Are you an enthusiast or an elitist?
Some old-time muscle car guys and gals scoff at what kind of “performance” cars the kids are driving these days, and some of the kids chuckle at the old-tech, gassucking barges that some people kludge up traffic with.
It’s beginning to sound like two soccer moms bickering about their kids at every game. Somewhere along the way they forget they’re all there for a common interest.
Fellas, the car hobby has always been about doing your own thing with your own wheels, so what gives? Why the family feud?
Speaking with several people on both sides of the coin, a generation gap is certainly part of the problem. And a lot of the older guys still look down on front-drive imports, no matter how good they might actually be.
Clearly, both factions have different ideas about what constitutes speed, performance and beauty. Like that comes as some kind of surprise considering the age spread between owners.
Hold the hate mail, but when it comes to attitude, I tend to sympathize with the younger crowd and their front-drive cars since fixerupper classic cars are getting very tough to find (not that any young man or woman could afford to fix them up, anyway).
And the older guys should just be happy someone is carrying the torch for what would otherwise be a dying hobby. Without new blood, old cars just get older and so do their owners.
If any of the old-time car guys looked back to see what their contemporaries thought of their jack-up Novas, Chevelles, Dusters and Mustangs … they were just as busy annoying quiet neighborhoods with their obnoxious grim-reaper paint jobs, mag wheels and woodgrain home-stereo speakers taking up the back seats.
Other than the canvas, has anything really changed in the last few decades? Are the old car guys being more than a little hypocritical?
If anything, today’s sport-compact movement is a mirror image of the old-time philosophy of “buy ’em cheap, fix ’em up, and make ’em go fast.” So, in that respect, nothing has changed.
However, technology is definitely on the side of the newer cars with their variable valve timing and the ability to stop and corner on a dime. And they’re plentiful and cheap … and cheap to insure. Sound familiar?
Honda Civics of all years, Acura Integras and various Volkswagen and Toyota products form the backbone. This is significant for one key reason: have you tried to locate an old Mustang or Camaro lately that you could actually drive back and forth to school, trust in the winter, has air bags and proper seats belts, gets great fuel economy and that you weren’t scared to death of wrecking or leaving alone in a mall parking lot for fear of theft or vandalism? No?
Have you seen the catalogs of speed parts for the sport compacts (which also includes domestics such as Neons, Cobalts and Cavaliers)? You can completely outfit a Civic for a few thousand dollars.
Have you been at a sport-compact show to see their wild paint jobs, enormous stereos and impeccably detailed engine compartments? For the most part, the workmanship puts many other cars and their owners to shame.
This should sound at least a little familiar to the muscle car and hot-rod guys in the audience because it’s the same drive that pushed the hobby through the ’70s and ’80s. Now, with few “budget” muscle cars left to rebuild, here we are, in a new era of speed and excitement. So what’s the problem?
What I find very cool is that many owners from the original sport-compact movement are now in their 30s and 40s and are investing big dollars to create unique, high-tech rides. These aren’t just Honda Civics with big mufflers anymore.
Old-style muscle cars and hot rods will never die. Their owners will see that one of the most important periods in automotive history will live on forever. But it’s time to stop bickering over who’s right and who’s wrong when we all share the same basic interest: buy ’em cheap, fix ’em up and make ’em go fast.
The bottom line is you don’t have to worship or even appreciate the cars the younger generation drive these days — they really don’t have a lot of choices, do they? — but you do have to appreciate the fact they have the same kind of enthusiasm and interest in cars that you did when you were a kid and still do today.
You can get on side and appreciate an interesting movement, or hide your head in the sand. It’s your call, but ridiculing enthusiasts when you yourself are an enthusiast — no matter what camp you fall into — is just wrong and puts an unnecessary rift in a common interest. You can message Rhonda by logging on to theoctanelounge.com and clicking the contact link.Wheelbase Media is a worldwide provider of automotive news and feature stories.