For several years I’ve been reading about an ominous and fascinating trend for the car industry which stretches across unfolding early 21st century American culture. Put simply, cars are declining as a key component of American culture, particularly with men. That’s not to say we’re done with them; far from it. Tens of millions Americans rely on them every day to make it possible to work, pick up the kids and experience many of the basic things that make life worth living. But cars have never simply been about utility.
Particularly for men – but by no means only for men – cars were a basic part of self-definition and identity. Mercedes, Trans-Am, Mustang, etc. Cars were and are freedom, control, speed, power. When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, I got my driver’s license literally on my 16th birthday. Where I lived out on the outer edge of the LA sprawl, with everything spread out and little to no public transportation, you could barely be a person, let alone an adult, without the ability to drive a car. But it goes well beyond utility. And, critically, you don’t have to look long at the nature of advertising and cost structure to see that quite a bit of profitability and price of the car business went to things that were not narrowly tied to utility. So selling cars just on utility is not nearly as profitable enterprise as selling many of them on a resonant myth.
But over the last decade, that’s changed. Some of it is privation and austerity, particularly after the Great Recession. There’s also the price of gas. There’s the increasing consciousness of the role cars play in driving climate change. But it’s also the urban transformation of America where many people, at least affluent enough to own cars, no longer always need them – at least not all the time or at least not for workm which is the core reason most people own cars. Most interestingly, a great deal of research shows that many men simply don’t think about cars in the way they did for much for the latter half of the 20th century. For many men, their techs, their devices are more a vehicle for conspicuous consumption than cars. Paradoxically, part of the declining male affinity for cars is that the growing role of high tech in automotive design is that it’s just not as easy to work on your own car as it used to.
Detroit and the rest of the auto industry are acutely aware of these trends and they’ve tried to grapple with them, though it has not been easy. Today we’re launching a four part series about the changing role of the car in American life. In our first installment, Nona Willis Aronowitz looks at this transformation of men and cars and how auto advertising has tended to double down on themes of men and the open road for those segments of society where that mythic of automotive freedom still has traction. Read it here. It’s fascinating.
