Culture & Cars in the Digital Age
Cars are deeply embedded in our cultures. This will impact autonomous vehicles, ownership and more.
There are countless books, movies, documentaries, TV shows and now of course, podcasts about cars. One estimate suggests we have about 1.4 billion cars on the road today, or about 18% of the world’s population and that in America around 12 million are destroyed every year. China has the most on the road at around 3002 million, followed by the USA at 267 million.
The majority are of course, ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) and a scant few are fully electric (EV), but apparently growing. Except EVs are declining in sales volumes. Then of course is the promise of autonomous, self driving vehicles. Which always seem to be getting pushed out a few years. And let’s not forget the wistful dream of flying cars.
So now we’ve got some numbers twirling and we can solidly state that cars play a major role in cultures around the world, what does the future of cars hold, in culturally focused terms, as we edge into the digital age.
For auto manufacturers, their first response to being digital was to lavish us with all kinds of shiny screens that are a forensic scientists dream come true for finger print collecting at a crime scene. Some have added WiFi capability, lots of Bluetooth everywhere. The automaker’s love them because they are cheaper than lots of knobs, buttons and fiddly bits that need manufacturing and more engineering and design time.
Consumers it turns out, rather like knobs, buttons and fiddly bits. They don’t like touch screens. But that seems to be what we’re going to be stuck with. If you make screen cleaning cloths and liquids, your sales are likely to improve.
Car Culture in the Digital Age
Cars are cultural artefacts. They’ve long been a status symbol, but are more than just transportation things and status symbols; social signals if you will. They represent lifestyles and life phases.
When it comes to design, they became very boring around the 1980s until the 2010’s or so. Honda and Toyota were exceptional at being boring. But they did have knobs and fiddly bits inside. American brands weren’t much better.
Some auto makes get social labels. Large SUVs and Audi TTs as soccer mom cars for example. Oversized pickup trucks with silver testes hanging off the tow hitch, well, you get the idea.
Around the world different cultures see certain makes as a blank canvas. To be modified with flashy things, exhaust pipes that signal the hubris of youth with a belching howl in quiet, leafy suburbs. IN Tibet, India, Pakistan and other stans, delivery lorries display incredible add-on design elements with deities and a multitude of colours, tassels and blinking lights.
Humans have decorated both transportation machines and other technologies for thousands of years. Implements like axes and swords were not just weapons but also social signals and sometimes carried important religious aspects to them. So it’s natural then that some types of cars would get the same treatment.
Cars are often rites of passage in some cultures. In others, not driving a car and being chauffeured around is a status statement and social signal.
There are so many ways that cars play a role in cultures around the world. In terms of design, especially with regard to EVs the current trend seems to be trying to outdo one another in terms of cold, sleek science-fiction move style.
But what happens when they do become autonomous? Some automakers have imagined that we will no longer own our own cars, we’ll just pay a monthly fee and have access to a range of types depending on our needs that day. In congested cities, car sharing services are increasingly popular. But only really work well in conjunction with good public service.
There were trial runs by GM and some others around the monthly rental model. It failed. BMW figured that it could start charging you subscription fees for things like an electric heater. It did not go well. Watching Netflix in a warm car may not be a thing.
A non-ownership concept of cars is an interesting idea. But shifting to that requires massive global scale cultural change. If you’ve ever sat on the board of a non-profit as a volunteer, you know how hard it is to change just a few minds. Now scale that up. Globally.
It’s not just driving habits that have to change, it’s the concept of ownership in terms of how we see cars culturally and within a social context. Car designs only recently became slightly more interesting because the manufacturers realized that design sells and humans prefer unboring.
Laws around roads and pedestrians were created in favour of the automakers to spur on an industry and that’s just been a bit of a mess to this day. Especially if you’re a cyclist in a large city. Automakers have sold cars on lifestyles for decades. To the point where they’re part of pop culture as well.
“Here in my car,
I can lock all my doors,
It’s the only way to live,
in cars…” Gary Numan, Cars
So while we may think that autonomous cars are coming and we’ll be relieved of expensive repair bills and no bank loans while mechanics are out of jobs, this hopeful idea suffers at the hands of culture. And the most powerful elements of culture are norms, customs and traditions.
It is even doubtful if the technology will ever fully get to autonomous driving outside perfect Mediterranean climates. Sometimes, revolutionary evolutions of technologies take far longer than we think to work their way into society. Sometimes, they even fail.