What's this funny-looking part for?
Those who brave the puzzlement and terrors of DIY car repair often retreat to the web for advice. Some car forums offer more than guidance for wrenches and bruised hands. Forum etiquette.
Read time: 11 minutes, a little longer than usual. This week: Car clubs have been around practically since cars first took to the road. Their role has changed over the past century, and they’ve shifted toward the virtual like everything else. They may be changing again into “garage and social.” Next week: An empathetic look at robots. How we see robots, and how eventually they may see us. I take a look at two scholarly publications. Know anyone who might be interested in Technocomplex? Why not share with them?
One of my adventurous projects began sipping beer and looking at web pages with my old “Bondi Blue” iMac tied to the Internet with a 56K modem. I “surfed the web” — a phrase, by the way, coined (or at least “popularized”) by friend and colleague Mark McCahill — in search of pictures of early Jaguar “XK-E” convertibles, as the car was called in the US. I felt most at home on two websites: Roger Los’s photography while restoring an early “flat-floored” car, and the website of Classic Jaguar in Austin, Texas, where Dan Mooney seemed somehow to pull levers in the workshop and on the company’s web server. Los’s original website from the early 2000’s has disappeared, but he posted some shots when the car was nearly done. The Classic Jaguar website beautifully continues, sans its “Café,” the company-sponsored Jaguar car forum from the early 2000s. Both sites changed, since the world is always in flux. Two things prodded me to buy and haul a rusted car to my humble garage: Los’s pictures of the work on his car and Classic Jaguar’s beautiful body work and a now defunct and nicely sized forum, which I think might have been a burden too heavy for Dan to maintain and keep his sanity.
Anyway, I blame both of these websites for my dalliance with the old car that became an adventure for a couple of decades.
In the North Carolina Piedmont, we don’t have a lot of E-Types, the proper British name for the model and the one I prefer to use. I’ve seen a total of three over the years, one of them a Series 1 coupé — the initial version of the breed that was introduced in 1961. Here, a sighting In Real Life is rare. The web delivers, though, and it managed to resurrect a passion that had laid latent inside me for decades. I bought a badly rusted 1963 model that had settled at the side of a cornfield near Suffolk, Virginia. It took almost twenty years to rehabilitate the beast, and to this day I continue to tweak and burnish.
Anyway, in 2002 I owned the proverbial “basketcase.” What I needed was advice. Before the purchase would have been better timing for advice, perhaps, but I do think I still would have sent the check and fetched the remnants even though wise advisors would have frantically tried to wave me off.
The wise advisors would have been more convincing, I am sure, if they’d been present in real life — perhaps as fellow members of a car club. But where I live, a classic car club wasn’t easy to find in the early 2000s. Times for real life clubs are tougher now as club officers fret about the aging of club membership — the average age estimated in the sixties — and many clubs make a special effort to attract younger members. Consolidation of clubs has helped a bit to bolster club numbers, too.
New habits of getting information have eroded the attraction of a regular monthly meeting of a car club, perhaps at a local diner or restaurant. Digital natives get information they want on the web, and they socialize just fine with smartphones. It’s been that way practically since modems first fuzzed static and dinged at home. If the pornography industry was an early adopter of the Internet (and a spur to its development), car restorers and enthusiasts weren’t far behind. The passion and the immediacy of car questions and opinions also made a good fit for the ’net. That’s where the young are, pretty much, if they’re smitten by the car hobby.
In Real Life clubs and post-digital clubs
Media, print or not, has always played a role in the life of cars. For the most part, the “old-car hobby” — that is, the hobby of restoring old cars — had support from publications and from car clubs, where the experience of driving and repair arose from real human interactions. The first publications on the old-car hobby in the US, according to historian David N. Lucsko, appeared after World War II. The earliest one he found was from 1947, and in the early 1950s other articles appeared in car publications like Motor Trend and Car Life. In 1954, Hemmings Motor News was first published by Emmett Hemmings, and its first edition was a slim four-pages offered for 50 cents. From the first, its mission was to support car collector enthusiasts.
One can think of print media like Hemmings as making up the sinews of a continent-wide body of collectors and restorer-hobbists, giving individuals a picture of a greater landscape of car collecting, not to mention the opportunity to scare up spare parts from junked cars. The publication continues to be important for collector car sales, in large part because of Hemmings online presence, which was launched in 1998. (One of my favorites among Hemmings publications is the “Abandoned Autos Calendar” which first appeared in 1991.)
In 2002, I needed a club, or something. Today, one website told me that I could probably join nearly a hundred clubs in North Carolina, one of them specializing in British cars. My own research has scared up many more, though clubs do seem to wax and wane, and frankly nothing is handy to where I live in the sticks. I have had to settle for online options.
Clubs and online forums do one thing pretty well. They concentrate skill — or at least they concentrate opinions, as is often that case with matters of old-car restoration. Often consensus eludes discussion, and that may especially be the case with forums, since messages come forth without the blessings of context. In Real Life, such context is essentially a given. You hear tones of voice, see the moments of consideration, and you capture nuances of manner and personal history. Online those cues lack, of course, and though we might feel they can be supplanted by other cues that are tractable in a digital world we also have learned that bits and bytes can deliver lies. “On the Internet, they can’t tell you’re a dog.”
I regularly lurked on the Jag-Lovers E-type forum, and I still check in, though not nearly as often as when confusion and restoration innocence made me open the web browser every evening. I have discovered that the place is actually pretty unique, since it is welcoming and fresh. Trolls have been kept at bay, perhaps largely because of rigorous post moderation and a strict ban on politics. In part because it is open to all comers (some forums require, say, ownership of a model, a membership fee, or an application of some sort), the range of views on certain subjects is broad and bounded only by a respect and love of the car model. Even though the forum is peopled with a whole array of characters, conviviality originates from attitudes about the car not, like TikTok, from algorithm manipulations or online (and fake) personalities. Many, like me, are amateurs and DIY’ers who either never had or have given up hopes of concours d’elegance car show distinction; car shows motivate others, and they have precise and valuable knowledge of every detail and every part. Thus do motivations mix on Jag-Lovers, and the whole place is enriched and sometimes even noisy in disagreement. The kind of disagreement that colleagues or club members share.
Decency of people helps, of course. And that’s not always to be expected in the car forum world, and in fact the rude and trollish responses that forums show have become a source of parody. Sometimes off-color and always biting website Sniff Petrol includes a feature called “Ask A Total Prick From An Internet Forum.” “First of all, welcome to the site,” Total Prick responded to a fairly typical first poster. “Secondly, is this how you would normally introduce yourself? You just come in here and start asking questions like you own the place? Get some manners.”
Total Prick wouldn’t make it through the Jag-Lovers moderators, most of the time at least.
I’ve seen compassion on the forum, and I have to admit that it is surprising in an odd way. Human compassion would seem to apply to any human exchange, at least in a civilized world, but it seems difficult to find online at times. In April 2021, I saw a first post from a woman in Oklahoma who had recently inherited an E-type from her father who had died from cancer. She was looking for help, much as I was some twenty years earlier. '“Have lofty dreams of completing the restoration as I promised him I would,” she wrote in her introduction, “Many pictures and even more questions to come I am sure.” The problem, she said, was a matter of knowing where to start.
Other forum members welcomed her warmly, a couple of them expressing a depth of understanding that comes from having lost their own loved ones to cancer. Everyone’s responses I saw were not only sensitive to the situation but also enthusiastic about helping a daughter fulfill her promise to her father. And, indeed, many pictures and helpful and humorous exchanges followed — exchanges that would have been magnified in their humanity had they taken place across the table at a restaurant or, better, huddled over the engine compartment of a car. But for an online forum, good enough. Even more than good enough.
Of course, the luckiest on the Jag-Lovers forum have advantages of proximity, and they share their car trips and meetings with the rest of the E-type world. Sometimes the intersection of Real Life and the digital magnifies and expands connections. In 2017, frequent contributor and level-headed E-type enthusiast Jerry Mouton died while on a “Big Sky Oil Leak Tour,” a driving tour he had taken part in for years with many of his Jaguar friends. Reports quickly circulated on Jag-Lovers. It was shocking even for those of us who had never met Jerry face-to-face. His motto was laissez les bons temps rouler, a theme that captured his spirit in his forum posts. Bay Area Jaguar club members gathered their E-types for his funeral procession. Others, more far flung, probably took part as well. In this case and in others, the Jag-Lovers E-type forum magnified human connections that in many cases, including mine, initially follows the thin thread of a car, a sole point of commonality.
Can the In Real Life club find new energy?
Hagerty Insurance, valuable core of the Hagerty group of companies, relies on the continuation of the old car hobby. They insure vintage cars and have recently expanded the scope of their activities after a successful stock offering. For years as a private company, Hagerty has compiled insurance data and car valuation information. Now a publicly traded company (HGTY), Hagerty leverages the social aspect of car collecting in its “Garage + Social” with locations in six North American cities as of January 2022.
“Think of Garage + Social as your clubhouse,” the company’s website says. “Stop by, grab a coffee, admire some cars and hang out with fellow automotive enthusiasts.” The locations are, literally, garages, with the standard “membership” including storage of classics in air conditioned and “dust-free garages with 24/7 security” and service that “covers all aspects of collection management.” Don’t have a classic, but want to rub elbows with those who do? A “social membership” includes “all the social perks, without the storage” and starts at $125/month.
The clientele is predominantly men, and website’s photos show it, though the its creators did make an effort to include women.
The structure of the Garage + Social set up echoes the structure of many “equestrian centers” or, as common folk put it, “horse barns.” Each has a staffing structure that centers on care of their respective beasts, monthly fees are comparable, and active members are curiously tipped toward one sex (not the same one, by the way). Garage + Social at Delray Beach has four “DIY mechanic bays,” but horse barns all have some place of grooming an animal who’s needing some work. At each Garage + Social site, such care can be arranged for the cars, including everything “from basic wash-n-wax to comprehensive detailing, a process that includes paint correction and nano-coating technology.” The person who arranges has the lofty title “concierge.” Many horse barns offer riding opportunities and training sessions analogous to the driving activities and events that Garage + Social facilities offer.
Of course, it’s good to remember that horse barns and recreational riding became the center of equestrian activity as the horse yielded roadways to the car. Could Garage + Social be the early signs of something like that for the automobile? The car, after all, is under pressure, requiring either a revolutionary move to a different kind of fuel (electricity or hydrogen, for example) or an equally important and considerably more drastic reconsideration of the car’s centrality, especially in urban life.
Perhaps feeling that the car or its “culture” is imperiled, McKeel Hagerty, chief executive of Hagerty, told New York Times business reporter Bert Brett, “The purpose of the company is to save driving and car culture. If we’re going to save car culture, we have to make investments outside of the core business, and really help create a whole ecosystem.” Garage + Social is part of the Hagerty portfolio, but the notion of “car culture” that seems to operate in it differs from sociologists’ “automobility,” which maps the pervasive influences, pressures, and dependencies relating to the car, especially in America. In light of his company’s car-supporting activities, McKeel Hagerty’s “car culture” looks to me a lot like today’s “horse culture” — cordoned off, mostly affluent, and limited to recreation and sport.
Tags: do-it-yourself, car restoration, classic cars, car repair, car clubs, automotive, automobile, online forum, Jag-Lovers, forum etiquette, car and society
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Maybe we should just take a bus: Parker, Claire. “France Says Car Ads Must Come with a Caveat: Walk, Bike or Take Public Transit Instead.” Washington Post. January 5, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/05/france-car-ads-alternatives/ and Le Monde.fr. “« Pensez à covoiturer », « prenez les transports en commun » : de nouveaux messages obligatoires sur les publicités automobiles,” December 29, 2021. https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2021/12/29/pensez-a-covoiturer-prenez-les-transports-en-commun-de-nouveaux-messages-obligatoires-sur-les-publicites-automobiles_6107611_3234.html. And, again in France, “Paris Respire.” [in French] Accessed January 20, 2022. https://www.paris.fr/pages/paris-respire-2122.
“I hope they don’t Hagertize everything”: Berk, Brett. “A Classic Car Giant With a Lofty Mission: Save Driving.” The New York Times, December 16, 2021, sec. Business. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/business/classic-cars-hagerty.html.
Complex and, yes, fun YouTube video from the Hagerty Drivers Foundation: The Cannonball Run was outlaw racing in broad daylight. This is the story of how the “Cannonball,” which began as a grudge and rebellion race against 1970s speed limits, enlisted a supercar for the New York to Los Angeles trek in 1979.
The fifteen-minute city and future mobility: Antunes, Miguel Eiras, Jean Gil Barroca, and Daniela Guerreiro de Oliveira. “Urban Future with a Purpose: 12 Trends Shaping the Future of Cities by 2030.” Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, 2021. https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/public-sector/articles/urban-future-with-a-purpose/15-minute-city.html.
“Automobility” — the classic Urry article that defined the term: Urry, John. “The System of Automobility.” Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 4–5 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276404046059.
Interesting book series from Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury. “Object Lessons.” Accessed January 14, 2022. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/object-lessons/. “Object Lessons is a series of concise, collectable, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.” The links, however, are dead ends because someone hasn’t finished the web page work.