The Honda Civic is a small, everyday car made by Honda. It’s popular with many owners, so you’ll often see it in car clubs and group events. People like it because it’s practical and parts are widely available.
Concept
car meat culture
“Car meat culture” is basically slang for the real-life, in-person car scene—people who hang out, talk cars, and build community around their cars. The host is saying it’s more than just liking posts online.
Concept
modification scene
The “modification scene” means people who customize and upgrade their cars. It’s the community around doing changes like performance parts or styling, and it can be very technical.
Concept
online bill communities
This sounds like the host is talking about online groups where car fans hang out and talk cars. The main idea is that online communities can still be serious about cars, even without traditional club meetings.
Concept
formal club settings
“Formal club settings” means organized car clubs with rules, dues, and regular meetings. The host is saying some younger fans may be more active and knowledgeable in less formal places instead.
Concept
pay dues
“Pay dues” means paying a membership fee to belong to a club. The host is suggesting younger people may hesitate because it costs money.
Concept
Instagram follows
“Instagram follows” refers to social-media engagement as a substitute for community-building. The host’s claim is that car clubs create sustained, local, intergenerational relationships that social platforms can’t fully replicate.
The Porsche 911 is one of the most famous sports cars ever made. It’s the kind of car many enthusiasts stick with for decades, so it’s a good example of why car clubs can bring different generations together.
A “flat six” is a type of engine with six cylinders arranged flat, like two groups facing each other. It’s known for feeling smooth and for helping the car sit lower and handle better.
LIVE
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to this week's episode, the Thursday pit stop here
on the B Differential Podcast.
I'm your host, Eva Gregory, and this week, I'm asking a question that comes up constantly
in the automotive and motorsport world, one that I hear from enthusiasts, from industry
professionals, and from inside the car club community itself.
That is, are car clubs diminishing?
And more specifically, does the next generation of automotive enthusiasts even want to join
one?
But first, let's have a brief little catch up on what I've been doing behind the scenes.
I always leave a section for a brief little catch up, but wow, this has just straight
up been a busy season, and I think that would take a while to unload on you guys.
I think the biggest thing right now is getting settled into my new place.
I have a lot of upcoming travel.
I'm coming off of literally like back to back to back, but there's still some things
that are just kind of on my radar.
So we'll save some of those updates for next week.
But let's just go ahead and get into the topic for this week.
As I mentioned, I'm asking are car clubs diminishing?
And I want to talk about what's actually happening to car clubs so I can lay out the
landscape because I think that it's important to name what we're actually seeing before
we tried to interpret it.
A number of car clubs across the country are genuinely in decline.
And I want to be straightforward about one of the largest and most painful reasons for
that. People are literally aging out.
OK, the founding generations of many of these organizations and the people who built them
ran them for decades and gave them their identity.
Those folks are aging out.
And in some cases, there simply aren't enough people behind them to carry the institutional
knowledge, the culture or the membership based forward.
And that's not a comfortable thing to say, but it is a real insignificant cause that deserves
to be named in honesty.
OK, so beyond that, I think there's a broader generational shift away from formal club
memberships as a concept.
And this isn't specific to car clubs.
I think we're seeing this across like civic organizations, fraternal orders, participation
in all kinds of structured community organizations has declined among younger generations.
So the instinct to formalize affiliation, pay dues, attend monthly meetings, follow a
charter that's just less compelling to someone who grew up building community digitally and
kind of informally and on their own terms.
So there's some other things we could address there.
But again, I just kind of want to factor that in.
There's also a mark mismatch.
Traditional clubs, many of the most established organizations are built around cars from the
50s, 60s and 70s, vehicles that obviously carry deep nostalgic meaning for the generation
that grew up with them.
But that feels more like museum pieces than dream cars to a 28 year old whose automotive
passion was shaped by a different era entirely.
I think from what I'm saying at least, the cars that Gen Z and younger millennials feel
strongly about are different.
And the clubs built around those cars don't often exist yet or look very different from
the traditional model.
So that's the honest picture.
And taken at face value, it is a concerning one for anyone who cares about these organizations
and what they represent.
But here's what I want to complicate even more.
The other story and from what I see on the inside is that the part of this conversation that I
think gets lost when people just read headline numbers is that not all car clubs are declining.
In fact, there are a handful of clubs, some of the most well known marquee organizations
in the country that are growing year over year in membership, and they're doing it in
spite of a challenging global economy, rising fuel prices, and all the same cultural headwinds
that I just described.
So that's worth paying attention to.
From what I've observed through my professional work in the space and through being
adjacent to a number of clubs, long before it was ever part of my job, the clubs that are
holding on or actually growing are the ones that have asked a harder question.
Not how do we get younger people to want what we've always offered, but what does this
community need to look like for the next generation to find value in it?
And I think this is a very important question, and those are very different questions.
And the clubs asking the second one are doing things truly differently.
They're investing in digital presence, not just as an afterthought, but as a primary
community platform.
They're creating entry level event formats that don't require you to own a mark or own
a car at all to participate.
They're being intentional about inclusion in a space that has historically been.
And listen, I'll say it pretty directly here, predominantly male and pretty gatekeeping
about what counts as a real enthusiast.
And something that I find genuinely interesting from a generational standpoint, the younger
enthusiast is not less passionate.
If anything, the depth of automotive knowledge and obsession I see in younger
communities is remarkable.
So the car meat culture, the modification scene, the online bill communities, these are
not shallow expressions of car enthusiasm.
These are deep committed and in some cases more technically engaged than anything
happening in formal club settings.
The passion is there.
It really is.
So what's missing?
For a lot of younger enthusiasts, it's a reason to formalize it, to pay dues, especially in
this economy, to attend monthly meetings in a conference room, to inherit an organizational
structure that was built for a completely different era that hasn't changed much since.
So I kind of want to bring in the bigger question.
What are car clubs actually for?
And does that even still matter?
I want to get a little philosophical because I think there's something important
underneath this conversation that doesn't get named enough.
Car clubs, at their best, do something that Instagram follows and Discord servers and
YouTube comment sections cannot fully replicate.
They create sustained, local, ideally intergenerational community around a shared
object of passion.
They are the place where a 70 year old who's owned his Porsche 911 for 40 years sits
next to the 32 year old who just bought their first one and knowledge moves between them
in both directions.
Okay.
I think that's a common misnomer too.
There are places where the skills of restoration and maintenance get passed from the people
who have them to the people who want them.
And they are the place where the physical, tactile, real world experience of being an
automotive enthusiast gets organized and preserved.
And that is genuinely, genuinely valuable.
And it's not guaranteed to survive if the organizations that have historically carried
it don't evolve.
Okay.
I think this is something I've talked about on this podcast before and something that
perhaps like even in recent podcast guest episodes have been discussed where we're
talking about carrying on institutional knowledge and context forward, especially as
we have these, what's the word?
RPM Foundation describes it as like skills that are going extinct, basically.
That's not how they frame it, but whatever.
Anyway, so when you look at connecting through car clubs, this is really, really
important to carry those skills and knowledge on.
I came into this world as someone who was always adjacent to clubs, right?
Through Porsche events before I worked with them professionally through Volkswagen
gatherings like Kubo, Truffin, celebrating the Volkswagen thing through attending
Lyftgekult and Rensport as a fan before any of this was part of my job on my own
dime. Okay.
And what I felt at those events was something that content can gesture
toward, but it can't quite replicate.
That's the physical presence, the shared obsession, the smell of properly tuned
flat six.
Okay.
You cannot stream that.
Okay.
And we know I've talked about it before.
I love the visceral experience.
I want to smell it, feel it, hear it.
So my honest answer to the question that I started with is this, car
clubs are not dying, but the traditional model of what a car club looks like is
being stress tested in a way that requires a real response.
The clubs that treat that stress as a threat will unfortunately continue to age
out. And the clubs that treat it as an invitation to evolve to meet the next
generation where they actually are, have a genuine future.
And that future might look different from what came before, but different isn't
dead. And I think that that's really, really important to highlight.
Why wouldn't we want to evolve?
Why wouldn't we want to do things differently and see what new audiences we
could bring in and invite others?
I'm sorry, but if we are still as a society worried about our ego and claiming
our, oh, this is mine and exclusivity, get out.
Come on, get out of here or get out of here.
I just, I will never understand it.
Like as someone that has had to like claw and fight for myself in so many
ways of my life, share the dang seat, bring another chair up.
Like, what are we doing?
Share it, love it.
It's all more fun when we get to do it together.
Why are you trying to be so isolated and exclusive?
You, anyway, so I'm closing out here.
I'm curious where you fall on this.
If you're a car club member, what keeps you in?
What would you change if you could?
And if you're an enthusiast who has never joined a club, what would it take?
What's in the way for you?
What's the obstacle or the barrier to entry?
And I'll ask too, if you've tried a car club and left, what happened?
Let me leave you with kind of another closing question here.
Is the future of car culture organized or informal?
Does it need a structure like dues, charters, chapters to survive and carry forward?
Or does it find a way on its own through meets and builds and online communities
and events that don't ask you to commit to anything?
I genuinely don't know the answer because I participate in all sides of this.
But I think the way that this question gets answered in the next 10 years or so
will determine a lot about what the automotive enthusiast world looks like
for the generation after hours and ideally the ones after that.
That's it for this week's Thursday pit stop.
Don't forget to sign up for our newsletter so you can stay in the know.
Thank you again for your time and I'll see you next week. Bye.
About this episode
Car clubs may be declining in some places, with “People are literally aging out,” and traditional organizations built around older car eras struggling to connect with younger enthusiasts. Yet the hosts argue clubs aren’t universally dying: some are growing by investing in digital presence and creating entry-level events that don’t require owning a car. Younger fans may be deeply passionate, but their community often shifts online—while clubs uniquely sustain local, intergenerational knowledge and hands-on restoration skills.
A number of car clubs across the country are in genuine decline. Some are growing despite every headwind. And the real reasons behind both are more complicated — and more honest — than most people are willing to say out loud.
In this week's Thursday Pit Stop, Eva Gregory asks the question that keeps coming up inside the automotive and motorsports world: are car clubs dying? Fresh from attending the Ferrari Club of America National Meet, she names the causes behind club decline — including the one that doesn't get talked about enough — breaks down what separates the clubs that are shrinking from the ones that are actually growing year over year, and makes the case for what car clubs do that no Instagram follow, Discord server, or YouTube comment section can ever fully replace.
The passion in the next generation of enthusiasts is real. What's missing is a reason to formalize it. And the clubs that understand that distinction are the ones with a future.
This one is for the longtime club member, the enthusiast who's never joined one, and everyone trying to figure out what car culture looks like for the generation after ours.
Learn more at bedifferentialpodcast.com
Topics covered: car clubs, automotive community, club membership decline, Porsche Club of America, Ferrari Club of America, car culture, classic cars, Hagerty, Luftgekühlt, Rennsport, grassroots motorsports, next generation enthusiasts, automotive lifestyle, Be Differential podcast
