Are Cars Still Cooler Than Phones?
The ad shown above seems to cement a sad reality for automotive enthusiasts: the objects of our passion are no longer considered the cutting edge of material culture. And this reality is reflected is reflected in more than just ads for mobile phones, the object that appears to have replaced cars as the touchstone of youthful cool. For a broad array of reasons, young people (the traditional arbiters of cool) are less obsessed with cars and car ownership than they once were. Even automakers themselves are rushing the automobile to the scrapheap of history by seeking to load ever more phone-like capabilities to cars, a trend that both fuels phone mania and disinterest in driving as an intrinsically rewarding experience. But, it seems, that cars can still be cool after all…
Marketingweek reports that a survey in coordination with Britain’s Centre for Brand Analysis ranked Aston Martin as the “coolest” brand of all, beating such phone-age luminaries as the iPhone ( iPod ( Blackberry ( and Nintendo Wii ( Still, Ferrari ( and MINI ( were the only automotive brands to make the British public’s top 20 list… and both were beaten by Harley Davidson ( There’s some fight in the car yet… but only if the industry realizes that cars can be (at least) as intrinsically cool as cell phones.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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Articles like this are both fun and not a little disturbing. Fun because they're an interesting airing of opinion, but disturbing because a lot of people can't really get beyond the ways things were when they were kids. For most people, you absolutely don't need a car. For most people, even "back in the day", the car was as much a tool as a cellphone is today; the difference is that you didn't hang out with the people who drove their parent's Toyota Corolla/Plymouth Valiant/Nash Rambler and really didn't care about the car. They're also not the people arguing on the fine points of Davlik JVM development on Android, or how to work around Symbian's idiocy. For those people---and they're the majority, remember---the phone enables them to make better use of the car, if they have one, or work around it if they don't. The phone isn't "cool" in an of itself any more than mom's Grand Caravan is cool. It's a tool that facilitates social interaction. It's not an either/or phone/car thing. Kids these days are doing what kids these days always did, except that they're doing it in an era where phones are omnipresent and cheap, instead of when cars, gas and insurance were. Or, put it this way: it's really easy, with a modern phone, to schedule matters such that you are somewhere that your parents are not---possibly much easier than it would be if you had a car and no phone. No cruising around for an hour, no big series of phonecalls and drive-bys.
My car provides me with a means of transport that allows me to live more than 1 mile from my work - That's cool. My car allows me to the restaurant to physically socialise - the opposite is very uncool so by default that's cool. My car allows me to stay dry when wanting to go places when the weather is less than desirable - That's also cool. Simple - An expensive phone with Data connection is a luxury where as a car is a necessity for me anyway, hence i have a car but not an i-phone.
Why should I be interested in driving? Driving either means having some one attach themselves to my ass sir-mix-a-lot style as they attempt to get me to break the speed limit as vigorously as they do, or taking a half hour to travel three whole miles getting 2 MPG being stuck in traffic that moves slightly faster than I could walk. What value to me is a 600HP v8 corner carver in either of those situations? Driving as an activity would still be a miserable one either way. If driving itself isn't interesting anymore, why should I be interested in the car, the thing that allows me to do the driving?
To young people, most cars are not cool because most cars are phony. Ask Holden Caulfield (or any of his grandchildren) and he'll tell you that a phony thing is by definition not cool. Cars are full of phony materials: soft plastics that belong on a barcalounger, phony leather that is actually made of ground up leather and then enveloped in sheets of plastic, fake chrome, fake wood. Contemporary cars are full of phony styling elements: the 20-inch wheels that have no function, the exaggerated curves, the swoopiness in absence of aerodynamism, useless spoilers, and oddly agressive fronts that allude to a fighting spirit which in the suburban context is a joke. Cars are phony because they promise something they can't keep. Young people feel they are just an expression of corporate bull shit. They promise speed but the reality is traffic jams. They promise freedom but ask for a monthly payment. They promise loyalty but they cost you in repairs. An iPhone doesn't have any cheezy styling elements. It has its faults but it does most of what it's supposed to do remarkably well. There's no soft plastic to be found on a bicycle -- which is another un-phony thing that young people can get enthusiastic about.