alt Hacker NewsI have this observation with the influx of soulless SUVs on the road. Every car group you see are always screaming out for manual, rear drive sports cars at an affordable price, but the majority of consumers just want a cube of car that has wheels and can go places. And they buy a new cube every year or two to keep up with the Joneses.
Everyone then complains that the automakers aren't making what they want... But the blame isn't with the manufacturers, the blame rests with consumers and how mindlessly apathetic they are to... basically everything.
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Seems like chicken and egg. Buyers buy what's for sale, I feel like "the consumer" and "the market" are blamed for decisions made by people within these companies. We treat these people as forces of nature: "if the market tells them to make suv cubes, they'll make SUV cubes, they have no choice, their hands are tied!" But that presumes 1. that they're correctly interpreting consumer desire, 2. that consumer desire can even be determined at all from the market, 3. that consumer desire isn't being smeared into an averaging amalgamation that looks ugly and stupid to everyone.
I'm one of those people that doesn't care for cars. They are equipment to me. I like "getting places", yes. But I don't like "personality" in my tools. Cattle, not pets. I don't want to drive around looking smug in my 650k shit bucket. Cars are an enormously wasteful, idiotic drain on the world, but the calculus is such that I am "forced" to own one. I find the idea that each of us is owning and maintaining our very own special little box that exudes "personality" preposterous and I'll bet the farm that future generations will think we were mental.
This is not apathy in my opinion. This is rational. Cars are just tools. Metal boxes to enable mobility. Car people have turned them into this cult of personality that I think is batshit insane. It's not just cars mind you, we do this with watches, shoes, you name it and it's all very peculiar, but cars are my pet peeve because they are so obviously wasteful and dangerous. Not just directly like killing 40k per year in the US alone, but also through obvious geopolitics.
People want to move around and they want to smile smugly and think they are better than others. Those two things are pretty much universal. I say we separate those issues. You can move around all you want but smiling smugly you do in some other way than in your "car". We'll have really good public transport and you'll assert your dominance in some other fashion. I personally recommend we reintroduce dueling to the death.
By the way I don't know anybody that would buy a new car every two year to keep up with the Joneses and I live in a pretty "Jonesy" place. That's a bit hyperbolic at least in my neck of the woods (Netherlands). Most people here keep their cars until they become unreliable.