In the new BMW M3 an owner voids the warranty by changing the battery. Not only can one not touch the Porsche Cayenne’s engine, they’re not even allowed to see it. Most modern cars have replaced the antiquated technology of oil dipsticks and physical movement with the addition of another computerized gauge on the spaceship dashboard. These are some of the most basic elements of owning and maintaining a car – specific to every single make and model on the road, oil and electricity and engines, and they are now slipping out of the reach of our clean, unstained fingers, in search of a modern, computerized type of car ownership.
The issue isn’t the warranty, and it’s certainly not the tiny little rubber bit sticking out of the hard-to-reach corner of your very hot engine, (because, let’s face it, oil stains never come off). The issue is that we are breeding out the car enthusiast from the very beginning. Gone are the days of wrenching muscle cars in the burning tarmac of a summer driveway. Lost in the vintage nostalgia sepia are the tales of building Hot Rods because you had to, keeping cars alive because you couldn’t afford not to, wrenching pickup trucks back together one painstaking bolt at a time, until your beautiful Frankenstein creation can emerge victorious in whatever life you have planned for it.
They have been the comings together of families, as fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, have taken apart and cracked open their rusted, beautiful machines, in search of the good that lay beneath. They have been the cause of tall tales, strengthened relationships, generation after generation of car enthusiast produced in the shade of a classic Chevelle or Cadillac. One doesn’t truly know their car until they have felt its rust in their eyeballs, the scrape of blood across burned, hot knuckles.
Cars today are smarter than their owners, more deft and reliable than a pair of good old hands. They require a computerized hookup for anything from tire pressure to gasoline-type calibration, and, in the ever changing world of technology, soon even the driver will be phased out from their seat behind the wheel, favoring the distant, unfeeling reliability of sensors, cameras, and programmed instructions.
For the non-enthusiast, it seems like the future – after all, what’s romantic about stained hands and dirty jeans and sweat pouring into your eyes as you lay under your truck, pins and needles making work of tired limbs? But for the car fiend who doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty, it seems like the good old days have come and gone.
Because we can no longer work on our cars, there comes an ebbing disconnect, a sense of widening losses between the car enthusiast and the car – once a member of the family, as much work and love put into your F-100 or Deuce Coupe as any work of art or poetry.
Now it has been demoted, a loving friendship of adventure and camaraderie, slowly slipping down to the ranks of toaster oven or hair dryer. The sheer technology of these modern makes had proven to be a nail in the coffin of 21st century car enthusiasm – how does one love a machine that they have no relationship with? How does one place value on a robot?
Technology is great. By and far modern cars are safer and more reliable and better equipped for any situation than their ancestors. There is certainly cause to love the advances and innovations and changes that modern car engineering has wrought, and make no mind, the situation isn’t dire just yet.
But why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t modern technology exist in tandem with the world of the tangible? Must we throw out the physicality of working on our own cars, in order to embrace the modern advances we have made? Because if we do, we’re throwing out so much more than just a dipstick or a battery. If we continue towards the road of total technology make up then we’re throwing out a relationship between a car and a mechanic, a truck, a family member, and the car enthusiast that loves it, whether professional or amateur – and what kind of legacy will that leave behind?