If car culture IS dying, it's actually all your fasult.
October 14, 2025
Not them, you.
The car culture stuff isn't dead or dying. Nothing is functionally worse from 2005/2015/2025 except your enthusiasm. Car meets didn’t start dying until people like you and I stopped making them worth going to. Everyone wants to talk about how things “used to be,” but no one wants to take accountability for how little they’ve done to help. You can’t claim the any scene’s dead if your contribution is just constant complaints online about how good things used to be.
Gatlinburg 2025
The elephant in the room is the most recent SE Gatlinburg fiasco. Everyone (present or not) has been online dumping their opinions about it and monday morning quarterbacking how it was supposed to go
Thousands of cars show up, they absolutely destroy Jimmys and the strip, and now the event series isn't welcome back in sevierville.
The same people who haven’t hosted (and some even attended) a single local meet or track day in years are making instagram posts about how “the scene is ruined.” because some broccoli haired 18 year old kids got a stance meet banned from a town (not a unique or new situation)
Since the inception of stance as a concept it's been an attention seeker contest for people to grab eyes and media with practically useless cars. H20i and Slammednuff were usually excuses to get drunk with some friends while spectating people misbehave in traffic from the hotel balcony. It was always naturally headed this direction, similar to large group rides during bike meets. While they're fun to attend sometimes, it almost always leans into turning the area into a racetrack
Problems vs Solutions
I will preface this by saying - I hate sideshows/takeovers and drivers that endanger other people, but I would be lying to say I never street drifted a car, did touge racing on a mountian road, or did generally unsafe car antics pre-prefrontal-cortex. I am very lucky at a young age it was not recorded (for the most part), and I am thankful that a lot of this stuff wasn't popular then. I do make a distinction between middle of intersection and trespassing into warehouse parking lots, but I think the comparison ends around there. Thinking back to when you've ever speeded or did a risky maneuver- spending all of your energy on trying to blame them for what's happening overall is a little bit of an accountability dodge.
People don't talk with prescriptive language anymore. It's easy to identify right from wrong but people struggle to add anything meaningful to the conversation. To say "new people are ruining my hobby" is one of the most common thing I have heard throughout my life as hobbies that are cool become trendy for any time. Once they sell RX7 shirts and hoonigan stickers at Zumiez, it's going to be like this. That said, it's easier to post memes about “clout chasers and retards” than to set up a private track event or create media that promotes positive behavior.
If you're the kind of person that owns a "fun car to drive to work in", a stance car, or don't participate in automotive events / Motorsports .... congrats! You have ascribed the VW Jetta use case onto something not designed to do that. Probably for attention if you're being very honest about that, so don't feel you need to read much further as you're likely into cars for vanity and attention anyway. As much as I am annoyed by young maladjusted TikTok brain poisoned 19 year olds with bad haircuts, there are just as many people with a high level of pretentiousness and perceived taste that are doing nothing to influence those people in the positive direction, build community, or develop their own driver skill.
There are new driver kids in my neighborhood that see my cars outside of my house and I tell them all the same thing- I will help them prep their cars for autocross or drift events, and help them make their loud cars quieter, but I *won't* help them cut cars up for cosmetic mods or help them do anything stupid. I also encourage them to do less mods and more events. I want more people to save money and focus less on depleting budget on things they don't even need. I also actively discourage my friends from creating public neusance cars that attract negative attention.
Where you come in
If you are reading this you are likely a pretty car interested person and/oryou have enough attention span to read down to my fifth header- so you are likely a pretty smart person in 2025.
Unfortunately, that burdens you with a bit of a responsibility. You should be leading by example. Have a clean well modified car with non replica parts, and promote good behavior.
You should do your best to avoid feeding the attention hungry group online doing anything to get you to talk about them. You should also host/attend car events in your area and help your friends make it to tracks in whatever way possible.
If new people around you show interest in motorsports- you should be the one helping steer them towards the correct media to get them on the right track, And a lot of the people who used to run it couldn’t handle not being the center of it anymore.