I'll admit to skipping through large chunks of this piece and nodding off during others, but generally speaking the old have always put up gates and ladders. If the youth of today aren't successfully maneuvering around these gates and ladders, I wouldn't blame it on the old who are acting as should be expected, but on the general lack of interest when it comes to the youth of today and the automotive industry. It's not just today's youth that are disinterested by the way. In addition, it's not just the automotive industry being impacted or that today's youth are lacking in passion, their passions are just being directed elsewhere. The remaining youth who are into cars are just fewer and farther between. The thing that is hard to imagine is that none of this is going to matter in another decade or so. That old saying about death and taxes left out one other inevitable constant, and that is change. The gates are going to be applied anyone who loves internal combustion engines and it's going to happen a lot faster than any "car guy" can imagine. Timelines to ban the ICE are continually being pushed up around the world. My guess is that the bottom is going to fall out of the collector car market in the next 10 to 20 years, primarily because these cars will be seen as obsolete. Various cars have seen their stars rise and fall with time, but cars in general were always buoyed by the fact that more were being made in the case of vehicles using the internal combustion engine. Soon enough, that will no longer be the case and when that happens, cars as we know them will join any number of other things that were once valuable before becoming obsolete. Aside from the car collectors themselves, the biggest losers in this inevitable scenario will surely include Hagerty and the other classic/collector car insurers out there. Instead of worrying about the remaining youth who are still into cars, unless your automotive passions include EV's, you'd be better off worrying about just how much time you have left to enjoy cars as you know them.
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