Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The first big news in the car circle was the bad news that Uncle Ken Block died in an accident.

Whether the matter is big or small is not small. Not big, because Ken Block is still far away from the mainstream, and he hardly belongs to the automobile world in the commercial sense, because he is the well-deserved first person in today's automobile subculture and the hope of the whole village that the mainstream "breaks the circle".

Many obituaries to Ken Block's title sound like a regular "rally driver", which is not appropriate. It is true that Uncle Brick started out as a runner, but his competitive career has been going up all the time, and he has made his own way on YouTube before and after 2010. Title is the first to play "famous Rally driver", which is a bit like saying that Lu Xun is a famous doctor and writer.

The so-called God closes a door and opens a window, which is demonstrated like a Ken Block textbook. What if you can't get ahead in a professional competition? Visual performance can also be eaten as a meal. You may not be interested in the gossip of drift at all, but with its amazing drift skills and amazing thrilling vision, there are very few people in the car circle who have never heard of Ken Block at all.

In the past, drift, especially the pure visual dazzling nature of drift performance, either belonged to the "show everyone" type of cyber lion dance, or reduced to the ghost fire of the local version. Even if Japan already had a professional drift exhibition competition like D1 GP, it would be difficult to reverse the image of yellow hair, ghost fire and fear of traffic police attached to the word "drift".

If he has been fooling around in "regular" rally venues such as WRC, Ken Block will always be an unknown background driver, but when he is proficient in drifting skills like needles and thread, coupled with a wealth of thrilling scenes and visual designs, and catch up with the rise of video sites, things will have a magical qualitative change.

The story is full of a sense of the times: for almost the first time, a car "fake movement" that has completely abandoned the cover of fitness and is naked for the purpose of visual show-off, can be accepted by the most mainstream, most conservative and most respectable members of the public, or even, chased and worshipped.

It has nothing to do with ghost fire, but it can have an affair with the upper class. In front of Uncle Brick, later, Brother Salt was a younger brother.

The classic scene of Uncle Brick at Pike Peak

If this bend falls, it takes so long to lay the groundwork before it comes to the point. The "mainstream non-mainstream" Ken Block, who took the "crooked road" into the right path, was actually born in 1967. Yes, it may be a generation earlier than the parents of many of our young readers. The image is so rebellious that no one can stand out, but physically it has nothing to do with "youth".

For this generation and the next generation of young people, will the attributes and stories of cars as "big toys" continue when faced with the so-called intelligent electric vehicles in the post-four modernizations era?

De-toylization, the old "Top Gear" trio often like to tell such a joke every time they talk about the unknown period of motor sports at the beginning of the century: every weekend, people happily go to see Duke and Earl of so-and-so commit suicide and lose their arms and legs.

As an attribute of big toys, cars peaked when they made their debut more than a hundred years ago.

In fact, the toy attributes of cars are nothing more than the elements of several levels: hearing, vision, and feeling. Ken Block video, throughout is the harsh sound and filled with white smoke, without these stimulate the audience's senses, no matter how extreme driving skills, no matter how thrilling link design, would not be able to create Ken Block.

Today, the rise of electric cars has completely wiped out the auditory level and greatly weakened the vision because of the weight problem; the active choice and intelligent objective changes of car companies have also been challenged as a sense of control at the sensory level.

But all this does not start with electric cars, but has been going on all the time. In the past 100 years, cars have gone from a smoky monster to a good boy with little pollution except carbon dioxide; from 1.5L V12 screaming to supercars, they have to use valves to raise their voices; from 86, who easily pulls on the hand brake and swings its tail, it has become a pioneer in shopping. Carola is very popular.

Tesla drift mode, almost only in the release of the sense of existence, not so much that the car's toy properties are fading, it is more like the car's tool attributes are constantly being purified. Toy attribute is only a by-product pursued by minority groups in the early days of automobile invention. with people's understanding and attention to danger and efficiency, it is constantly restrained and weakened by the mainstream world.

In this process, there are constantly individuals who regard cars as entertainment, fighting openly and secretly in various ways, such as striving for living space in the gap between laws and regulations, such as standardized competitions that specially open up and thus bring thresholds. and, for example, give commercial value to the fun of cars.

It seems that only in the early days when the car was invented, the ownership was not large enough to cause safety risks, and the public did not consciously improve the safety bottom line of traffic participants. in that short period of time when everyone lacks sufficient understanding of the negative externalities of cars in terms of pollution, efficiency and safety, the toy properties of cars are fully released and expressed unreservedly and unconditionally.

This is probably on another level, the greater the ability, the greater the responsibility. The more important the social role is, the greater the proportion of human life is, the more it will be restricted and controlled by many aspects, and when the overall interests and individual enjoyment may lose one or the other, this restriction and control will certainly take the former as the fundamental demand.

Looking for a new fulcrum of business value does not mean that from a macro-historical perspective, the toy role of cars has been declining, and cars are destined to be completely instrumented. Over the past few decades, cars, as an important attribute of adult toys, have been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, which is not unshakable.

The main players are business needs. In order to obtain higher profit margins and excess returns, car companies have the inherent motivation to build more meaningful brands; as driving machines, the indoctrination path of the same goal is high performance or passability, so car companies should explain and guide consumers to feel the fun of driving, and support cars to breathe and rebound on the road of de-toy.

Simple means of transportation can also create high and low grades, but the excess income capacity is too small in the way of one cent per cent. On the contrary, when perceptual demand is created, it may not actually fall into the hands of consumers, which creates an arbitrage-like attractive space. A mental driver who is psychologically keen on driving control may only pay for a set of sports encirclement.

Once there is a benefit-driven, often do not worry about the way, life will find its own way out.

Just from the current static point of view, the typical labels that represent the "big toy" attributes of cars: high-performance driving machines and outdoor adventure off-road are facing challenges in the smart electric era, and car companies have not yet found a new way out. Toys will still be toys, but the way they play may be completely different.

For example, the most mainstream path in the fuel era is performance, from F1 to RV racing to supercar to high-performance version and finally to street cars and even post-market retrofitting, which is an irrefutable classic chain in the fuel car era. Building supercar and high-performance version is always an efficient way for the brand to rise.

However, this has been almost falsified in the past few years, and the Formula E electric equation imitating F1 has experienced the initial popularity, but it has not attracted the actual audience. In the past two years, the limelight of the race has taken a turn for the worse, and the four giants of BBAP, which are keen on field races, have withdrawn one after another, and even returned to traditional events such as F1 and WEC.

The game of electric supercar is becoming more and more ridiculous. Weilai EP9 maintains a prototype car that is not in mass production and does not go to the street, controlling the input / loss to the maximum extent. Tesla Roadster2 has skipped tickets for three years, and there is no sign of being eager for mass production. To really build supercars and sports cars has become a decision made by brand / voice-lagging car companies in order to seek attention.

The latest trial path is the second choice in the fuel car world, the hardline cross-country or pan-cross-country style. BYD's high-end brands look up, and the warriors used by Dongfeng for military and civilian use, including American-style Rivian and Hummer, are more or less (big G route) or less (range Rover route) with the intention of "invoking high-pass endorsement for value".

Whether such a story makes sense, whether it is more interesting than electric supercar, take a look at it step by step. Whether it is electric supercar or cross-country, people are much less likely to actually use it than the same kind of fuel. There is no optimistic logic as to whether the potential connection between ability fantasy and practical use can support consumers to pay for this possibility.

"Digital Terminal" is the most popular way of narrative at present. But first of all, even today's digital devices have largely lost the ability to endorse their value, and there is no certain type of digital device that can bring great value to personal image: there were smartphones ten years ago, iPhone 4, none of them can be called today, and the folding screen AR is not enough.

Secondly, it is true that the car has become a digital terminal, but in today's era-even body fat scales are digitally terminated, what can "become a digital terminal" represent? What is the value of what kind of imagination space can support? This logic may be true, but it may not be applied to the new story of "car play". Becoming a digital terminal is a tool.

Pessimistically speaking, we may come to the last corner where we will regard cars as "big toys". In the historical trend of pure instrumentalization of cars, there may be such a qualitative change point, from then on the toy properties of cars become negligible, and human pursuit of oversized toys may be transferred to other consumer goods.

If you look at "timing tools" as a big category, this kind of story has not happened before. When Breguet spent more than 40 years making complex pocket watches for Queen Mary in the 18th century, he would not understand that one day people would not care what they used to look at each other's time.

Optimistically speaking, no large amount of consumer goods can really be completely instrumented, which is determined by the perceptual needs of human beings. It's just that Ken Block and even you and I love driving, and the definition of "driving control, limit, wanton" for car play is likely to be replaced by another form of toy expression.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: autocarweekly (ID:autocarweekly), author: ao'hu

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