American car-buff media tend to talk down to their readers to the point where I sometimes wonder whether editors — or at least their overseers on the business side — think we’re just a bunch of knuckle-dragging troglodytes who never matured past adolescence. This is why I keep my eye out for signs of intelligent life in the distant galaxies of the Internet.
The other day I came across a YouTube video that I thought might have promise: “How the Decline of Cars Mirrors the Decline of America.” This was a recent episode of Julia James Davis’s (2025) vlog called The War on Beauty.
Davis (2025) looks earnestly into the camera and states that “if you want to sum up America in a single image, it is a car.” This is because the car “symbolized the freedom, self determination, the romance and the upward mobility that once defined America. But as ugliness started taking over car design, as we moved from the sleek [1957] Chevrolet Bel Air or the [late-70s] alpha Trans Am to the beta Tesla or the unremarkable Prius, the fading power of cars in our culture became an allegory for what happened to our country and to Americans as individuals.”
In other words, as Davis’s (2025) idealized form of car design has “declined,” America has become “less free, less beautiful and a shell of its former self.”
Welp, that’s quite a thesis. How does she back it up? Davis starts by trotting out the words of marketing consultant Clotaire Rapaille. As we have previously discussed (go here), he argued that car styling should speak to the reptilian portion of our brain that is fixated on survival and reproduction. That’s why he argued in favor of menacing-looking designs and even suggested that if automakers put machine guns on the top of cars that they would sell better (Bradsher, 2002; p. 96).
Davis argues that cars are intimately tied to identity
Davis (2025) does not mention the dark side of Rapaille’s recommendations. Instead, she highlights his contention that the unconscious associations Americans have with cars are fundamentally different than those of other cultures due to our unique history. For example, his research found that Americans associate Jeep with the “western frontier, open spaces and progress,” whereas Europeans associate the vehicle with its functions in war.
Rapaille’s research found that while consumers he interviewed tended to initially talk about the practical aspects of car ownership, when he delved more deeply he found that what they most remembered was the sense of freedom that came with being able to drive for the first time or having a first sexual experience in a car.
This led Rapaille to conclude that what consumers really wanted was a car that was distinctive, gave them freedom and offered a sensual experience. He also found that a car represented a key part of our sense of identity — to the point that when elders who can no longer drive they may feel as if their life is over (Davis, 2025).
Also see ‘Road rage is on the increase — and some states are worse that others’
Let’s stop for a moment. I would agree that in the U.S. one’s car is of heightened importance to a typical person’s identity — particularly compared to people in other advanced nations, who have access to more multimodal forms of transportation.
In addition, the dominant conversations I see in the auto history media tend to have a nostalgic quality that focuses on youthful memories. However, my sense is that guys on car blogs don’t often talk about their sexual experiences, but instead focus on male status posturing. That can include debating which cars look better, got faster 0-60 times or won more races.
That can get quite tribal — which helps explain why Indie Auto sometimes receives nastygrams from people who feel insulted because I had the audacity to criticize their favorite car. It’s fascinating how touchy people can get. After all, it’s just a car.
Car design has become ‘homogenized and bland’
Armed with Rapaille’s theory, Davis proceeds to argue that the colors offered on cars have dramatically declined in recent years. That strikes me as a common-sensical argument, but for evidence she says that a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle was offered in “over 90 colors” but that a 2012 Tesla Model S only had four colors that were not gray scale.
Uh, what? Wolfsburgwest.com (2025) reports that the 1974 Beetle had only 13 exterior colors. That aligns with my sense that imports tended to have fewer colors than domestics. And even the most-popular U.S. car of 1967, the Chevrolet Impala, reportedly only had around two-dozen exterior colors (1969Chevy.com, 2025). It also doesn’t help Davis’s argument when she talks about a Tesla Model S’s colors but displays an image of Model 3s.
Okay, so we can’t expect a vlogger who isn’t a car buff to get all of the details correct. And Davis’s basic point still holds that cars are less colorful than back in the day. She further argues that car design has become less distinctive.
“The visual language of automobiles has become homogenized and bland compared to the wide variety of styles offered from the ’50s to the ’80s,” Davis (2025) argues. “That is a reflection of our broader cultural flattening.”
I agree that car design has become more conformist — and suspect this is primarily because the auto industry’s global integration has mostly erased national differences in design philosophy (go here for further discussion).
A car culture decline is causing social problems?
It is at this point that Davis takes a strange pivot — and really starts to show her ideological colors. She argues that a decline in car design has happened in sync with a reduction in the car’s role in American life.
Davis points to declines in the proportion of teens who get driver’s licenses as linked to a “broader social collapse” such as youth not dating as much — which translates into fewer people getting married and having children.
“All of the traditional rites of social growth and independence are being stripped away” Davis insists, “and cars are an important catalyst” of those rites. “So now what we have is a perverted and inverted version of what should be going on” where “kids are being stunted by the lack of initiation into life via cars.”
Our children are not the only victim of a decline in car culture, according to Davis (2025). “The freedom that cars symbolize in American life is now being used to trap and limit Americans of all ages. There is a new movement to get rid of cars and driving altogether.”
Davis gets shrill in attacking critics of car-centric living
Davis points to an unsigned Scientific American (2024) editorial titled, “Changing Car Culture Can Benefit Our Health and Our Planet.” The piece argued that cities need to be redesigned to reduce pollution and the costs of an auto-centric lifestyle.
In doing so, Scientific American (2024) quoted Stefan Gossling, who warned in his book, The Psychology of the Car (2017), that “powerful campaigns already seek to strengthen bonds with the private car.”
Davis does not acknowledge these campaigns to protect car culture. Instead, she sees countervailing forces lurking all around. For example, she points to the danger of a “15-minute city,” which is where residents can access most of their daily needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their homes (Wikipedia, 2025). Davis (2025) says this policy goal would result in car ownership “eliminated altogether.”
That’s not true. At least here in the United States the goal of this movement has been to reduce car dependency. In addition, the idea behind the 15-minute city is rooted in the design of urban areas prior to the advent of the car (Wikipedia, 2025).
This raises a painfully obvious question that Davis never addresses: How did Americans achieve “independence, romance and social connection” prior to the car? What about in other western cultures that are less car dependent?
And now it’s time for a conspiracy theory
I could see the auto industry lobby being happy with much of Davis’s defense of cars. However, she takes one detour that gives her schtick a down-home flavor.
Even though Davis (2025) appears to be pretty young, she seems to be inordinately nostalgic for the American car culture specific to the postwar era. For example, she lamented that once upon a time “men could work on [cars] themselves” because they didn’t have a lot of complex electronics. In contrast, today’s cars are more like driving a computer. “Can you even call it a car?” she asks.
The cherry on top of this diatribe is Davis (2025) expressing the concern that “in the future they might even be able to shut your car off from outer space — not to be a conspiracy theorist.” No, of course not.
I suppose I should have started off by looking at her home page to get a general sense of her biases. If I had I would have seen other episodes such as “Why we need the Patriarchy” and “How the decline of marriage is destroying society.” The titles give a pretty good hint about Davis’s ideological inclinations.
All in all, Davis takes a kernel of an interesting idea and makes quite a mess of it. Even so, at least she is thinking bigger thoughts than the usual car-buff prattle. And I am now curious as to what our future Martian overlords may have in mind.
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- 1969Chevy.com; 2025. “Decoding your trim (body) tag.” Accessed June 28.
- Bradsher, Keith; 2002. High and Mighty: SUVs — The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got that Way. Public Affairs, New York, NY.
- Gossling, Stefan; 2017. The Psychology of the Car. Elsevier.
- Scientific American; 2024. “Changing Car Culture Can Benefit Our Health and Our Planet.” Posted March 1.
- Wikipedia; 2025. “15-minute city.” Page last modified June 2.
- Wolfsburgwest.com; 2025. “Colors/1974 Beetle.” Accessed June 28.
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- oldcarbrochures.org: Pontiac Firebird (1977)
An article of this type (Davis) is called “making the facts fit the conclusions”. The idea that car ownership and style affect the moral fiber of America’s citizens is a real stretch. The conclusion that the U.S. is in decline (may) be true but there are so many factors here including income inequality, changing climate, foreign competition, plus many. many, other factors. The premise that the U.S. is in decline is questionable too.
In the early 1970s the reduction of variety in automobile styling was already in full swing as the Glorious Thirties inches to a close, the élites decided that the common man had had enough crumbs of the lunch (see artificially creating energy scarcity, even more hilarious in a country endowed with oil like the US!), and boxy shapes cheaper to manufacture supplanted fastback body styles and curvier surfaces.
I would invert the cause effect relationship: it’s the cultural loss that produced a flattening of car design, and I am employing the term “loss” to imply not an objective worsening, but a “discolouring” of sorts. The social scheme of “working for naught, breeding, working for naught, changing car after two years because of mechanical war and neighbourhood competition, go to retirement home” of the 1950s was toxic in many regards and fortunately fell…in words.
The problem is that nothing replaced it. No fair wages, no personal freedom, no public transportation (in the US), no health care (in Europe too), worsening food standards…all came as a result of this cultural void, and even the positive aspects (smartphones, computers…) aren’t used to even 1/1000th of the potential. I learned Spanish as an autodidacticist (no certification) and passed English C1, but many people with a degree in my country can’t even conjugate verbs properly!
In other words, it’s like the average person of the 21st century runs on lines of code in a rat race, and it shows. No one has nothing interesting to say, although possibilities today are boundless.
Nice summary and analysis.
The reference to Clotaire Rapaille is fascinating: “That’s why he argued in favor of menacing-looking designs and even suggested that if automakers put machine guns on the top of cars that they would sell better.” And yet his input apparently drove the design of the super-friendly, decidedly unmenacing, and initially immensely successful Chrysler PT Cruiser.