Young people, old cars

As car enthusiasts, we’ve all experienced that little rush of pride when identifying a car correctly for a friend. Such small victories are sweet, felt when you inform your layman companions that they’ve just been deafened by a TVR, especially when that’s followed by, ‘what’s a TVR?’

So imagine my sheer horror when walking through a car park and being unable to identify a friend’s car. It was definitely a Mk2 Volkswagen Golf and I was pretty sure it wasn’t a GTI – no badge or red lipstick – but it had four headlights, not two like the standard car. To add to my confusion, my friends, who wouldn’t know their Cadillacs from their Caterhams, loved it. What was to me an interesting but otherwise unremarkable old Golf seemed to captivate them in a way no modern machine could.

But when I learned that this car was not owned by some bearded curmudgeon with a penchant for the past but a 20-year-old university student, it rather confirmed something important, something I’ve suspected for some time now: it’s not true that young people are less interested in cars than previous generations, rather that modern cars are simply less interesting than their forebears.