| The Internet and the Muscle Car |
| Written by Muscle Car Tech | |
| Friday, 22 February 2008 | |
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If one thing can truly help the Muscle car make the comeback that the American car manufacturers desperately hope it will, it will be the internet. The American car companies for years have watched their market get slowly chipped away at by foreign car makers.
They’ve realized that they can’t compete with what the imports do best, and so have to make a return to what they do best. The glory days of the American car were the days of the Charger, the Challenger, the Mustang and the GTO among others. The American Muscle car remains such an iconic set of machinery, as well as an iconic attitude that many long for the days of yore. Even young people today who get interested in cars spend days looking at pictures, building models, and drawing pictures of those Mustangs and Chargers. I don’t know a car lover, kid or adult, who has a poster of a Hyundai Accent up in his bedroom. The internet is the world’s greatest news and information sharing marketplace today. In order for the American Muscle car to truly resurge to its place of prominence and stay there, it has to appeal to the younger generations. Yes, the reissue of the Challenger and Camaro will be bought by many boomers, but in another decade or two it will be the young people of today taking the lion’s share of the muscle car market, and if those cars are going to last that long they have to interest people now. The internet is a source for so much more information on these cars than could ever be gained from a monthly subscription to a car magazine. You can read all about the cars in their original state and time, and how they raced, how they functioned and how they were such a part of the subculture at the time. The real appeal though is the custom websites that people have developed showing their restored cars from the sixties and seventies. This is how you catch the bug. When you flip through a monthly magazine you know it’s only so long and you have to wait until next month. But every time you sit down at that computer to check your email, it’s hard to resist the lure of hopping over to a website like Jay Leno’s garage where his viewers send in the pictures and stats of their restored cars, (Not to mention Leno’s own astounding collection) and you can see something new every day. Then you start to dream. There are so many auto-selling and trading websites out there you can’t even list them. Once someone starts to browse them, you know they’re hooked. When someone goes on craigslist and searches for a Mustang for sale, you know they’re done for; it might just be a matter of time. Those classified ads are a powerful lure, because they make you realize that your dream of owning the perfect muscle car is a reality, even if it can‘t happen today, it’s only a matter of time and money until its yours. The internet may just be the breeding ground for these muscle car dreams that the car makers need. It may be the best chance to fire up an entire generation about getting a muscle car someday. |