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Notes -
In summary:
The American Hot Rod Association gives an overly strict definition of hot rods which has been unwelcome to the newer generation of tuners. Due to factory cars being fast now, tuner culture has changed. The people still doing hot rods are getting old and dying off, and aren't interested in the types of things that have happened in response to this. They have chosen death over diversity.
My take:
Old hot rods are expensive AF, and like most cool things (hot rods and muscle cars are cool), the cost of them has gone to the moon. It's not that tuners are disinterested in...tuning, it's just that getting to the really high end is extremely expensive now. Still, having a car that will do 10 second quarter miles is seen as an extreme point of pride.
On top of this, most homes now either have a restrictive HOA, or an even more restrictive and powerful set of city "ordinances" which prohibit things like a teenager and his friends swapping an engine in their driveway. It's become de facto illegal in most places[1] to tune cars unless you can afford an enclosed workshop to do it in.
[1]: Obviously California is an exception to this rule where they have all but made it literally illegal to modify any aspect of you car and may or may not just impound it if you do: https://old.reddit.com/r/ElantraN/comments/11iks8c/final_most_likely_update_4_loud_exhaust_and_smog/
I can only wish that jackbooted thugs would impound the cars that shook my windows every day when I lived on a main road in California. Unfortunately, they didn't.
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I took a course in speed reading, and I got so good I read War and Peace in 3 hours! It's about Russia.
A lot of mid-tier street rods are actually getting harder and harder to sell, because young people (broadly defined) don't really care for them. This is the kind of dynamic I'm talking about: if you incorporate the newer forms of the hobby, some of those same people will respect and care for the older forms.
HOAs are the fucking worst. All the downsides of government and private industry combined into one.
Lmao, sign me up.
I'm curious about the libertarian argument here. Usually when I bring up HOAs libertarians start complaining about zoning etc. Idk, I think it's a thornier problem than most give it credit for.
My vote goes to the fact that we no longer have a shared moral fabric in modern Western society. Once you lose that things that were relatively simple become hard as hell to figure out.
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