By Peter M. De Lorenzo
Detroit. Tom Wolfe’s famous collection of essays, published in 1965, with one of them shedding light on the custom car culture of the day and such luminaries as Ed Roth and George Barris, remains etched in American literary lore. And the title of Wolfe’s essays in particular has held firm and fast as the quintessential descriptor of America’s fascination with the automobile and the cult and culture surrounding it.
But as I suggested in last week’s column, the American cult and culture surrounding the automobile is changing at a furious pace. America’s automotive fascination - which reached its storied heyday in the momentous 50s and 60s – has evolved into something else altogether, mirroring the uproarious changes in American life itself.
The once highly focused car culture in this country has exploded into a kaleidoscope of differing wants, needs, tastes and agendas. Not that this is new by any means, but still, the vast chasm between the ultra-hip, anti-car “intelligentsia” and the people who happen to want and need big pickup trucks couldn’t be wider. And it’s not likely to narrow anytime soon.
More to the point, what’s left of the muscle car legacy that defined the American car culture in its glory days is rapidly fading from view. Yes, there are rabid enclaves all across the country (and the world) still hard at work celebrating everything and anything to do with the American muscle car era, but for the most part it’s a glimpse of Americana that’s becoming just a speck in the rearview mirror of American life. A shame, but it’s the inevitable reality.
Today, high-performance motoring has exploded into a vast array of choices that run the gamut from affordable compact cars offering a modicum of performance and efficiency to the outrageous super sports cars that for no rhyme or reason – other than for bragging rights in an owner’s well-heeled “trophy” garage – have upwards of 1000 HP on tap.
In essence, the wonderful creativity and pure emotional simplicity that defined The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby era that Tom Wolfe so wonderfully described, is long gone. It has been replaced by an era marked – and encumbered - by a withering set of expectations set into motion by generations of people whose overriding sense of entitlement is defined by an all-encompassing desire to have one’s cake and eat it too, a sensibility that has resulted in vastly more complicated machines designed to a wildly demanding set of safety and emissions regulations that seem to grow exponentially more stringent with each passing year.
The auto companies - desperate to stay one step ahead of the creeping zeitgeist and locked in a perpetual battle of trying to anticipate shifts in consumer tastes while designing vehicles five years ahead of time - have undergone a fundamental transformation in recent years, becoming mass-market niche manufacturers - a seemingly unfathomable contradiction - but one that was on full display at the Frankfurt Motor Show this week.
To give you an example BMW is touting its usual array of segment blanketing offerings but at the same time they’re introducing the i3 electric urban car and the i8 plug-in hybrid sports car, which has 362 HP and costs $135,925 (see this week’s “On The Table” – WG). The i8 bristles with advanced materials and features while achieving 94 mpg (2.5 liters per 100 km) on the EU fuel consumption cycle.
Or take Porsche, for instance. On the one hand the German automaker is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its iconic sports car – the 911 – while on the other they’re unveiling the $845,000 918 Spyder, an 867 HP plug-in hybrid super sports car that is, according to Porsche, the future testbed for the entire company and a technological tour de force.
That automobiles will continue to change with the sensibility of the era and at times lead cultural tastes in our transportation choices is predictable. This industry has had an uncanny knack over the previous decades to capture the spirit and imagination of a given era while delivering spot-on products that eminently satisfy the desires of the populace. And I expect that to continue indefinitely.
But acknowledging that, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby has now been reimagined.
Horsepower has been repackaged and augmented with electricity, and driver aids allow for even the most ham-fisted of pilots to drive around in a 600 HP+ machine on a daily basis. The overall safety of new vehicles today is now approaching a level unimaginable just a decade ago (even pedestrian impacts have to be accounted for), and the bewildering electronic capability of our cars has us teetering right near the ragged edge of driving autonomous vehicles, something that has been promised by the end of this decade. And, of course, our new vehicles have become ambassadors of the connected lifestyle (and to our detriment, I might add).
Going forward I have no doubt that the lure of the freedom of mobility will continue to be strong around the world, as I said last week. I also believe that the desire for high-performance vehicles will continue on indefinitely, albeit with a much steeper cost and degree of complication attached to them.
But I must say that our sanitized, electrified automotive future has a sense of foreboding attached to it, too, with the act – and the art – of driving well becoming a quaint notion for many, a relic from our past that few people care to be bothered with, which is a giant bowl of Not Good from where I sit.
And somehow The Soy-Based Chlorophyll-Specked Self-Driving Module doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, now, does it?
And that’s the High-Octane Truth for this week.