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The State of things.
What’s one thing you genuinely miss about the older automotive scene?
Not the cars themselves necessarily, but the feeling around it.
Lately it feels like everything has turned into a competition for attention instead of appreciation. People building cars for engagement instead of building something that actually makes them happy. Every meet turns into rev battles, takeover clips, ego contests, or people trying to prove who spent the most money.
Meanwhile some of the coolest builds we’ve ever seen were held together by zip ties, late nights, scraped knuckles, and a vision nobody else understood yet.
That’s honestly a huge reason Midnight Pretenders exists in the first place. We wanted to build a space where:
— People can ask questions without getting clowned
In my area at least, we need more what I'd call "humble cars". When I was growing up and first got into the scene there were more guys just doing mild builds. Most meets were high schoolers with their first car to early 40 year olds that built their dream rides on a budget and a few old timers here and there ( and those old boys were a HUGE knowledge bank that we're slowly losing but that's a different story).
No crazy 1000+ horsepower cars or super aggressive exotics; just whatever folks could build in the garage or maybe a local performance shop would bring some builds out. Now every meet is Porsches, Audis, BMWs, Lamborghinis, etc. Not that it's bad but the cars have no story aside from "yeah I spent $90,000"