Cars 2015

Find New Roads.

It's hard to find car marketing that doesn't present you, the lucky future purchaser, moving unimpeded along an attractive road. I'm sure that's what this car company was thinking with their slogan. It's a call-out to the Car Freedom Wanderlust trope even as it tacitly acknowledges that our day-to-day experience is vastly different from that.

But there's also this thing called "Induced Demand". It's the idea that the latent demand for additional pavement is so strong that extra traffic lanes – or, indeed, new roads – makes it impossible to pave your way out of traffic congestion. The lure of the open road makes for an appealing slogan, but it translates into very bad urban planning.

Of course a strong latent demand also exists for public transit, and perhaps it's a little hypocritical that it becomes a reason to build instead of condemning the effort as futile. But then again, building more transit on my street inconveniences some drivers a little bit, while the municipal effort to replace that same street with an urban expressway nearly had my neighbourhood bulldozed.

The car industry, like the memory card industry, has challenges around superlatives. This leads to things like trucks named after mountain ranges being named after a mountain from a different part of the continent as well.

Everything for 2015 is all-new despite having overwhelming parts commonality with the previous model of the same name. Everything also offers better performance, and these days usually has the word "eco-" tagged in somewhere as well. It's the Lite Beer slogan of 'tastes great, less filling' repurposed to make people feel better about the fuel multi-ton single-passenger vehicles burn – as if that's a bigger problem than the incredibly inefficient use of the vast civic resources dedicated to them, or the number of people they kill each year.

As is true almost everywhere, smart phones dominate photography. And why shouldn't they? They have good image quality, simple operation, and are perfectly in tune with how most people see and show their photos. Rather than lamenting the demise of the single-purpose camera – the selling of which keeps my own camera collection fed and housed – I've decided to be glad that taking photos remains so important to how people enjoy their lives.

Not that I was using my phone to take photos, mind you. All of these photos were taken with my nondescript little Ricoh GR.

The sales staff at car shows – whether they work for a dealership or are hired for the event – have always impressed me. They can speak Automotive with fluency that matches or exceeds my ability to talk about cameras or photography, and do it for days on end under incredibly demanding conditions. They need to be equally good at talking to someone with my level of automotive knowledge – "the green one is pretty" – to a exchanges with enthusiasts who have genuine passions for the products on display. Seriously: the skill it takes to work and interact in sales is deeply under-appreciated.

One of my favourite things about going to car shows is being able to listen to my brothers talking about the vehicles. It's like having a pair of incredibly knowledgable guides who can explain the significance of everything I see, but need to tell me "the red one" or "the silver one" so that I can follow along. Or try to, at least. At the end of the day I come away impressed, and still convinced that the green one is pretty.