I believe that the auto industry is having to contend with the Malaise Era II and this time, it is not the fault of car makers; in fact, cars are more dependable, well-built and easy to maintain than ever.
The problem this time is that cars, no matter the badging when there is badging included with the vehicle, is that all new cars not only look alike on the surface, they are almost identical under the hood.
Yes, every motorhead journalist took Lincoln to task over the Versailles and its “rich Corinthian Leather” and the Cimarron by Cadillac for taking the chassis, drive train, engine, transmission and spare tire off of their cheapest built car; they then, after making a few sheet metal adjustments or adding some body cladding, attempted to market the “new top-level luxury car” at the head of their fleets.
No one was fooled, but they kept at it, just at a more subtle level.
The reason we don’t see a car company like Oldsmobile touting their Hydra-Matic or such an exclusive tranny system that offered many improvements the other companies couldn’t claim, is that the Synchromesh system became the entire industry’s standard.
No one has tried to improve on the three-point restraint seatbelt system we have today because it does not need improvement, it already performs its function at 100% along with its companions, the airbag system and crumple zones
Oh, sure, the automakers try to be clever with their headlight placement, or whatever those things are called now and the designers really get a crayon high when they get picked to draw up the latest overblown version of a gaping maw of a grille.
In today’s world, people know the Acura in their garage is actually a Honda from stem to stern and no one complains because the lawnmower, weedeater and edger that sit next to the “Acura” in the garage are all made by the same company, Honda, and all of them are what we call bulletproof.
I remember looking into my crystal ball and writing in a past column that Jaguar’s poorly received “new branding” was not necessarily a move for the company to prove how “woke” it was as much as it was that Jaguar knew that the car they were about to release was really not all that special and had nothing that separated their from other luxury models.
The Type 00 Concept looks like Jag turned Rolls Royce’s famous waterfall grille on its side, blatantly stole the Rolls’ version of headlights and took more than just a cue from the side angling design. I remember musing why this “car of the future” even needed a grille, since it has an electric drive train.
My belief is that we, as consumers, have changed and the industry is just beginning to take notice. Once upon a time, the automobile factored in as a large part of daily life and overall culture as well, a distinction that is long gone.
People bought cars to show off their social status or to act as a reflection of their personality. I can’t tell you how many college professors I have known over the years that claim to be one of the first to purchase an AMC Pacer.
There was a time when people committed themselves to one of the “Big Three” companies and stayed with them, sometimes for life. It was the norm for someone to start out in a Chevrolet and move up to a Pontiac when the family began to grow. When the consumer moved up several notches in their career, an Oldsmobile or Buick would make for the perfect placeholder for that Cadillac Eldorado sitting on the polished showroom floor.
My grandfather always owned a red Chevy pickup truck. All through my youth, there was never a time that one did not grace the driveway, well, except on one occasion. Gran-Gran purchased the GMC version of the Chevy Silverado, because it was basically the same truck as the Chevy brand, but offered some features he liked not offered by Chevrolet; however, he was eager to trade it in when it became time, because “It doesn’t have the feel of a Chevy.”
Cars used to dominate the weekend, whether it was teenagers cruising their GTOs up and down the local main street or a station wagon that stowed every bit of equipment needed for a camping or boating trip to the lake to people seeing and being seen checking out Christmas lights on any given Friday during the holiday season. Today, there is no such a thing as drive-in theaters, “motorvating” on a Sunday afternoon or auto parts dealers having a full store on a Saturday afternoon.
We no longer change our own oil, much less perform a brake job. The rite of boyhood passage into adulthood by being given the task of washing and waxing the family car once a month is also long gone along with teens having a sleepless night before taking their driving test to gain a license to drive.
Now that more and more people are working from home, cars are no longer even needed for a daily commute to work. If we need to fly out of town, we don’t have to rent a multi-day pass at the airport, we take an Uber; rather than using a car to haunt the mall or Target parking lot, a good chunk of us purchase what we need over the internet.
A modern family night used to mean a trip to the multi-plex followed by going to a sitdown restaurant afterwards; that scenario has been taken over by NetFlix supplying the entertainment and Door Dash handling the in-home catering.
Many people don’t even need a car to do their weekly grocery shopping as the cost of having groceries delivered is cheap compared to what it was just three or four years ago.
The car just doesn’t have the impact on human life the way that it did in its heyday and there were many such heydays.
My crystal ball, at this point, doesn’t portray a bleak future for the car, but rather, one in which the automobile continues on in its new role, not as a central part of life, but as an appliance that performs its functions when not sitting next to the ATV in the garage.
Scott Hudson is the semi-retired Senior Investigative Reporter, editorialist and weekly columnist for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
