There Goes the American Muscle Car

Mustangs got the reputation because they were cheap power with a solid rear end which made peeling out into a turn incredibly unstable.

A nice, tactile gear change is particularly pleasurable as well. And sounds do go along with all this, but they don't necessarily need to be loud.

I can imagine a bizarro version of this comment where a future person in a world where all of your caloric needs are met by a pill you take daily, ranting about how food enthusiasts insist on shoving their smelly food up your nostrils as you walk by an unnecessary-in-this-day-and-age restaurant, and how they only do it to annoy other people.

As opposed to the 60k for a nice Tesla??

> There's just fewer and fewer people that need a loud noise maker to be happy,

Come to south Queens NYC and you'll find plenty of these people. There's a shop around the block from me that builds these noise makers and I get to hear them test drive them up and down the block.

My electric family sedan (Tesla model 3 long range) has everything I've ever liked about muscle cars - in abundance. 498 horsepower, a "first gear" that will wind up past 200 kph, instant throttle response. The only thing missing are the impracticalities - the noise, the small back seat, the smell of tires and soot and oil leaking from somewhere. Oh, and the oil changes, and the plug changes, and the stolen catalytic converters, and the coils that go bad, and the fan clutch, and the PCV system, and the fuel/oil/air filter maintenance, and the drive belt, and the injectors, and the exhaust manifold gaskets, and the muffler, and the yearly smog checks.

The sound profile of a V8 is very different from the 4-cylinder and similar I’m shopping for of course, but the principle still applies. I also just don’t want to be my neighbor who finds it necessary to come and go at odd hours in the most abrasive manner possible.

Also, the loud sound != big. V8 != Loud, esp when many v6 motors are close in displacement to Ford's 5 liter V8.

I had a MINI. That was a build quality disaster. Major engine issues after only three years. I now have a Silverado 1500 LTZ. It has obvious build quality issues. Interior isn’t as good as it used to be. Gearbox has a banging sound. My Teslas seem so much better than either of those or most other cars I interact with really. I sat in my friends Toyota Camry the other day. The interior seemed so much cheaper, the sound quality so much worse, the cabin was so much more loud than my humble Model 3. What about my car has poor build quality that I am oblivious to?

I'm not actually sure any EV could capture what people like about muscle cars, but you're definitely not going to get it from some futuristic transport blob that just happens to have a low 0-60 time. The Tesla roadster might have captured some of the sports car magic, but it's telling they don't make that any more (for now). I don't know if they could do the same thing for muscle cars at all.

Maybe more importantly, either of the above had an appealing visual style (to some!) and had their own community around them. Teslas are pretty visually boring, you can't really modify them, but I suppose they have a community of their own who debates which version of software drives the car for you better.

A Suzuki GSX-1000 can do it in 2.5s.

I don't worry about being smoked by any Subaru (loved my WRX in the day) but dual motor Teslas? I ease off.

Besides, Muscle cars are often more about torque and the front-engine rwd layout. In the 70s they were all slow as shit but could still peel tires and do burnouts.

Also, for those in-the-know, the mid 2000s Honda Accord v6 was about as fast as the mustang of that time, but obviously drove very different.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

I don't think it's ever been logical but it ticks important emotional boxes so that makes sense.

I'm old and I drive a refurb'd Leaf and have never ever cared that my vehicle was not sexy. I've never been "normal" so never had the appeal but I understand it.

I would challenge you that it is your proclivity for logic that is causing your identity crisis. If you enjoy a certain aesthetic, the pursuit of that aesthetic is reason enough. You are already putting constraints on the concept of a car because strapping a rocket on wheels with wings is going to have much more performance than an EV. Redefine your pursuit to be the most performant muscle car and everything is squared. No identity crisis needed.

* Don't change lanes if the blinky light on your side mirrors tells you not to

* Don't back up unless the image in the backup camera tells you it's safe

* Stop reversing when the beeping from the park distance sensors get too insistent

* AEB, lane departure warning, rear traffic assist radar, etc.

Don't get me wrong, people have used this "old man yells at cloud" point of view to call "real cars" dead for many decades; fuel injection, ABS, automatic transmissions, whatever. But we've definitely gotten to a tipping point where most of the fun is gone.

I'm not saying we should go back to x% more deaths per year by getting rid of XYZ nanny system, I'm just saying car enthusiasm is largely dead in new cars.

Look, no way about it, most of the drivers of muscle cars today are grey headed old men. They're the only ones that can afford them.

The next big demo for muscle cars is via exorbitant leases that select for idiots. Which yeah, now we're talking younger men with testosterone, at least.

Being an old man now too, I'm fairly certain that dumb testosterone laden guys with a loud and fast car are still gonna get the girls, but I can't be 100 on that anymore.

Still thats the next demo down. It's mostly old farts on Harleys and in Mustangs (unless you're near Paris Island or San Diego, of course)

I view it as much like having an appreciation of Steam Trains and older aircraft!

Still interesting and the best are machines worthy of our ongoing attention.

FWIW I own an old Porsche 911 and an alarmingly fast EV.

I love them both.

When I get back in to the old 911, I think to myself, how the bloody hell was this even legal! It feels dangerous and exciting all at the same time. It's an event every time I turn the key and it starts making noises and the gauges spring into life and lights and switches start glowing. Then you turn the key from a cold start and listen to the sound, and you get to know exactly the state of tune. You dont even need to drive it very fast or very far and it makes you feel alive in a way my EV never does!

Now when I get in and drive my EV, it works in an astonishingly safe and effective way every time. When you stamp on the accelerator it will immediately rocket forwards in a way that makes the occupants of the car feel sick LOL

The acceleration in an EV tapers off, whereas in an older performance cat the performance builds in a more exciting way I think.

But as I say, it's like being a Steam Train enthusiast. They are what they are, from a time when they did what they did.

I think we're a long way off self-driving cars in earnest, but we're in the shorter term leaving behind the idea of cars as something where their performance in some way correlates with social status. As hard as you try, you can't deny that element is there for gearheads and tuners - it's writ large across the Fast film franchise.

No shit...

> The average monthly car loan payment in the U.S. is $745 for new vehicles and $521 for used ones

> In the first quarter of 2025, the overall average auto loan interest rate was 6.73% for new cars and 11.87% for used cars.

It's not freeing because it's been saddled with all sorts of financial burdens raising the cost while at the same time younger people are poorer than ever.

It's not just cars, tons of traditional "coming of age" things are going away for the same reasons.

He had a 2000 Cadillac Eldorado he was very fond of. Drove that thing everywhere. He had to junk it -- the whole thing -- because some rain got into the sun roof and messed up one of the computers -- and aftermarket motherboards were not available. If he were willing to entertain computers in cars before, he wasn't afterward. Purely mechanical is where it's at. Me, I'm concerned that encroaching electronics means turning cars into smartphones on wheels. Things that want to shut down and do software updates when you want to go for a drive. And heaven help you if the update has bugs in it, or if the manufacturer decides to try out innovative new UI paradigms! (Patch 4.3.21: You can now use the gearshift to select songs in the media player! Great!) And that's before we get into the "features that are in the car, but disabled and paywalled with nothing but a software flag" issue.

I have a feeling that the enshittification of vehicles means there will be a small but vocal community of young people who rediscover the joys of purely mechanical vehicles from the 1960s and 1970s, the same way young people have discovered and appreciated 80s music, or video games from around the turn of the millennium.

A related issue: Analog radio is going away. It used to be that you could put together a crude but serviceable AM radio using a handful of spare parts. Kids would build them with components bought for a few bucks at Radio Shack. This could let you receive, for example emergency broadcasts in a pinch. If everything is converted to packetized digital radio, or worse, TCP/IP "radio", suddenly the complexity threshold you need to pick up a broadcast jumps.

Some of the most fascinating technologies to me are ones that are relatively simple, but which get you far. The Polynesians were able to explore much of the vast Pacific Ocean using sturdy canoes and navigation techniques that required no special equipment, just observation and a body of knowledge passed down through the generations. Our complex culture seems to be losing the ability to build and make use of simpler technology (though as concerns marine navigation, the US Navy has reintroduced navigation by LORAN and astronavigation as a part of cadet training).

During the pandemic I got a Camaro convertible with a manual. I love that car but it is hard to defend on functional grounds. A Tesla plaid will blow it off on the line. There are a lot of cars that are ten times more functional that are as good or better on the track.

I have kids who don't care about cars, took their time getting their driver license. As someone who grew up California I can't understand that. But cars allowed me to do things they can do without cars. And they live in an objectively safer and more stressful world, so I can see why they don't want to add driving to it.

Here's what I like about what I drive. It's fun, silly and orange. People look at it and know I like my car but they don't think I am rich dude with a fancy Porsche or Mercedes. All kinds of very pedestrian cars are faster, but I live in Los Angeles and I get to enjoy the weather.

We're decades past the time when a 1960s car was remotely competitive on any measurable aspect of performance but, just as rock climbing is not a valid competitor for taking a train/ski lift/whatever to the top of a mountain, there will always be those that revel in the joy of doing something that calls to our more primitive selves.

Muscle cars are the essence of being young... they're unreasonable, loud, reckless, and beautiful.