Michael Czeiszperger wrote:
http://autos.yahoo.com/articles/autos_content_landing_pages/1523/generation-y-giving-cars-a-pass/
I think the peak was 2006. I had what turned into an extra long lunch in the fall of 2006 with an intense car-guy who runs a very successful web business. My take at the time was "what's next?" The 500hp E60 M5 was just out, the 500+hp Z06 was just out, etc. We ended that lunch with the strong opinion that we were near a major turning point in society. The housing boom was supposedly still going, but the homebuilder's index had already topped in 2005, and had been short (trend system) for months already, but the hoopla continued in the media.
We asked ourselves questions like "will every new model Vette, M5, etc, from now on have a 20% increase in power?" "Will the 2012 cars have 600hp? 700hp? 1000hp?" "Where, when and how does this trend end?" We knew that "something was up" since that huge uptrend simply had to top from a socionomic point of view. When the trend has been up THAT long, and everybody is fully on-board, it's time to sit close to the exit door.
Now, 4 years later, I'm wondering what direction this "new future" we discussed will actually take. We've had a step change, a discontinuity, due to FINALLY breaking the back of a 40 year unfettered world-wide expansion in credit. Back in the fall of 2006 you could still get an Alt-A loan with no credit check and no income verification, and our own federal government was waiting behind the scenes to buy it off the issuer and take all the risk (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac). I mean, Greece even sold the future landing rights income in Athens for an upfront massive payment -- then went and spent that money for current needs. This list of insanity like this would take pages to account. Borrow from the future in huge quantities, and spend it for current needs.
Simply insane activity was occurring which the majority thought was "normal" simply because it was happening. Hopefully sanity will prevail someday without all of this bickering and blaming when people look at the big picture and see that what happened was a world-wide blow-off, a massive data outlier in the history of the world's economies. 500, 600hp cars were just a symptom, a barometer of that moment in history. We humans won't accept outlier events, so we go about trying to prevent the next outlier event, with our biased and demented view of what happened most recently, which simply lays the groundwork for yet more trouble in areas we don't even consider...and so it goes.
Hence here we are. 10 years on we're going to look back on this era as the "good old days" just like in the late 70's I was looking back at the muscle car era peak in 68-70 as the most awesome time to be a car nut imaginable. There should be some period where extreme cars of today become almost worthless (example, a good friend of mine in high school bought a 1968 Shelby Mustang GT500KR vert for $3k in 1975).
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