This Sunday is Father’s Day, a time to reflect on all that Dad has done for you.
As time wears on, I gain ever more appreciation for my father, because I am a father myself. Every time one of my kids does something outstandingly annoying, I think to myself, “Surely I wasn’t this much work – was I?”
I probably was.
Further, I can absolutely lay the blame for my obsession with cars on my father’s shoulders. It was he who first got me going by teaching me to drive the family Land Rover around a field in low range, and then helped me understand the mechanics of things when he restored our MGB. The love of machinery began there.
However, I find myself scratching my head a bit about how to pass that love along, or whether I even should. My kids are preschool aged right now, which means it’ll be 2030 or beyond by the time they’re driving. Already, cars are such ridiculously complex machines that truly understanding them is an impossible task. I have a friend involved in tuning Volkswagen products, and his company is essentially equally divided between the workshop and a bay of terminals they use to crack the thousands of lines of code.
And then there’s the question of whether sharing a love of machinery is even worth the time spent. By the time 2030 rolls around, complexity of cars won’t be as much of an issue as alternatives types of transportation. Sure, autonomous vehicles are always a possibility at some point, but already alternatives to owning a car are becoming more prevalent. It’d be nice to see a greater availability of the Car2Go and EVO car-sharing vehicles in our neighbourhood, and perhaps coming densification along Marine will drive that. Certainly, the pressures of ever-increasing North Shore traffic will make potential future drivers look at cars with a pretty jaded eye.
I sometimes think that where cars are concerned, I’ve arrived at a party that is in its closing hours. You talk to people who were covering various events in even the 1990s, and you hear tales of Ayrton Senna, and Greg Moore, and the first of the Acura NSX, and the last of the air-cooled Porsches. The further back you go, the more it seems like the golden age of the automobile has lasted its allotted century, and the times they are a-changing.
However, I’m not sure the car is quite ready to go quietly into that good night. A couple of weeks ago, I picked up the new hard-top version of the Mazda MX-5, and blasted up the Duffey Lake Road, where saw varied and wondrous things. The car, lightly powered and quite efficient, was as quick as you could ever want for the public road, and the bliss of being beyond cellphone signal cannot be overstated.
Additionally, the further up the Duffey I went, the more I noticed the intermittent road markings and sweepings of gravel in the corners. This would be a tricky, nay, near-impossible road for even the most developed of cars to follow. GPS is a bit spotty, you can rely on sensors to “see” the lanes, and the chances of washout or avalanche are pretty high. Much of British Columbia is similar, or at least the most picturesque roads are.
And that gives me hope. It gives me hope that we may see not a dead-end for the automobile, but a fork in the road. To the right, you have your semi-autonomous crossover, loaded up with labour-saving gadgetry and designed for people-schlepping. It’ll self-park, self-drive, and maybe even run the kids to school by itself. Also on this branch, a host of little pods that worker bees can summon up with their phones, then surge over the bridge in groups of five or more, oblivious to their surroundings.
But on the left branch, there are cars for those who get up early and head out of town on a weekend. Not just sports cars, but Jeeps and Tacomas and motorcycles of all stripes. Vehicles for people who want to get out and explore. Machines for those who understand that there’s a difference between being trapped on a highway every day, and the feeling of freedom that a car can give you, out there in B.C.’s huge, open spaces, with a packed lunch and maybe your camera.
This Sunday, you’ll find me down at Waterfront Park, judging at the annual French and Italian car show (pretty informal – I’ll just be checking out the 60 or so French machines). I’ll have both kids in tow, my eldest to assist with evaluations, my youngest to stump along and chat to my Dad, who will also be there.
Three generations, out for the day among the classics. And really, perhaps these are the greatest takeaway lessons I’ve learned from my father. It’s not the machines at all, but the people that surround them. You shouldn’t try to overthink parenting – just go do stuff together.
And finally, it’s not important how you spend the time, but spend it doing things together. My kids may or may not love the same things I do, but we will love each other.
