Select Page

I’m not a car guy, in the sense of somebody who salivates over particular models or spends Saturdays working on my vehicle, although I can appreciate good engineering and design in a semi-detached manner, and I enjoy driving a stick shift for reasons I can’t articulate (unless I’m in a traffic jam, of course).

So when Slate reprinted an answer from Quora asking “why do car buffs dislike Tesla”, I have no idea if the premise of the question is even relevant. But I found it entertaining in its snarky put-down:

People claiming to be true car buffs who don’t like the ascendancy of electrics are really nostalgists. They like grease under their fingernails as a signifier—mostly to themselves and a subset of their males friends—of a certain type of manliness. They are stuck in the past, not even surfing the present, never mind inhabiting the future with Tesla.

In the future, there isn’t room for people who think that burning million-year-old dead plants and blowing a ton of pollution and carbon into the atmosphere in order to go slower is a good thing. There’s just room to put them out to pasture with old YouTube videos and maybe analog amplifiers to make the sound fuzzy and distorted.

You can read the whole thing right here, and either nod in approval if you’re a Tesla/electric car fan; grimace in annoyance if you’re a traditional-car fan, or scratch your head if you’re one of those people who think cars are boxes on wheels that serve a purpose and can’t figure out why people get all worked up over them.

Pin It on Pinterest