Why did people fall in love with cars?
I mean, why did they used to fall in love with cars?
It wasn’t because of speed or sex appeal – though those things certainly helped. It was because cars were freedom incarnate. As a teenager, you counted the days to your sixteenth birthday because on that day, you were let out. Free to drive anywhere your wheels could take you. No longer controlled or supervised or monitored. On your own and as you please.
This freedom is under attack – has been for a long time, including via skirmishes that have made the process of acquiring a driver’s license torturous and endless, insofar as teens are concerned. They are effectively debarred from driving in any meaningful sense until they are practically no longer teens, via prohibitions levied against their driving with friends who are also teens or at night, without the supervision of an adult and via brutal “zero tolerance” polices, which criminalize the tracest amounts of alcohol or “drugs” (the arbitrarily illegal ones) in their systems.
Million Dollar Classic…
Best Price: $5.11
Buy New $4.89
(as of 06:40 EDT – Details)
Which delays their becoming adults and also stifles their desire to become adults. Which is probably why the current generation of teens shows the least interest in cars and driving of any generation since the dawn of the automobile age more than 100 years ago.
But now the real battle is about to commence.
The one that will determine whether adults are to be debarred from driving in any meaningful sense – via the force-feeding of automated (as distinct from “autonomous”) cars.
Which will be controlled – just not by you. Hence the farthest thing conceivable from…