Nostalgia’s context problem

When I was 17, had no girlfriend, no job, nothing else to do, and it was Friday night, my friends and I would cruise to the local high-end car dealerships just to gawk. You could walk the lot at the Jaguar dealership. No guards, no suspicious police, no razor-topped fences. We could walk up and read the window stickers on the XJs and the XJSs. The Porsche dealership had an enormous plate-glass showroom front, probably three stories tall, and all the cars on the floor were brightly-lit. We would just stare at the 911 Carreras, the 944s, the 928s.

These cars were state-of-the-art. The best. The most “advanced.” We dreamed of owning them, but we knew it would be a really long time before that could possibly happen.

The “classic” car market thrives on people like us—people who fall in love with cars as teenagers, harbor fierce aspirational fantasies of owning them, and then become middle-aged, affluent, with no little kids at home or other high demands on disposable income. Nostalgia drives them to seek out the nicest examples of the cars they lusted for at 17. The prices of those cars reach levels beyond the wildest fantasies of the original dealers.

As each age group reaches that stage of life, a new group of cars become sought-after “classics.” The prices go up. Conversely, when everyone who ever lusted for a certain car as a teenager has died, the values of those cars drop. This is what has happened to “pre-war” cars. There isn’t anyone left who had their first sex in the back of a ’37 Packard. At least, not a new one.

A 1995 Porsche 911 stickered for about $65,000 USD. A nice one today is worth $120—130,000. If you were 17 in 1995, you’re 47 now. Beginning middle age.

I follow cool cars with abiding desire, but I’m also a historian of technology, and so they interest me that way too. I don’t want any of the cars I gawked at when I was 17. What seemed state-of-the-art then, the epitome of “modern,” seems almost primitive now. ‘80s cars now compete with cars 30 years newer, and newer cars are, as my friend David once said about his 2010 Nissan 350Z versus his 1983 Porsche 911SC, “better in every way.” If you’re a regular here, or you do HoT yourself, you know that “better” is a seriously problematic concept in HoT, but we can make a seriously strong argument for David’s “better” in this case. It doesn’t mean that every car made in 2010 is better than a 1983 911. But the best cars from 2010 leave everything from 1983 in the dust in almost every way. I would put up two advantages of the 1983 model. One is objective, and one is subjective. The objective advantage is light weight. Without all the modern safety equipment and luxury-convenience equipment, ‘80s cars were much lighter than their current counterparts. So, they could be less powerful and achieve comparable speeds (although they were not nearly as fast in absolute terms). But for sporty driving, you feel weight, no matter how much power the car has and how well the suspension is set up. Centrifugal force and gravity work on mass, period. And handling feel matters much more for having fun on public roads than maximum power and maximum speed. So, there is a different feel to the older cars. What would be a 3,400-pound car now would have been more like 2,700 in 1983.

That does blur into the subjective advantage, though—nostalgia. The light weight, lower power, and more basic suspension set-up means a different feel—and for some, that feel evokes the feel of an earlier time.

As noted, what was “powerful” then is not powerful now. Some of you may remember a popular TV show called Magnum PI. The titular character drove a Ferrari 308GTS—a “poster car.” In one of the most brilliant test-track showdowns I know about, some clever people put one of those on the track against a new minivan—you know, the thing you buy not because you give a damn about cars but because you need something for carpool. The minivan destroyed the Ferrari—figuratively, I mean. Don’t get too upset.

What was “safe” then wouldn’t meet basic regulations now. Your chances of surviving a crash with no serious injuries in a 2010 car far outweigh your odds in something from 1983—even a Mercedes. We build them differently; we build them to crash as safely as possible.

What was comfortable then isn’t nearly as comfortable as what we can do now; luxury cars in 1983 can’t even touch solid mass-market sedans today—or in 2010.

When I watch videos of people with expertise doing road reviews of “classics,” one of the highest compliments they pay is how this or that aspect of the car’s performance or comfort stacks up against its “modern” counterparts.

Oh, and in general, reliability is no comparison either—not thus far, anyway. And no ‘80s car can be diagnosed by plugging in a little OBD II and reading codes.

So, as I’ve said here before, the appeal of these cars is aesthetic. Looks, feel, smell, sounds—and whatever those evoke in the driver—memories, some sense of another time, another way of doing things, youth. A 27-year-old testing out a ’63 E-Type is not going to have the same experience driving that as someone who was 17 in 1963. The younger person might deeply appreciate the basic aesthetics of the car, but the evocative stuff can’t be extracted from a brain in which the right memories and formative experiences are absent.

I’ve given you two different people, then, who are not subject to nostalgia for these things. One, me. Two, a much younger person. But why not me?

There is of course a difference. I do have some nostalgia for the cars from the ‘80s. But, in general, I don’t have much nostalgia for the ‘80s at all, because I was living with untreated mental illness, and that profoundly affected that whole experience, from how I feel about the cars to what grades I made and thus what schools I could get into.

An ’85 Jaguar XJS in British Racing Green with an ivory leather interior is a beautiful car to me—but not as beautiful as a 2003 XK8. For a lot of people my age, it just doesn’t work that way. The XJS evokes something in them that pulls at them much more powerfully than it does me. For me, I love looking at one for a few minutes, and if someone let me drive one, I’d jump at the chance—but I wouldn’t expect to be seriously impressed by that experience. Remembering those Friday nights on the empty dealer lot is not going to make magic for me.

And then there’s the simple fact of the passage of time; there was no 2003 XK8 with which the ’85 XJS had to compete. The best of 1985 were the best. Now, they’re nowhere close.

But I do find that I’m starting to experience some sort of what might be nostalgia; I’m still thinking about that. I do find myself attracted to the best “aughts” sports and GT cars—those made between c. 2000 and 2010. What’s the context for that?

As the famous YouTuber Doug DeMuro put it, these cars offer a sort of best-of-both worlds sweet spot. They are thoroughly modern, in terms of engineering, build, safety, power, handling, reliability—but they are still “mechanical” enough to offer the aesthetics of that—feel and sound—and they don’t, for the most part, have “screens.” That is, “infotainment” screens in the dash. They have gauges, dials, and buttons. Now, the computers in cars are no longer hidden away out of sight doing things we drivers aren’t really aware of in the moment. They’re literally in our faces. EVs are common now, small turbo gasoline engines thoroughly dominate the non-EV market (in the U.S.; other countries still have a strong diesel-engine presence too), and that screen, with its touch-capacitive experience replicating that of a smartphone or tablet, makes it fully obvious how the push of a not-even-real button can make the computers do just about anything to the car, from change the lighting, change the sounds, change the feel of the suspension.

I know part of the appeal to me of these cars is technological conservatism. I like technology—especially expensive technology—that has proven itself. That I have confidence will go the distance—literally. And from experience, I do not trust companies that make stuff that requires software that requires updates that may or may not happen a few years after purchase. I do not associate screened digital electronics with joy. I associate them with utility and frequent frustration. Part of me would purge digital electronics from my life completely. But I like streaming music, and video, and my phone’s camera…

And I love the sound and feel of a naturally-aspirated V8 engine. Unlike fifteen years ago, though, I am keenly aware that such an engine in a car is almost gone from the market. So that makes owning one (which I do, in my 2014 Lexus GX460—a lux-i-fied Toyota Land Cruiser Prado, for those of you outside the U.S.) extra-special-feeling. The context for owning an NA V8 now is not the same as it was in 2010, and that alters the subjective experience of it.

It is definitely true that people who own older technology thanks to nostalgia are aware of the context of more modern alternatives. Hence David’s “better in every way.” Nostalgia does not have to be blinding. But he still loves the ’83 911. He appreciates it for what it is, rather than judge it for what it is not, and of course every time he touches it, he’s in direct connection with whatever ‘80s Porsches meant to him in the ‘80s.

Only two things about my adult life have anything to do with what I foresaw at 17. One, I’m married, and two, I have an advanced degree. Other than that, the aspirations of 17-year-old me and those of adult-me are vastly different. So, there’s a break, if you will, in what could have been a sort of “nostalgia-continuum.” It is true that I retained the aspiration to own fine vehicles—but I do. They are not the same ones I gawked at when I was 17—but then they didn’t exist when I was 17.

It would be easy to think that scoring that beautifully-preserved ’89 BMW 3-series would give you that “pure BMW experience” that got diluted with the size and weight and complexity and computer-ness of modern cars. The hitch is, that “pure BMW experience” you have in mind is going to happen in the context of all those ‘90s and ‘00s and ‘20s cars you’ve been driving. You might be in for a bit of a rude reality check. That could turn into delight at the “retro-novelty” of it, but what it won’t be is the same feeling you’d have gotten if you’d driven it in 1989.

So, yeah, nostalgia has a “context problem,” but it’s an interesting and potentially highly-instructive one in understanding the complexity of the connections between technology and subjective experience. The ’89 BMW, the ’83 911, the ’85 XJS—they didn’t change, if they’ve been preserved like-new. But we did, and automaking did, and the roads did…