Where the War on Cars Loses the People

Americans are increasingly torn over whether the era of personal transportation is over. The anti-car drumbeat continues and is getting louder. But stepping back and looking at the issue objectively is instructive, because as automobile dealers, we have an important message to share. And it’s up to us to make sure that it’s heard.

The School of Hard Knocks – it’s a phrase that appears in the press going back to 1918. Wikipedia describes it as “An idiomatic phrase meaning the (sometimes painful) education one gets from life’s usually negative experiences.” It aptly describes what most of us know: you can’t learn everything you need in life from formal education and even though some ideas go against conventional wisdom, they still manage to thrive.

Education – from Hard Knocks or Harvard – offers freedom. Combined with working knowledge of the world around you it is advertised as the means to be able to live the life you want to live. Freedom that stems primarily from a book-based education, on the other hand, tends to be short-sighted, enables hazardous assumptions and even erects new thought barriers.

Americans have a tendency to believe their perspectives on poverty, privilege, and freedom are universal and that we will always be able to turn on our lights, always have food to eat, and always hop in our car and get out of town. Those living in developing countries - or California during a wildfire - know this to be a squarely false assumption.

When people get outside of their geographic or cultural comfort zones it often leads to some dramatic revelations.

I’m a good example. I thought I knew what poverty was. Growing up in a rural area of North Carolina decimated by the plight of tobacco growers, I saw farmers who once sold to R.J. Reynolds selling overseas for a fraction of the price. After college I moved to the east side of Washington D.C., which had been ravaged by race riots in the 1960s and then neglected. I saw people kill and rob to put food on the table for their children when their government benefits were turned off. I thought I knew what poverty was. But when I joined a government delegation to a United Nations refugee camp just outside the Syrian border in 2016, I realized I’d been wrong about poverty my entire life.

When someone challenges our basic assumptions, we tend to dismiss them as fantastic or detached from reality. But they’re still out there, spreading their ideas. It often begins with paid advocates spreading demonstrably one-sided messages. Nevertheless, those messages seep into the public consciousness. And when it comes to getting rid of cars, major publishers are starting to take notice and are starting to disseminate the idea under their credible reputations.

This week, Condé Nast and McKinsey Consulting joined the chorus, positing a future without personally owned vehicles. Quoting classically educated “researchers,” they are waxing poetic on the opportunities a car-free society might hold without really examining the practical reality that it could also result in some significant challenges to our way of life.

If you live in a city – especially one with robust and inexpensive public transit – as these A-list researchers inevitably do, this may be a manageable challenge. But for those without the operating funds, physical ability, or proximity to transit, getting rid of cars could have the practical impact of making the world significantly smaller. If expanding the world leads to revelations, shrinking it would restrict people’s understanding and deprive them of empathy for others who see the world differently.

In fact, we’ve tried this before. Major urban planners created a “town within a town” concept in the mid-1900s. It’s how New York got Little Italy, Miami got Little Havana, and Chicago got Polish downtown. But the planners didn’t reckon on how it would lead to an appreciation of these different cultures and venturing out to explore the town and the world in larger numbers than ever. People discovered freedom. And we liked it.

Discovery and breaking down barriers brought development and broke up the monolithic nature of formerly insular neighborhoods. This was a good thing because we were getting to know people who saw the world differently. Why would we seek to reverse that now through the eradication of cars and making our worlds smaller? Climate change notwithstanding, there’s a better way than limiting people’s freedom.

It’s easy for us to say Americans will never give up their cars. I have said it a dozen times before the legislature. But we must be careful of conventional wisdom. I’ve also caught myself saying things that made perfect sense at the time like, “The Russians will wipe Ukraine off the map,” or “There’s NO way the Avalanche lose to the Kraken.” Conventional wisdom is often proved wrong.

Climate change is a concern, certainly, but automotive technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that such a regression doesn’t make sense. Nevertheless, as dealers, we certainly hope the American people will hold the line and demand the freedom to travel around town and around the country on their terms.

Dealers must internalize and start communicating our own message. Getting outside of our communities’ auto rows, educating ourselves and globalizing just a little about climate could help us develop enough of an understanding to effectively combat the anti-car movement through science, automotive technology and successful messaging. We do not want to see the day where we become the ideological minority struggling to be taken seriously. That would be a serious lesson from the School of Hard Knocks.

Matthew Groves Interim CEO