R&T made me really, really sad with a hot take on sports cars...and they might be right

Hmm, skimmed over the thread and read the first post and here's what I'd like to say from my POV as a 29 year old "millenial".

1) There's a lot of people my age, even younger, that have interest in cars and racing, but they simply can't afford it. High cost of living, stagnant wages, education debt are the main barriers obviously. When you're struggling to survive, you're not exactly thinking of buying and modifying a car (or racing it).

2) Car enthusiasts, including people who race, have always been an extremely small part of the population.

3) The internet and smartphones have changed the sense of freedom we once got through driving and cars, its just the way times are changing. But the thing is, with the internet, people who stumble upon cars/racing as a hobby can meet up quite easily thanks to facebook groups, instagram DM chatting, etc.

I grew up loving cars and wanting to become a professional racer, and part of me still wants to do that anyway. I don't necessarily care if I'm an oddball or a weirdo that still enjoys cars/racing. Between environmentally conscious issues and financial issues, my generation and younger are sort of steered to go a certain way. Side note: I don't think full autonomous cars will be achieved anytime soon, and I don't think electric is the way (due to how bad batterie are for the environment), but what I think doesn't matter. I think we should all just focus on what we love doing and ourselves, and you can try to spread the whole motorsports/car culture thing, but if people don't wanna do it, then that's that. We're all different for a reason.

Off-Topic but here is the one and only reason I do not believe autonomous cars will be wide spread anytime soon: please name a single piece of software that is glitch free. I have a state of the art computer with state of the art multi million software from a premier software company and everyday it hiccups up around 3:00 - 3:30. Nothing major but that software isn't moving me though traffic at 70 mph. When I was in manufacturing I worked with some brilliant software engineers and even they would get cuaght out on occasion. Most of this was trying to make different companies products work with each other. This is an open market and you're likely to have rival platforms and all the inherent problems that come with that. 

Since this thread has hit on a generation growing up with so much tech; as comfortable as young people are with technology I also think they are keenly aware of how fallible it can be.

As for sports cars there is a reason so many middle age people own sports cars, because that's when people can finally afford one. My father's generation (he was born in 1934) if they went to college, worked their way through or went on the GI bill or they went into a trade and it took them decades to work their way up the ranks before they earned enough to afford a sports car. I also think young people have been sold a bill of goods when it comes to colleges A couple of my cousins who went to premier schools for jobs that guaranteed they'd need 10-15 years to pay off the debt. I also have a couple who went to city college for jobs that pay them six figures. Currently there seems to be a lot of emphasis put on designer labels if you will.

Many  years ago  I mentioned that if one wants to be a club racer you have to really really want to do this. The same applies to sports cars, you have to really want one because of everything you give up. 

Now as one of the old guys (I'm 56) I will say there does seem to be a lack of that inate scratching and clawing to make a buck like my dad and his generation had. I know that it's partially perception and partially my parents gave me a better start. I did a lot of wheeling and dealing to afford racing 30 years ago but by contrast I wasn't wheeling and dealing just to put food on the table. 

With all that said I think the sports car thing just comes down to most people regardless of age want something quiet and comfortable to drive to work or dinner. Everything in the world is like anchovie pizza, you either get it or you don't. There just aren't a lot of us who like anchovies.

monkeyodeath said:

In reply to Brett_Murphy :

Google's been running a self-driving car fleet for years in the Bay Area, among human drivers, with an extremely low incidence rate. It's arguably a safer driver around humans than an actual human.

It is my understanding that the self-driving cars are (currently) incredibly risk adverse and don't add any speed or efficiency to the process- which is what I was commenting on.

I can't see a huge increase in efficiency being gained under current driving conditions unless the self-driving cars programming gets a much larger appetite for risk and/or the programming increases greatly.

Our wireless printer can't work reliably for the period of time it takes to go through an ink cartridge.

And they think we're going to have driverless cars.  

volvoclearinghouse said:

Our wireless printer can't work reliably for the period of time it takes to go through an ink cartridge.

And they think we're going to have driverless cars.  

You should check with the printer software programmers to find out why its your fault its failing.  Because its certainly not their code!

In reply to logdog :

volvoclearinghouse said:

In reply to logdog :

The truth is here. But I dont own a printer because why would I subject myself willingly to those hateful machines.

logdog said:

volvoclearinghouse said:

Our wireless printer can't work reliably for the period of time it takes to go through an ink cartridge.

And they think we're going to have driverless cars.  

You should check with the printer software programmers to find out why its your fault its failing.  Because its certainly not their code!

Every piece of technology from bargain-bin Chinese junk to the code that keeps modern aircraft flying is not related. There is no more conflict between crappy wireless printers and working driverless cars existing than there is between a cheapo 2-stroke that fails because sand was left in the block from casting, and a working modern F1 engine existing in the same universe.

volvoclearinghouse said:

In reply to logdog :

There's some truth to this. Avoiding the garbage tends to mean abstaining from the latest trendy high-tech doodads. That doesn't necessarily mean everything you own is old or low-tech, but it does mean it's modified or carefully chosen to avoid the security/privacy pitfalls (like that OpenWRT router which could be a brand new model). I'd have no problems with smart locks if they were controlled solely via SSH connections directly between my devices for example.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

"There is no more conflict between crappy wireless printers and working driverless cars existing than there is between a cheapo 2-stroke that fails because sand was left in the block from casting, and a working modern F1 engine existing in the same universe."

Except that almost anyone can own a cheap weedeater, but almost nobody will ever own an F1 engine.  As far as I know, the goal for driverless cars is to make them ubiquitous.  Which is going to happen even later than the majority of new car sales being of the non-ICE variety.  ;-)  

volvoclearinghouse said:

In reply to GameboyRMH :

"There is no more conflict between crappy wireless printers and working driverless cars existing than there is between a cheapo 2-stroke that fails because sand was left in the block from casting, and a working modern F1 engine existing in the same universe."

Except that almost anyone can own a cheap weedeater, but almost nobody will ever own an F1 engine.  As far as I know, the goal for driverless cars is to make them ubiquitous.  Which is going to happen even later than the majority of new car sales being of the non-ICE variety.  ;-)  

In the software world, everyone can have an F1 engine!

Or consider that there are a good number of XC90s on the streets with super-turbo hybrid powertrains, doing their thing while those cheapo 2-strokes die from the sand they came with.

In reply to Tom1200 :

We will have to disagree about when we have money for sports cars.  

In my teens and twenties I owned a lot more sports cars both new and well used then I owned as I neared retirement.  I do agree that during my middle age my focus was on raising my children to their potential. In my retirement I am scrambling to buy old scrap that I hope to turn into  sports racing cars. 

Comparing printer software to self-driving software is like saying you don't trust flying in a Boeing 777 because you heard about a Cessna crash. Glitches occur in normal engineering, too -- like Takata airbags, Firestone tires, and the lower balljoints on a first-gen Toyota Tacoma.

Much of daily life today depends on bulletproof software. Your finances, the MRI machine your doctor uses (which can totally fry you if it malfunctions), the power grid. Look how safe flying is nowadays -- and planes are mostly flown by software. When they do crash, more often than not it's human error. It's not perfect, but it's probably a lot safer than if every pilot were out there flying by hand all the time.

Engineers (like me) avoid a lot of new tech because it's often slapped together and hasn't matured. But nobody dies when your printer malfunctions, so there's no reason for a company to spend a ton of money making sure it works perfectly.

Some of my co-workers write code for billion-dollar space missions. You better believe that incredible care and money is spent making sure that the code operates perfectly. And it does, year after year, despite being frozen and irradiated on the surface of Mars.

Not trying to cheerlead here for self-driving cars, just trying to point out that if Google is spending billions of dollars on the tech, it's probably going to end up a lot more Voyager II than Epson printer.

volvoclearinghouse said:

Our wireless printer can't work reliably for the period of time it takes to go through an ink cartridge.

And they think we're going to have driverless cars.  

I bought my Printer in 1998. It’s been pretty reliable over the years, so far flawless.  It prints photographic quality prints, good enough to mount and frame.  

But then my last truck lasted 20 years 371,000 miles and I bought my MGTD back in 1962.  Since then it’s been restored, raced and driven across country anytime the whim strikes.  

No, not everything I’ve bought is good and reliable.  Most things? , yes?  I’m not sure but I suspect they are.  I’ve got a stack of old computers and phones that have become obsolete, and were replaced with newer designs.  

mmm - This is a long thread, and I won't go through the whole thing - but having read the original assertion I disagree largely. My experience at Cars and Coffee seems to indicate that young people of all ranges dig sports cars still (and all cars). 

It could be that a smaller percentage of younger people are interested in cars- but, given the uptick in population numbers, the same overall number of people wind up being car guys.

I think the point being argued in the original article is not that "young people don't like sports cars". The point seems to be that young professionals are now less willing to drop $50k on a new sports car than they were in the past. There's a subtle difference there. The sports car may no longer be the status symbol that it was 20+ years ago.

Sure, you'll see young enthusiasts at car shows and autocrosses, but they're likely to be in relatively cheap used cars for those events. There's still passion for cars among young people, but when it comes time to drop their hard earned cash on a new vehicle, a sports car isn't high on the list of desirables. These days, if you're a young person with a $50k budget that's shopping for a new vehicle (lucky you), you're probably going to spend that money on a CUV or crew cab pickup that meets your needs and requires fewer sacrifices than a traditional sports coupe like the new Supra.

Carmax did an interesting demographic study last year. It doesn't involve new cars, so it's not a perfect reference for the article discussed here, but it does show some cool trends in car buyers.

Here's what they found for "sports car" buyers:

Young people still buy a higher percentage of sports cars than any other demographic, but there's a very pronounced dip around the age when families and home ownership start happening which makes the sports car impractical. Then the kids leave the nest and the buyers reach peak earning years and the toys reenter the picture.

Meanwhile the Minivan curve is nearly the exact inverse:

In reply to STM317 :

Good point - nifty graphs too!

In reply to volvoclearinghouse :

I'm a mechanical engineer, so everything I have that's REALLY important uses solid-state control and x-by-wire. If you've seen the failure modes for a control cable or hydraulic circuit you'll look for any way to get away from fatigue failure...

RyanGreener said:

I don't think full autonomous cars will be achieved anytime soon, and I don't think electric is the way (due to how bad batterie are for the environment), but what I think doesn't matter.

BTW, I think full autonomous cars will be in showrooms within a decade and that electric IS the way because of how much less terrible it already is for the environment than fossil fuel extraction/refinement/transport, and how much room for improvement there is with battery technology. There's a good discussion of this issue in the first few pages of this thread:

https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/most-useless-automotive-thing-ever/144496/page1/

GameboyRMH said:

 

BTW, I think full autonomous cars will be in showrooms within a decade and that electric IS the way because of how much less terrible it already is for the environment than fossil fuel extraction/refinement/transport, and how much room for improvement there is with battery technology.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

As I've pointed out numerous times before, we don't even have self-driving trains.  Trains.  You know, those things that go from one place to another, on steel rails, without any variation.  We still have people operating them.  

We're a LONG way off from self driving cars.  I don't think I'll ever have even the option of buying a self driving car before I hit retirement age- and that's over 2 decades in the future.  

As for electrics...well, our bet's still on.  ;-)

^There are some fully autonomous, unmanned trains in the world. An Australian mine transport train and a few urban shuttle trains just off the top of my head.

Most of the world's trains in fact are largely autonomous and the crew is there to do navigation and act as a backup/fill-in-the-gaps control system. We don't have fully autonomous trains only because we won't tolerate the risk of fully autonomous trains (unless they're just hauling coal through the outback/people around an airport) - same with airliners which are also mostly autonomous. For passenger cars, the risk is more reasonable. There are even fully autonomous mining trucks in use, and fully autonomous military transport trucks in field testing.

I rode in an autonomous train not two weeks ago. 

Many if not most of these are fully automated

I have a friend on one of the autonomous driving development teams. He thinks that we're pretty close to well-marked, dry freeway autonomy being a real thing, but really dynamic environs like a major city are 10-20 years away before we feel that the tech is trustworthy enough for mass implementation.

Funny story: He tells me how their software changes daily and once there was a glitch that occasionally made their cars FOLLOW a pedestrian. There was only a window of a few hours or so before they dealt with that, but the image of a robot car stalking someone is hard to shake.  

Turns out there are more than I thought in fact. Here's a list of fully autonomous passenger trains:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems#Grade-of-Automation_4_systems

frenchyd said:

We will have to disagree about when we have money for sports cars.  

In my teens and twenties I owned a lot more sports cars both new and well used then I owned as I neared retirement.  I do agree that during my middle age my focus was on raising my children to their potential. In my retirement I am scrambling to buy old scrap that I hope to turn into  sports racing cars. 

Absolutely agree. I had a lot less money in my 20s, but with only myself to spend it on I could channel as much discretionary income as I wanted to my car hobby. After I was married and had to share the spending decisions, I still had fun cars but my cash was divvied up and spent in many more ways. Now with a house full of kids, every car mod has to be balanced against the wants of the whole family.  I drive the nicest car I've ever owned, but the time I spend in the hobby has been scaled way back.