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The conventional wisdom in progressive circles, especially in places like Ann Arbor or San Francisco, is that the automobile is dead, or at least so passé that it isn’t worth talking about.
If you absolutely have to have a car, it better be a thirteen-year-old Volvo, or maybe a newer Subaru, that you admit to driving only when necessary, as when it is too far to walk and you can’t get an Uber. I read surveys indicating that younger millennials don’t want cars.
Well, I’m not a “car guy.” When I imagine driving a race car on a test track, I have a vision of involuntary incontinence. I don’t know how much horsepower my car, a small SUV, has.
Frankly, I would rather have a sedan, but have an addiction to large dogs. I would prefer a station wagon, perhaps the least sexy car ever made. But almost no one makes them anymore.
But I do love my car, and cherish the freedom it allows me — a freedom I don’t want to give up, and which would be close to impossible for many professionals to be without.
If you are running around town interviewing people, or going to meetings, it would be hard to make even the best public transportation work for you. Yes, I wish I could go down to my corner and get a rapid transit bus that would whisk me off to the airport. I wish I could jump on a comfortable passenger train anytime I wanted to go up north.
But the odds are I would still need a car to get around when I got there. People felt enormously liberated when Henry Ford came up with the Model T and put them on affordable wheels, and few ever wanted to give that freedom up afterwards. You can function without a car in Manhattan or Chicago or a very few other communities.
But not very well otherwise, and I think many younger people will find that out.
That doesn’t mean we don’t need better, smarter, safer, more efficient and less polluting cars; we do. Self-driving cars are also an intriguing idea … up to a point. The potential for horror movies, or personal nightmares, about driver-less cars run amok is huge. They are coming.
But I think it is likely to be a more gradual introduction that some think. There’s also a myth that Michigan is no longer the automobile state. In fact, we still produce more cars and trucks than any other state in the nation, according to the Detroit regional Chamber of Commerce – more than two million vehicles last year, 85 percent of them assembled in the Detroit area.
True, there aren’t nearly as many assembly line workers as there once were. But more than 110,000 engineers work in automotive jobs in Michigan. There are more top suppliers, original equipment manufacturers and auto technology centers here than anywhere else.
Generally speaking, cars are amazing things. We can’t seem to educate kids properly, or solve poverty, or fix the roads. But my car can store an almost infinite number of my favorite songs, and take me to someone’s house in Arizona, pausing to warn me about construction, traffic delays and advise me on where to eat. Thanks to vast improvements and competitive pressures, our cars are now technologically better than they’ve ever been.
Automotive history is also fascinatingly storied, starting with Billy Durant and Henry Ford. I think rumors of the death of car culture need to be put in park.
We still have a lot of miles to go.
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