Old Cars & The Analog Resistance

This is Julia James Davis, and welcome to The War on Beauty. I want to tell you about an interesting experience that I had about cars that actually turned out to be a very illuminating experience about the state of the war on beauty. So a few weeks ago, our family SUV went out. The transmission failed after we'd spent a lot of time going back and forth with mechanics trying to fix this car, and then it just finally stopped going in the middle of the street, and we decided, okay, let's look into getting a new car. I am someone who does not know anything about cars previous to this experience, but I thought, let me be the one to spearhead the research. I'm going to find our family the best SUV, reliable, no transmission issues. It's going to last for generations and a million miles and low tech, all the things that are ideal in a car. So I did a deep dive, and I found some really great options for us to go check out at dealerships. Enter two days of car shopping that felt like entering a hell realm. The cars were not only so unattractive and uninspiring and unexciting, because as we know, cars have been also a huge victim of the war on beauty. Most cars these days are just on a gray scale. They're all copy and paste, same body styles, but it was so exorbitantly expensive. So it was just hunk of crud after hunk of crud for the low, low price of starting at $50,000. And then the dealerships would say, well, if that's too much, don't worry. We have a certified pre-owned with 30,000 miles on it for a $2 discount. And then in the process of all this, I found that the looks of the cars were really the least of their problems, but it was actually the tech inside. We ended up at a dealership of one of the major American car manufacturers, and what has happened to the car manufacturers in America is really a separate story and such a tragedy, really of a hollowing out of such an amazing industry in this country. But we get into a car to look around inside the car, and the salesperson said, hey, this is one of our great new features in this car. It has a camera sensor that is going to read your face and decide if it's safe for you to put this car into autopilot or cruise control. It was something like that, which immediately set off red flags and alarm bells in my mind. Apparently, it's not just the EU that has rolled this out, but America is also starting to roll out that cars are going to have these cameras inside them. And so, so far from being the amazing symbol of American freedom that they once were, cars are now being turned into rolling prisons. So according to a McKinsey study cited in an article by BBC, by 2030, 95% of cars on the road will be connected to the internet. And a 2023 analysis by Mozilla said that, quote, cars were the worst product category that we have ever reviewed for privacy. That same article goes on to say that in this Mozilla review, car companies reserve the right to collect details, including your name, age, race, weight, financial details, facial expressions, psychological trends, and more. The article said Kia's privacy policy, for example, suggests that the company may even collect details about your sex life and general health. This invasive data collection situation is not something that may happen as tech grows more advanced. No, this is actually something that currently is happening now. In the same Mozilla report cited by this BBC article, General Motors has allegedly already been selling car data location without driver's consent. And one more thing in this article, apparently Lexus Nexus tracked one specific guy every single trip that he and his wife took in their car over the span of six months, which resulted in a 21% insurance rate increase. So while I did not know the extent of all of this during my car shopping, I did know that they were generally using cars to invade our privacy and spy on us, and that a car is really, again, such a critical, not only symbol, but actual vehicle of our freedom. It allows you to move, but also to flee. In this process, I got into all of the car algorithms on Instagram and Reddit, and I started to see people's posts of how their brand new luxury vehicles were breaking down at like 15,000 miles, 30,000 miles. And it just is all very clear that the car industry and just cars these days are some sort of scam and a sham. In this research, I thought, okay, maybe an option would be an old used car, something really low tech. And I found that some of the great cars that you can buy now are especially Toyota Land Cruiser, like the one behind me is a really old example, but a Toyota Land Cruiser, a Lexus SUV. When I started to find those cars on the internet, those were also exorbitantly high. It was almost like the cars never even depreciated, but despite being 20 years old. And that is because apparently people want old cars, which were reliable, better looking and low tech. So to conclude my story about car shopping, we decided to just fix our own car, get a new transmission and do whatever needs to be done to just make it drivable again. But this whole experience really did bring me such a feeling of hope and a ray of light. And I will explain how. So again, I am not a car person at all, but I did start to become fascinated by cars in this process, especially learning about the cars that can last generations and be repaired by normal tools without a computer, especially cars like, again, Land Cruisers, Tacomas, Volvos and some Land Rovers, Porsches and Mercedes. And so I started seeing so many of those exact cars, old, old versions of them on the road driving. But then I started getting more specific and observing the actual people driving them. Many of the old cars that were driving by me were actually driven by young people, by Gen Z, early, maybe late teens, early 20 somethings. And of course, some old people for sure, like those were just their cars for decades, but a lot, a lot of young people. And I think that this is the hope. And it's, to me, the most significant example of the return to analog that we're seeing with Gen Z and young people. There's an amazing shift back to just tactile analog. You see it with the rise of reading, with vinyl records, wristwatches. Young people are wearing wristwatches again and seeing films in the theater. And there's actual analytics around this. Now the cars on the road are the oldest they have ever been. The average age of the normal passenger car is 14 years old, according to S&P Global Mobility. And also while 286 million registered cars are operating on American roads, less than a third of those cars are less than six years old. The rise of older cars could be for a combination of reasons. The COVID lockdowns, the cost of repairs and insurance, and also the aforementioned privacy concerns. In an article by Kelly Blue Book, they cited a survey by Hagerty Insurance Company, which found that 60% of Gen Z drivers wanted to own a classic car compared to just 31% of boomers. And 32% of Gen Z and 30% of millennials say they have either owned or currently own a classic enthusiast vehicle. So I think there is incredible hope in the fact that young people are resisting going with the trends of our corporate run debt slavery system by actually choosing the things that are going to give them freedom and autonomy. That is cars that are paid off, cars they can fix themselves, and cars that cannot be remotely shut off. And on that note of the car algorithm that I'm on now on Instagram, I'm seeing so many videos of young men who are choosing to find old cars or take their grandparents' car and fix them up and make them their daily drivers. And I would think that maybe that's just that algorithm that I'm on now and no one's actually doing that. Except for the fact when I walk around my own neighborhood, I am starting to see more and more dads, brothers, people, guys by themselves in their garages fixing up cars themselves. The return to analog is a powerful and practical way to regain our freedom. It is simply choosing another way instead of the one conveniently laid out for us by our corporate overlords. It is a quiet rebellion that you can fix your own car with your own tools in your own garage instead of having someone at a dealership hook it up to a computer and find an error that was designed to be there because the car is designed to break. But it's also too those smaller ways, the fact that you can now have your own DVDs instead of having access to movies only as long as they're on Netflix or some other streaming service or own your own vinyls instead of having to pay a monthly subscription. That is freedom. All of this has changed my perspective so much. I now look at the girl in the beat-up Corolla hanging on by a thread and the guy in his 20-year-old Tacoma and I think that they are so much cooler than the person in a souped-up Escalade or a brand new EV. I think it's cooler because it is cooler. I am at a mechanic place literally and if you hear all of those noises in the background, that is them fixing cars. But that is all that I've learned and I really wanted to share because I genuinely did learn so much from this experience and how important cars are in our lives. Not just as a symbol of freedom but really as an incredible thing of beauty. Workmanship, mechanics, design, it all comes together in a car. So thank you so much for watching. I hope that you'll please like, comment, and subscribe and I'll see you in the next video.