QUENTIN WILLSON
A chance conversation with my daughter led to a useful insight into the cars that Gen Z thinks are ‘sick’, which translates as ‘cool’ to you and me
‘I was driving to raves in a Malachite Green BMW 735i SE with a back seat full of girlfriends’
No sooner had I crossed the Ts and dotted the Is on this month’s Hot Tips recommending the BMW E34, my 18-year-old daughter showed me a picture of a 1991 525i E34 asking how much a decent one would cost. This exchange, I hasten to add, was totally unprompted. Her car-crazy contemporaries think the E34 is ‘sick wheels’ – ‘sick’ meaning very good rather than very bad. I didn’t know that either. Interested to hear what Gen Z considers cool (or sick), I pressed her further and she shared several insights. The Nineties is their most admired decade, imagined as one long trance party during which the Cold War ended, the World Wide Web opened, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer became the torch carrier for a new cult of tough, independent, self-reliance. And given what this generation has been through over the last few years, it’s small wonder they look back nostalgically on what were much more cheerful times. Gen Z admires assertive Nineties hero cars like Testarossas/512trs, Diablos, Vipers, Escort Cossies, Lancers, Lotus Carltons and Supras, but as she explained, they’ve all been hyped up in price and bought by Boomers. People like you and me, in fact. For her generation, aching to buy into the Nineties vibe, there’s not much that’s sick yet affordable left. Except, perhaps the BMW E34. Pushed to find out what her generation admires about the middle-manger executive 5 Series, my daughter summed it up in one simple word: poise. They love the shark nose and double headlamps, the upswept tail, the squared edges and the analogue interior. ‘Beautiful’ is another word that came up a lot, along with ‘presence’. There’s a widely held view, certainly among my daughter’s more knowledgeable car-guy friends, that the E34 is one of the best-looking saloons ever made. That may sound like a sweeping statement, but I’m inclined to agree that the design by Ercole Spada and J Mays is very nearly the perfectly proportioned saloon. When I told her that in the early 2000s I used to regularly buy 50,000-mile 525i SES autos in Dolphin Grey and Calypso Red for £3000, her eyes widened in surprise. ‘No way Dad. Wow!’ And this is what we can learn from these Gen Z kids, struggling as they are to cope in a world order that seems to be collapsing: that the cars we now look back on as ordinary and every day, are to them, wildly glamorous as totems of an era of hope, optimism, and fun. We’ve forgotten just how good the Nineties, and all those motors, were. As a parent, I thought it best not to tell her that in 1992 I was driving to raves in a Malachite Green BMW 735i SE with a back seat full of girlfriends and enjoying all the fun and freedoms her generation yearn for now. So, I get it. I totally do. I was there back then, basking in the square-jawed selfimportance of those Nineties BMS. So, if you want to spot trends, listen to Gen Z, those kids born between the mid-nineties and mid-2000s, because they’re the new classic car enthusiasts. What they covet now will soon become desirable. We Boomers need to move on from our obsessions with our Sixties and Seventies icons and look into the 2000s and all those Mercs, Saabs, VWS,
BMWS, fast Fords and Japanese iron that so fascinate Gen Z. And let’s hope that prices stay reasonably affordable so this beleaguered generation of young enthusiasts can enjoy the classic car fun and freedoms that we have so enjoyed for so long.