Artkansas 

Cars are really a love-hate thing with me. While I despise the pollution they cause and how oil centric they have made the world, there is a part of me that can't let go of loving them.

I rarely use them for transportation, which perhaps makes the problem worse. It's like an unrequited love. Where you don't actually interact with the beloved on a daily basis, so it's easy to overlook the warts.

When I was a kid I was car crazy. I memorized cars. I built model cars. I raced slot cars. I even attempted to enter the Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild and Soap Box Derby contests. My favorite book was "Here Is Your Hobby Car Customizing" by Henry Gregor Felsen, Big Daddy Roth and Mickey Thompson. The highlight of my year was going to Sebring. I even dragged my mother to the car dealer so I could get a look at the introduction of the Chevelle.

All that time I was bicycling to get around, and when it was time to move out I still hadn't bought a car, (Using Dad's was easier) and going to Art Center was out of my price range.

And now, I live a car-free lifestyle, but I just can't get myself to sell my car, a 1983 Bonneville Wagon. I love it but I can't get myself to spend the money to make it as sweet as it should be, and I don't drive it. I've got 5 bikes, but when people talk about bike porn I just don't understand. Bicycles are just machines. They don't arouse the same passion in me that a beautiful car does.

While I lived near Palm Springs, I had the opportunity to drive cars for an exotic car auction there. After several years, I was a senior driver and got to pilot the nicer cars, including pro-stock dragsters and rare models of Rolls Royces of which there were only 5 on the planet, but my favorite was spending 20 minutes sitting in a bolt for bolt copy of this. But the owner decided to drive it at the last minute.


I wish I could resolve this conundrum. Cars are a drug. I hate them but I want them.

zeppinger

I feel your pain. I was a car crazy kid too but I think that has a lot to do with why I am carfree now. I also now love motorcycles and recently bought one to make my 15 mile commute easier and "free up my time." However, it is now for sale because I find riding it everyday to and from work really rage inducing. Traffic, people trying to kill me, other people road raging, ect ect. I would rather it take me a little longer on a bicycle or take the bus and read a book or listen to music. Much less stressful.

In short, motorized stuff is cool. You get to go fast, feel the power and speed, and all without any "effort." Of course its cool! However, it quickly loses its magic as a mass mode of transportation, doing it everyday, and having to sit, stuck in traffic with others just trying to get somewhere. Not to mention repairs....

My suggestion? Rent a really sexy car every once in a while for a hot date, anniversary, whatever. Also, I used to do indoor cart racing which was super fun, uses very little fuel, and you can just rent a cart and be done with it. One day they might even make indoor electric cart racing which would be the best of both worlds. I like driving, just not for transportation.

Mauriceloridans

There's a reason car commercials show only one car in their clips. A car in the singular is rather lovely and benign. Put them in the rat race of car centric civilization and they are a collective monster bound to bring us down.

After the decline, civilization will find ceremonial uses for them like they use the horse drawn hearse for head-of-state funerals and horse drawn carriages for royal weddings.
The fetish for cars will linger like that too.

Roody

What can I say? I grew up in Detroit, and I do have car love. My dad took me to the North American Auto Show every year. My favorite school field trip was to the Henry Ford Museum to see the collection of classic cars. There was a Grand Prix race right on the city streets. They were a big part of the Hudson's Thanksgiving Parade every year.

Come to think of it, I still love cars--especially when they're in a museum, car show, race track, or parade. I just look forward to the day when there will be a lot fewer of them on the streets!

Artkansas 

Fasteryoufool

There are things I love about cars some cars I truly love... But it takes a really unusual car to get my notice most of the time. With bikes, I'll look just to look.

The things I like about cars have changed significantly over the years too. My wife just recently bought a '94 Mercury Grand Marquis because it's roomy, has a huge trunk, it's quiet and comfortable, gets reasonable fuel economy (especially for something that size) and most importantly - it's got body-on-frame construction and a small block V-8, so we can tow with it when we move in a couple of years. Those things wouldn't have interested me as a kid/teen/young man, but now they're exactly what we need and shopped for.

Ridefreemc

Cobo Hall was my destination year to year as well. A field trip, with Dad as the chaperone, to the River Rouge Plant was the highlight of 3rd grade. 4th grade was the Henry Ford Museum. Mom worked building Chryslers. Dad and brother building the plants (Operating Engineer and Steel Worker). My sister’s boyfriend had this fantastic 66 Chevelle with a 327 that would smoke the tires all the way down the block. That and many more experiences got me into cars, but now my Chevy Astro Van sits in the driveway until I need it to tow the boat to the water every few weeks.

Hippiebrian

My addiction is still motorcycles. I love them, and sometimes still miss riding (then I remember the above mentioned road rage I'd get!). My last girlfriend said that hearing a bike turned my head quicker than a miniskirt did, and she was right!

Luckily, in the last year (Oct. will be a year living car-free for me, although I hung on to my truck until June without driving it) I've developed the same head turn for bicycles. There's hope yet!

Spudd

One day? They already do! We raced indoor go-karts for a corporate off-site last year. They were kind of pathetic, on the uphill (don't ask me why they thought building the track with an uphill was a good idea) they slowed to a crawl. The cool thing was that the track operators could remotely cut the power to them to stop us if we were breaking the rules in some way.

I love cars too, by the way. Not normal cars, but fancy cars? Hell yeah. I was passed by a Lamborghini on my way home from work the other day. That was cool.

gerv 

I have to confess that I don't share any of this. I've owned cars for transportation and that was it... just a means to get from A to B. I didn't love them when they broke down. I didn't love them when it was time to make a payment. I didn't love them either when someone wanted me to drive them somewhere.

I know there's a lot of propaganda (well... advertising...) that drives this love, but when you think about it, it's as ridiculous as me saying I'm in love with my walking shoes. They are both just a means of getting around.

The shoes do have a lower carbon footprint too

Artkansas 

That would be nice. But that is the point of this thread. Living car free as I do, for years and years, has not dimmed my love of the idea of automobiles one bit. The reality of oil etc, yes. Buddhists would call this identification with form. I guess that's one attachment I have to work on. And apparently, I'm not alone.

It's not just advertising that drives it, though I admit, when I bought a '62 Falcon Squire wagon in the early 1990s, their ads from 30 years ago came to my mind. But its also the culture. It's my Dad's sports car. Being soaked as I rode with him in the rain because his MGA was so leaky(they all were). It's all the great cars I was surrounded by. Like in Mad Men, my grandfather had a brand new black '62 Continental. One neighbor had a Porsche 365, another had a Jaguar XL120. I lived around the corner from Emmett Kelley the clown. He had a '55 Cadillac. For me, fine cars were as much of the American Dream as a house, maybe more so.

I can appreciate that you don't feel it, but don't dismiss it as mere advertising. How you feel about cars is close to how I feel about bicycles. I've used them and loved riding them, but I just don't feel as attracted to bicycles as I do to automobiles.

It's a whole culture.



The pic is not me, only because I was never able to finish my car for this contest.

gerv 

Yeah, but I still don't see why you would be infatuated with a car and not something else (like your shoes...). After all your dad had a nice pair of retro shoes.

I believe you are right. It's a partly cultural thing. We bond with certain objects in our environment... one that our parents, our television advertising, our friends and colleagues all tell us to bond with.

That's why we call ourselves "carfree" rather than "people who ride exclusively by bike".

It's reactive when perhaps we should just let those intense feelings about the car just float on by.

Artkansas 

Well, I can't expect you to understand on a gut level. I think it's a case that you have to be there. It's like I really don't enjoy watching sports. I just don't understand what people see in it, (unless you are talking car racing, then I'm there, LOL). But then, my father never watched football, baseball or basketball, though we did drive in rallys together, and go to car races.

Roody

Sorry, gerv. You're in the minority. Flashy and go-fast appeal to most people. Our eyes are innately drawn to objects that are shiny and move quickly.

Maybe this attraction to cars has been educated out of you, rather than being educated into other people by advertising, as you claim. Are you aware of any influences that caused you to be indifferent to the appeal of flashy cars?

wahoonc

I like the beautiful cars as an art form, they make plenty of bicycles that fill that niche too. I was in an small industrial museum the other day and some of the old equipment has an art form to it that is missing from the slap sided computer controlled machines of today.

Aaron

Artkansas 

I think it's great that he has been raised so that he was not part of that culture. He's ahead of the curve in that respect.

But I felt that being out of that subculture, he tends to under-estimate the influence. That's why I labeled the thread as being a carholic. An alcoholic, even if they never have a drink again, the danger and the influence is always there. If I never drive again, I think that cars will always have a siren's call to me. I may be able to just let the thoughts come and go, but they will always be coming and going. I don't think they'll fade.

gerv 

Interesting. Maybe it's something more like karma.

I like what you say about thoughts "coming and going". That's just how it is.

I grew up in a rural area on an island that joined Canada in 1949. It was pretty backward compared to most of North America. My father did get a car in 1958 I think. My wife's dad got his first car in 1980. Our grandparents did not own cars. I didn't have a car or a driver's license until I was 26 or so. The car I did get was more of a nightmare than a dream.

I do feel a bit of what you describe if I see, say, an old Schwinn Paramount

Roody

For sure. I no longer look at cars much, except to deal with them in a traffic situation. I don't even recognize friends' cars that I've seen a hundred times before. But if I see a beautiful bike, it turns my head and I often know what it is before I look at the head tube badge or decals.

Artkansas 

Yeah, that's what I thought. We grew up in very different milieus. One of my grandfathers was an exec with Gulf Oil. The other, PR Director for Reader's Digest, and my Dad was an electronics engineer.

If you've seen Mad Men, I would have been friends with Don Draper's oldest daughter. I was born in New York and my grandparents lived in the same areas and I had friends there. My parents moved to Florida, but it was the same country club atmosphere. Literally, you had to drive across our property to get to the yacht club next door. It made a great location for a kool-aid stand. At one point I remember that we had 4 cars, two MGAs, a 55 Chevy wagon and a 59 Rambler wagon.

Heck, where I lived, even chimpanzees drove cars.

At the same time, all the kids had bikes and used them extensively. So the roots of being car free started in a very pro-car environment.

Smallwheels

My parents owned cars but weren't into them at all. Somehow I was a car junkie before I could ride a bicycle. I was always interested in them. I didn't have any brothers or sisters who were interested in cars. It was just an innate thing with me. I was drawing cars before I began school.

The only thing keeping me from loving cars these days it the cheapness factor of anything costing less than $40,000. I bought a new Honda Fit Sport for utility purposes in 2006. It was junk. All the economy cars were made of hard plastics, cheap interiors, thin metal, with cheap paint. Overall the quality of the engineering is much better than the cars of the eighties and earlier.

I like the looks of the Mazda Miata. The thing is that the interior looks cheap even in the photos on the internet. Porsche has some great looking interiors. No cheap materials are used in those. I suppose when people spend eighty-thousand dollars or more for a 911 the interior should look good.

If I were to decide to own a car for the purpose of pure fun, I really don't know if I'd buy a new one. It might be just as economical to purchase an older car with character and dump $40,000 into a custom restoration. There are companies out there that recreate old car frames and body work of popular hot-rods from the fifties and earlier. One could build up a classic car from scratch. No matter how new it is it will never have a smooth ride or the comforts of a contemporary car.

Something from the sixties could have all of the regular comforts of a contemporary car, especially if it was a big car like a Cadillac. I've ridden in a 1970s Cadillac and it had a much better ride than a new Lincoln Town Car. The difference was the mass. The Cadillac had huge wheels and weighed hundreds of pounds more than the contemporary Lincoln. When the Cadillac rolled over rail road crossings it would just float because the body wouldn't react to the vibrations from the suspension. It was just too heavy to be affected. A Town Car had great engineering in the suspension but it still transmitted some vibrations into the passenger cabin. It just wasn't stiff enough.

Over the years I've really lusted for so many cars that I'd have a hard time deciding which one if any to buy for pure fun. I think I lost my lust for cars more than fifteen years ago. Were I wealthy I know I'd by a car but really none grab my attention these days.

Fasteryoufool

You're out of your mind. Modern cars go further on less fuel, go, turn and stop MUCH better, they LAST much, much longer than older cars did, and protect the occupants far better. Try comparing a 1970 Boss 302 Mustang and a 2000 Countour SVT. Compare fuel economy. Then compare emissions. Then compare maintenance intervals (ooooohhhh cheap shot - The Contour gets it's first major tune-up at 100,000 miles, the operational EXPECTANCY of the Mustang) Then compare safety ratings. Then compare emissions. Oh yeah... then compare performance. Guess which one's quicker, faster, handles better and stops better? I'll give ya a hint - it ain't the 2 door.

Roody

Yet another boring discussion of the supposed greatness of cars... on the so-called carfree forum.

Fasteryoufool

Not at all. As the OP pointed out, I LIKE cars. I choose to be car-free. Well, mostly. Wife is car-light, I'm car free... but I still dig the damn things.

I just took umbrage with the half-witted assertion that modern cars are "junk" compared to old ones. Facts are facts. New cars are better in every way, including how much they consume and pollute. Doing without is still better for the environment, for you, and for your wallet.

Roody

It does sound like you're a caraholic, and you're in the rationalization stage. you probably need to go to more meetings.

Artkansas 

But really the topic is that cars are a drug and that many of us, while car-free can't help but love them like a junky likes junk or an alcoholic likes whiskey. Just knowing how bad it is, doesn't extinguish the love. Even if you don't imbibe. These are just our bar fights.