I'm A Car Enthusiast That is Starting to Hate Cars. Here's Why.

hey there we need to have a chat about the future of this channel a channel about cars and the fact that i'm starting to hate cars today let's talk about it so i'm on one of my favorite canyon roads and i thought this would be a good place to talk about what's going on with me what's going on with this channel mainly because it's away from the city it's away from the suburbs both places where i really hate driving and roads like this are usually fun mainly because there's no one else around okay so before we get into why i'm starting to uh hate cars let's take a quick look back in time when i was a kid i spent most of my time surrounded by matchbox cars i could also be found with my head buried in a sketchbook drawing cars i had my own line of cars i had my own brands it was pretty silly i've owned almost 50 cars in my life i've restored cars i've ruined cars i've raced cars i've done fun things in cars i've done dumb things in cars so yeah automobiles have been a big part of my life and that's one of the reasons why i started this channel and i've been making videos on this channel for five years which is nuts it's truly been a life-changing experience with the people that i've met the places that i've traveled to and all the unique cars i've gotten to drive [Music] but even with all those positives i don't really think it's working it's not really working for me personally or creatively it's not really working for my mental health and it's certainly not working for the greater good so that's where we come to the part where i said that i'm starting to hate cars i'm a car enthusiast that's falling out of love with the automobile or at least certain aspects of cars and this changing perspective has made me less excited to create certain types of videos it's even made me just consider quitting and shutting down the whole channel yep so let's dig into it [Music] okay reason number one why i'm starting to hate cars i own too many of them they're all constantly broken and they're costing me a fortune even the quote reliable ones now if you know me you know that i own 12 13 vehicles actually i'm not even sure how many i own most of them were cheap and they all have some sort of issue some small some major for me it was about the thrill of finding cheap cars that were forgotten or unloved and trying to fix them myself but unless you have airplane hangers full of cash it's very difficult to maintain a fleet of 13 cars without having mental breakdowns like not youtube mental breakdowns like actual real mental breakdowns just keeping all of the batteries charged is a challenge and i don't have a shop so they're just parked in my yard and they're constantly dirty and since i work from home i don't really drive them all that much the average car is parked 95 percent of the time and me owning 13 of them probably means that i'm raising that average i've even bought cars that you don't know about yet because i just haven't had time to get to them it's a pretty cool volkswagen fox but i literally have done nothing with it it's been sitting here for two months that's kind of stupid i've purchased this many cars for youtube i never would have subjected myself to this type of automotive abuse if i wasn't trying to let you all live vicariously through my misfortune and bad car karma but owning this many vehicles has made it so i don't really enjoy working on them anymore it's just not fun i can't keep up with all of the problems that they have the average american spends over a thousand dollars to maintain their car for a year take that number and multiply it by 13 and factor in that all my cars are old garbage and you can see why this is kind of a problem so what should i do i'm actually thinking about selling off most of my vehicles yep i need to get the fleet down to a manageable size that doesn't give me constant night terrors the ones that will likely be hitting the chopping block soon are my f-150 my legacy the grand am my wrangler and probably the probe and this fox which i haven't even made a video with yet i'm also on the fence about the scion and the 944 who knows maybe even the nova talk some sense into me if i do buy a car i'll try to make sure i have a very specific plan for it and not buy one until another one leaves the fleet and word to my fellow car enthusiasts out there don't do what i did it may look glamorous to own this many vehicles but it's it's genuinely awful [Music] okay on to reason number two why i'm starting to hate cars in the last couple years i've been creating automotive videos that may be straight a bit too far from the original mission of the channel i originally wanted the channel to be all about adventures with unique cars and the stories that we create with them a show about the journey traveling to places documenting how cars could be fun and bring people together but i quickly found that i wasn't able to build a large audience for videos that had a travel element they usually had low views and as a result low ad revenue so i started to include a lot more videos on my fleet of cars trying to fix them trying to keep them running and quite honestly those videos also pay very poorly ad revenue isn't the only way that i support myself but it's definitely necessary to allow me to continue to make these videos so i started including more standard format new car reviews which often generate much higher ad revenue but in those videos i ended up doing what most car reviewers do talk about specs talk about infotainment talk about cup holders and with that i think i lost the plot a little bit so what should i do i've got new car reviews that pay pretty well but are kind of unoriginal i've also got videos on my awful fleet of cars which is clearly a money losing proposition but i've also got some in-depth videos on viewer cars and some videos on car history which seem to do fairly well i'd like to challenge myself and really think differently about the videos i make any suggestions [Applause] [Music] okay lastly reason number three why i'm starting to hate cars and it's not the fact that i just locked my keys in the car true story i'll have to deal with that in a second but this is bound to cause some discussion and may even cause some of you to hit that unsubscribe button but what i'm about to say is at the heart of why i'm making this video cars are actually terrible before i go on a rant let me just say this about automobiles there have been few inventions in human history that have done more to advance mobility and economic growth it's clear that at least here in north america the car is usually the only real way to access jobs food health care and family and that's the very reason why cars can be awful because the automobile shaped how our cities got built they're often the only way to get around even if you wanted to bike to work or walk to the grocery store or take a train to the beach you often can't because the infrastructure is built to prioritize cars over pedestrians over cyclists and over public transit and zoning laws keep housing inconveniently far from commerce making people dependent on driving great news for the auto industry i guess when vehicles are the primary means of transport especially in cities and crowded suburbs you get traffic and you get car-centric infrastructure that makes it incredibly difficult unpleasant and dangerous to be a pedestrian or a cyclist and you get drivers that are increasingly unaware of the dangers they pose to people outside of their cars in the u.s there were more driver cause fatalities last year than any year since there were more pedestrians killed on american roadways than any year since 1982. as car enthusiasts i don't think we should be ignoring that you can still enjoy the fun things that cars provide while being aware of the ways that cars are bad and even finding ways to help cars be less bad some of this can be blamed on drivers excessive speed accounted for a third of all car related deaths in the us in 2020 but much of the blame rests solely on the shoulders of urban planners and traffic engineers that prioritize vehicle speeds and traffic flow over all else fifty percent of car trips in the us are three miles or less if streets were actually safe and convenient for pedestrians and cyclists more people might choose to make some trips without a car and there they are yay now i'm not saying that you personally need to give up your car and go out and buy a bike in many places especially rural areas cars can offer a good amount of freedom especially for older folks but as you make your way into suburbs and into cities that freedom becomes a bit more of an illusion once you consider all of the costs that go into car ownership everyone loves to focus on gas prices but so many people in the us are in debt because of car ownership it's not freedom if you're in debt to your car the average new car price is over 47 000 and the average u.s car payment is 712 dollars a month and then you have to factor in maintenance and insurance a study by triple a in 2019 shows that the average american will spend 450 000 for the privilege of owning and operating a car over their lifetime 450 000 now what about the opportunity cost of car ownership let's say that instead of owning a car you invested just that 712 dollar monthly car payment in the stock market after 50 years based on an 8.7 percent historical rate of return you'd have 6.8 million dollars in your bank account what that's nuts but it's right i checked the math three times and all of that doesn't include the costs that are subsidized through taxes that we all pay a german study showed that over 245 000 is paid in public subsidies throughout a driver's life cost of maintaining roads and car-centric infrastructure costs of providing free parking and collectively paid health costs dealing with crash damages and air pollution there's no doubt that the automobile along with a vast network of roads built in the u.s gave a rapidly growing population the ability to choose where to live to choose where to work and provided mobility to travel and explore new places but decades later the cost of using a car for everything is still mostly overlooked or simply justified as being the way it is now if you love your car and you never want to leave it that's fine i get it for most people it's really the only option and some people don't mind sitting in traffic they don't mind driving everywhere but even if you did want to reduce the amount of driving you do you might not have great options you could take public transit but it's often stuck in the same traffic that cars create you could buy an e-bike but there are not that many protected bike lanes so it's usually pretty dangerous you could walk but car-centric places are terrible places to walk and things are usually too far away you could move to a walkable neighborhood that was built before cars but those places are often in high demand with huge price tags and that's why most people just continue to drive everywhere unsafe streets aren't just about driver behavior or bad infrastructure automakers have also played a big role to get us where we are we won't even get into how the auto industry reduced the rights of pedestrians and lobbied for a future where land use was inefficient and cars were a requirement let's just talk about what automakers are doing now new cars are much more insulated from the outside world worse visibility higher hoods higher belt lines larger blind spots bigger screens more distracting tech lack of physical buttons and knobs and new cars by and large are safer for the occupants which is great but because of their larger size and mass and the increasing amount of distractions inside the vehicle they're getting far less safe for pedestrians and cyclists anybody outside of the car and i don't think car manufacturers really care about that and because drivers now have an increased sense of safety for the occupants that might cause them to take more risks when i compare the size of my 1992 f-150 with a brand new f-150 it was eye-opening even comparing my 20 year old tacoma to a new tacoma was surprising yes some of the reason why cars are larger and heavier is because of safety equipment and yes some newer cars provide more passenger space than their predecessors but a good deal of the increased size is purely marketing and aesthetics to make vehicles look tougher to look more aggressive all at the cost of pedestrian safety so why are manufacturers killing off small cars in favor of larger less efficient vehicles some will say that it's entirely consumer demand which is true up to a point automakers and car dealers have been pushing larger and larger vehicles on buyers because surprise they're more profitable now you might be wondering why would automakers add tech to cars that makes them more distracting to drive and why people text and drive so much i think distracted driving occurs so frequently because some people don't actually like driving they'd much rather be doing something else there's twitter posts to get mad about there's cat videos to watch but also an increasing social pressure to immediately respond to messages many people drive because they think they have no alternative but often there truly is no reasonable alternative and that's why there's so many more distracting features in cars today and why we're seeing such a big push for self-driving technology even automakers know that driving often sucks [Music] so new cars are larger heavier have worse visibility than older cars and actively encourage distracted driving now this is obviously bad for pedestrians and cyclists but it's also bad for those of us who like to drive older smaller cars with more antiquated safety equipment when i drive my 1988 chevy nova i basically treat it like i'm riding a bike i'm hyper vigilant because i'm at a severe disadvantage from a safety standpoint compared to new cars especially trucks i would not survive a side impact crash with a new pickup truck where their bumper would hit my head instead of the body of the car maybe drivers would be less distracted and take fewer risks if they were forced to drive in 1980s boxes so what does this mean about the types of videos i'll be making moving forward i'm tempted to just stop making videos with new cars altogether but i think there might be a benefit to me continuing it but taking a much more critical look at the environmental cost pedestrian safety aspects efficiency size weight visibility distracting technology and the true cost of car ownership i live in one of the most car dominated traffic prone places on the planet and quite honestly i'm sick of having to use cars for things that suck in situations that suck i'd love to get to a point where i only use cars for fun activities road trips canyon road drives off-roading driving on race tracks and decorating cars based on stupid puns i'd like to try to avoid using cars for anything else i know that isn't incredibly realistic but i'd like to slowly move towards that if i can it might mean having to move to a more walkable neighborhood it might mean getting involved with local organizations that are helping to make streets safer okay so in the end i guess i've learned that i don't actually hate cars but i do really hate car dependency and i've learned that you can enjoy cars but still want to do something about unsafe streets traffic and pedestrian fatalities as car enthusiasts it's actually in our best interest to care about these things and want to do something about them it doesn't have to be an either or situation if all of this is too much for you that unsubscribe button is right down there but i hope you'll join me as i continue my journey on this channel even though it will likely shift direction if you'd like to see more of my videos please consider subscribing and hitting that bell icon if you like to help support the channel you can buy a hella road t-shirt at helloroad.tv shop thanks so much for watching i hope you're well and i'll see you soon [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Hello Road

Views: 190,297

Keywords:

Id: K8jp_lligz0

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2022