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King-Aaron | on: Ferrari Luce
I have this observation with the influx of soulless SUVs on the road. Every car group you see are always screaming out for manual, rear drive sports cars at an affordable price, but the majority of consumers just want a cube of car that has wheels and can go places. And they buy a new cube every year or two to keep up with the Joneses.

Everyone then complains that the automakers aren't making what they want... But the blame isn't with the manufacturers, the blame rests with consumers and how mindlessly apathetic they are to... basically everything.

komali2 | parent | next
Seems like chicken and egg. Buyers buy what's for sale, I feel like "the consumer" and "the market" are blamed for decisions made by people within these companies. We treat these people as forces of nature: "if the market tells them to make suv cubes, they'll make SUV cubes, they have no choice, their hands are tied!" But that presumes 1. that they're correctly interpreting consumer desire, 2. that consumer desire can even be determined at all from the market, 3. that consumer desire isn't being smeared into an averaging amalgamation that looks ugly and stupid to everyone.
King-Aaron | root | parent
I do think about this a lot. Kind of like newspapers saying 'bad news sells', while they are also the ones deciding what news will be consumed.
carsareok | parent
I'm one of those people that doesn't care for cars. They are equipment to me. I like "getting places", yes. But I don't like "personality" in my tools. Cattle, not pets. I don't want to drive around looking smug in my 650k shit bucket. Cars are an enormously wasteful, idiotic drain on the world, but the calculus is such that I am "forced" to own one. I find the idea that each of us is owning and maintaining our very own special little box that exudes "personality" preposterous and I'll bet the farm that future generations will think we were mental.

This is not apathy in my opinion. This is rational. Cars are just tools. Metal boxes to enable mobility. Car people have turned them into this cult of personality that I think is batshit insane. It's not just cars mind you, we do this with watches, shoes, you name it and it's all very peculiar, but cars are my pet peeve because they are so obviously wasteful and dangerous. Not just directly like killing 40k per year in the US alone, but also through obvious geopolitics.

People want to move around and they want to smile smugly and think they are better than others. Those two things are pretty much universal. I say we separate those issues. You can move around all you want but smiling smugly you do in some other way than in your "car". We'll have really good public transport and you'll assert your dominance in some other fashion. I personally recommend we reintroduce dueling to the death.

By the way I don't know anybody that would buy a new car every two year to keep up with the Joneses and I live in a pretty "Jonesy" place. That's a bit hyperbolic at least in my neck of the woods (Netherlands). Most people here keep their cars until they become unreliable.

rounce | root | parent
Why do you see enjoying doing something, driving in this case, as being some sort way of “asserting dominance”? Some people just enjoy things because of all the activities and associations they have which involve that thing. I come from a place where we have both good public transport and a sizeable automotive enthusiast subculture, one doesn’t preclude the other. You seem to be pushing the idea that car enthusiasts enjoy cars because of the some status association, when most of the time people who are interested in car-as-status have little to no actual interest in cars beyond that.
lostmyacc | root | parent
Same guy here. I understand some people derive pleasure from the “hobby” of owning large mobile metal boxes and I am not against it, but notice we are commenting on a 650k Ferrari and a butt-ugly one at that.

The people in the video are literally smiling smugly. I kid you not.

I’m talking about all those fancy Audi, Tesla, Volvo and BMW drivers that want to feel superior in their mobile box of death and waste. They are not car enthusiasts. Car enthusiasts do maintenance work on 80s Alfas for fun. I know the type and those are alright.

Car culture is much larger than the mechanics. It’s the idea that cars need to be nice at all. The idea they have “personality” and are indicators of social status.

I’m not at all against social status. I’m against using such wasteful, ugly and dangerous machinery as a delivery mechanism of the winnings in your particular genetic and cultural lottery.

bombcar | root | parent
People think that everyone spends hours and hours deliberating over the car they buy - and some do, but those are the same people who likely have discussions about how the iPhone 17e is significantly different than the iPhone 16 (ooo "Support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously"!).

Talk to various people with $100k+ cars and you often find they bought it "because they needed something and the color was nice" or "they always buy from Joe" and other similarly seemingly insignificant reasons.