I think there are many factors that contribute to or detract from our hobby. One is certainly the declining numbers in our age group. I'm 71, but many in my club are older. Growing up, I started helping my dad with mechanical things at about age 10, because he was mechanically skilled; I learned a lot and my interest was encouraged and rewarded. My dad's car, which we worked on together, was until 1955 a Model A. My first car was a Model A, bought in 1961, which I still have. I had daughters, not sons, and they had zero interest in working on cars. Likewise now their husbands, because they came from professional families whose fathers did not work on cars. So, moving along the timeline, my daughters and their husbands had no mechanical experience to share with or pass on to my grandchildren. Only one grandson has any interest in my cars; he is twenty, in college, but has no mechanical skills, interest, or ability, let alone tools. I think what I have described here may be true for a lot of people.
Now, let's look at current vehicles, and then forward a bit. You cannot hardly find a car or even a truck that has a manual trans. And if you can, there is almost nothing in them that your average owner can fix if it goes sideways. Many people today not only don't know how to change their oil, they often don't even know they need to do that until their car tells them!
And looking not too far into the future, we will someday soon have self-driving cars, perhaps entirely in 20 years. Gasoline may become impossible to find, replaced by batteries, solar cells, or who knows what, so we might not even be able to drive our cars for lack of fuel, even if we are still alive in 2036. We are near the end of the automobile as we have known it, and maybe even the automobile as a primary means of transportation, perhaps even the end of the automobile era. One only has to try to get to the grocery store at 3:00 in the afternoon to realize there are too many cars on too few adequate streets, or to be stuck in a freeway traffic jam for two hours to realize this is unsustainable.
If nostalgia is a major factor, today’s kids are not likely to be nostalgic for their mode of transportation. We have increasingly become a disposable society with rapid change. New things come at us at a much faster pace and will continue to do so, and the current skill set is quickly made obsolete by new demands. We have moved away from the mechanical/industrial age and into the information/service/technology age. What we needed to know to get by 50 years ago is obsolete, and fast becoming lost knowledge. How many guys can pour babbitt? How many have the skills and facilities to paint their own car? How many even now have trouble just timing their Model A, a relatively simple article of maintenance, and who is going to teach them in 15 years?
Some life lessons for me to accept as I age are:
1) All things pass.
2) I am increasingly irrelevant and out of touch.
3) What I value is not necessarily what my grandchildren will value.
4) It all doesn’t much matter in the great scheme of things.
5) In a hundred years no one will know, remember, or care about our current little puddle of anxieties.
Sorry Mike. Nothing personal!
