I have always loved cars, not because they get you from Attadale to Bicton, but because of what they represent in the world of design and culture. A car is one of the last truly personal objects most people own, everything else is AI, a subscription service or a throwaway item from Target. It sits at the intersection of culture, freedom, design, film, music, art and engineering. It reflects how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen. Cars signal whether someone is practical, poor, rich, ambitious, nostalgic, caring, interesting or careless. I will give you three distinct examples:
- Rugged terrain, livestock, Australian bush, Landcruiser, guns in the cabin, dogs on the back.
- 1990s BMW, Cartier watch, combed hair, corporate job, double-breasted suit.
- Southern Californian low rider, hydraulics, stereo system.
Cars shape the way people think about movement, space and even success. They are not just transport (as most Hyundai drivers would think!). The car you drive quietly signals your priorities, your ambitions, your aesthetic sensibilities, your artistic thoughts and feelings. Simply put – a car is your personality on the road.
Take 1990s and early 2000s BMWs. Those cars captured something specific about that era: dot-com optimism, Vice President, corporate ambition, upper-middle-class confidence – these machines oozed cool and confident. The E39 5 Series, the E46 3 Series, these were machines that felt planted, balanced, mechanically honest (note: reliability is dependent on you investing the coin to maintain them). They were serious cars for serious people who had a lot of responsibility. Sporty without being loud about it. Solid without being ostentatious. They commanded the road not through aggression but through composure. The competitors of the day spoke different languages. Mercedes-Benz targeted a discerning, established, older audience, while BMW targeted a sport focused, yuppie, the new money persona.
I drive a 2002 Titanium Silver BMW E39 530i with black leather and dark walnut interior. I say this with bias, but also with lived experience. That car feels engineered rather than assembled. It has weight in the steering. Feedback in the chassis and solidness on the road. It feels like a product of engineers who cared about the driving experience more than quarterly earnings. Even after 25 years, it feels like a BMW.
My first car was a 1992 red Audi 80, built in West Germany, before Audi shifted to the A4, A6 and A8 naming conventions. Five-speed manual. 2.0-liter four-cylinder. It represented my youth in a way I did not fully appreciate at the time. It drove me to my high school jobs, houseparties, school and did 20-30 driving trips from the Perth Hills to Applecross when we moved from semi-rural pastures to the city.
I still remember buying it at sixteen for $5,400. Dad’s first rule was “no European cars.” That rule lasted about 10 minutes when we hit the car dealerships in Victoria Park to find nothing but ranthrough junk. This Audi had character. It had a real German feel, the radio had a 1990s sound, doors that shut with authority, steering that spoke to you, it had a tight box (gearbox). It was raw enough to feel mechanical but refined enough to feel special. And yes, the air conditioning worked. It was fucking deadly (except for that one time when the clutch fucked up and it cost me $2,000 to fix – that was fun, or that other time when it overheated and cost me $1,500 to fix, but we do not talk about those times because I was too busy enjoying the car and was totally ok with paying 70% of the purchase price to repair my broken car).
Later came a 2009 charcoal grey VW Golf GTI. A phenomenal car. Bought at 28,000 km, sold at 110,000 km. I drove it through Sydney for a few years and then reluctantly let it go to a buyer in rural New South Wales as I was moving overseas and had not further use for it. If I could rewind one automotive decision in my life, it might be selling that GTI. It was the perfect blend of practicality and fun, the last of the understated hot-hatches before everything became digitized and filtered. VW makes a ripping hot-hatch.
When I moved to San Francisco, car ownership ended – I became chronically pedestrian along with the other shitcoin AI-techbros and city dwellers who hang around Mid-Market Street and reliant on the MUNI and BART. The city is indifferent at best and hostile at worst to motorists (unless you are Dirty Harry). Yet even without owning a car for 4 years (the passion did not fade). I drove extensively around the West Coast, long stretches of the Pacific Northwest, Arizona, Nevada, California highway, desert roads, coastal cliffs, the Big Sur. Cars remained symbolic. They represented autonomy.
When I returned to Perth, carless in a carful city – I bought the BMW 5 Series on a total whim with limited to no due diligence undertaken aside from the trust of its Croatian custodian. Originally Bruno (Not the name of the owner, but the name of the car, my girlfriend named him), was delivered to its original owner in Melbourne (March 2002). It was brought to Perth in 2006 by an owner who kept it for nearly 17 years. Two mechanics (Auto Classic and Swiss Motors). Full-service history. Care, not consumption. It feels like stewardship rather than ownership.
And that is what concerns me about the direction of cars in Australia today.
Increasingly, cars have been reduced to cheap appliances. Interchangeable, sanitized, optimized for compliance rather than character.
Walk through most suburban streets and you see the same categories repeated:
- Ford Ranger and Toyota Prado.
- Chinese electric vehicles.
- Japanese and Korean crossovers.
- White, grey or black European SUVs that blur into each other.
It feels like people have no creativity anymore! They just buy what the next guy buys, some stupid Raptor thing. People are not discerning enough when it comes to style.
We are drifting toward monoculture. Every vehicle risks becoming an electric grey egg with an iPad glued to the dashboard and 500 kW under software control (you can pay for 700 kW and they will push the red button and turn it on with AI). Design language is converging. Interfaces are homogenizing. The physical act of driving is being abstracted behind screens, sensors and legal disclaimers.
You can thank Northern California and Silicon Valley for this aesthetic. Minimalism has metastasized. The car interior now resembles a tablet accessory (like AI slop and goo). Tactile buttons are gone, no more switches that set off dopamine when you flick them (honestly, it feels amazing to flip a beautiful mechanical switch). Everything is “clean”, which is to say, everything feels the same.
Economic forces and safety regulation play a central role.
Pedestrian impact standards raise bonnet lines so good by Lamborghini Countach. Battery packaging dictates proportions and weight distribution. Aerodynamics smooths edges. Efficiency flattens personality. But creativity has quietly ceded ground to cost optimization, large-scale end-to-end Chinese manufacturing and platform sharing amongst manufacturers, consolidation in the industry (look at Stellantis – Jeep-Dodge-Chrysler-Alfa-Maserati).
The rise of Chinese manufacturers adds another dimension, and these Chinese manufacturers have upended the entire car industry in only 5 years. Honestly, there are dozens of brands and sub-brands, and non-car enthusiasts gravitate toward these brands (think, Chery, Haval, BYD, GWM, MG, JAC). Many of the designs are overt homages to German luxury brands (look at certain BYD SUVs beside a Macan or Cayenne). Visit a dealership and you will be greeted with 4 or 5 muted colors, all variations of white through charcoal. Interiors that feel like they were mood-boarded from Mercedes or Porsche. A friend and I visited a Chinese car dealership – it smelt like cheap materials, the cars looked like Porsche, the customers looked like people who wished they could buy the real deal.
There is little reward in the mass market today for automotive artistry. A global supply chain produces a global aesthetic. Culture that was once regional. Think, German (luxury saloons), British (sports cars), American (muscles), Italian (supercars), Japanese (anything you wanted it to be) – now feels flattened.
But monocultures rarely last.
If you look at broader cultural trends, especially on social platforms, the era of centralized celebrity is fading. The Kardashians are being displaced by microinfluencers and niche communities, from cottagecore, lofi-metalcore to Italodisco styles. Trends fragment. Subcultures flourish, then we rebuild.
I suspect the same will happen with cars.
Gen Z and Gen A are growing up in a world of seamless, screen-mediated experiences. These generations did not remember life before the Internet. Their rebellion may not be louder exhausts (who knows, it may be) – it may be authenticity. Mechanical authenticity. Analog authenticity. Objects that require maintenance, attention, skill. We are talking about mechanical art, like a Swiss timepiece, a set of Japanese denim workwear, a German ZF transmission.
Petrol cars, especially from the 1990s and early 2000s, may become the final bastion of individuality in a sea of optimized electric conformity. They will stand out not because they are faster (EVs already dominate that metric, I say let them take that) but because they are tactile. Imperfect. Emotional. The sounds, the scents, the feels.
In a world of silent grey eggs, the rumble of a twin-turbo inline-six may feel radical. Manual gearboxes will feel defiant. Hydraulic steering will feel luxurious.
Petrol cars may become less about transport and more about ritual. Weekend machines. Cultural artifacts. Moving sculptures that represent something.
And perhaps that is their future.
Not extinction, but elevation.
From appliance to art.
C.BONO.ME 