?

Posted on January 29th, 2006 by Lee
Filed under: Uncategorized