From the Beetle to the McLaren F1: Why Old Cars Still Dominate the Internet

Scroll through YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, or even Google Discover, and you’ll notice something that should feel paradoxical in an age obsessed with “the next big thing”: the cars that consistently command the most attention are often not new. A 1967 Ford Mustang restomod racks up more views than the latest electric SUV launch. A grainy clip of a Porsche 911 air-cooled flat-six screaming through a tunnel gets more emotional reactions than a 1,000-horsepower hypercar announcement. The Volkswagen Beetle, a car conceived in the 1930s, still generates millions of searches every month. And the McLaren F1, launched in the early 1990s, remains the yardstick by which modern hypercars are judged.

At first glance, this looks like simple nostalgia. But that explanation is lazy. Nostalgia alone doesn’t sustain multi-billion-view ecosystems, nor does it explain why people born decades after these cars were made are often the most obsessed with them. Something deeper is happening, and if you care about cars, media, or culture, you should care about understanding it—because it reveals not just why old cars dominate the internet, but what modern automotive culture is quietly losing.

Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth: the internet does not reward novelty. It rewards meaning. And meaning, in the car world, is something that has become increasingly scarce.

The Beetle, the F1, and the Myth of “Just Transportation”

The Volkswagen Beetle is one of the most important industrial objects of the 20th century. Not because it was fast, or luxurious, or technologically groundbreaking, but because it became a global symbol. It represented mobility for the masses, mechanical simplicity, and a strange mix of political history, counterculture, and everyday life *1. It’s not a coincidence that the Beetle is still one of the most recognizable car shapes on Earth, decades after production of the original ended *2.

The McLaren F1 sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. It was never meant to be a mass product. It was Gordon Murray’s uncompromising vision of the ultimate road car: naturally aspirated V12, central driving position, obsessive weight saving, and engineering priorities that look almost alien compared to today’s spec-sheet wars *3. It held the production car speed record for years and still commands prices north of $20 million *4.

On paper, these two cars have nothing in common. In culture, they share everything that matters: they are stories first, machines second.

Modern cars, by contrast, are marketed as appliances with performance numbers. Faster 0–100. Bigger screens. More driver aids. Longer range. But where is the story?

If you think this is just romanticism, ask yourself a simple question: how many people can describe the design philosophy behind a current mass-market car without looking it up? Now ask the same about the Beetle, the original Mini, the Ford Model T, or the Porsche 911. The difference is not age. It is narrative density.

The Internet Is a Story Amplifier, Not a Spec Sheet

One of the biggest mistakes people make when analyzing online car culture is assuming that virality is driven by objective merit. It isn’t. It is driven by emotional hooks, identity, and narrative.

A cold start video of a carbureted V8 going slightly out of tune on a winter morning carries more emotional information than a flawless launch control clip from a modern supercar. The former tells you something about imperfection, about mechanical honesty, about a world where machines had moods. The latter tells you the car is fast. We already knew that.

This is not speculation. Media researchers have shown that content which evokes high-arousal emotions—especially awe, anger, or nostalgia—is far more likely to be shared *5. Old cars are basically nostalgia machines, even for people who never lived through their era. They compress decades of cultural memory into a single object.

You see this in the way YouTube algorithms behave. Channels like Doug DeMuro, Petrolicious, Jay Leno’s Garage, and Hagerty’s media arm consistently get massive engagement on older or historically significant cars, often outperforming coverage of brand-new models *6 *7. This is not because these creators ignore new cars. It’s because audiences quietly vote with their attention.

And attention is the only currency that matters online.

The Death of Mechanical Transparency

Here’s a point that will probably make you uncomfortable if you like modern cars: most new cars are incomprehensible to the human senses.

Open the hood of a 1970s car and you can usually see the engine. You can point at components and explain, in simple terms, what they do. The throttle is connected to the engine by a cable. The steering is connected to the wheels by metal. The brakes are hydraulic and mechanical. The relationship between input and output is legible.

Open the hood of a modern car and you see plastic covers, sensors, wiring looms, and software-mediated systems. The throttle is a suggestion. The steering is often filtered. The brakes are interpreted by computers. This is not inherently bad—modern cars are safer, more efficient, and more reliable by almost every measurable metric *8. But they are also more abstract.

Abstraction kills romance.

People don’t fall in love with systems they can’t intuitively understand. They may admire them. They may depend on them. But they don’t tell stories about them.

This is one of the core reasons old cars dominate the internet: they are visually and conceptually readable. A child can look at a classic Beetle engine and understand, at least roughly, what is happening. A McLaren F1’s engine bay is not simple, but it is honest. Everything you see is there for a reason, and that reason is not hidden behind UX design.

Scarcity, Survival, and the Filter of Time

Another uncomfortable truth: most new cars are not interesting enough to survive.

Time is the most brutal and honest curator. Of the millions of cars produced in any decade, only a tiny fraction remain culturally relevant. The rest disappear into scrapyards, anonymity, and footnotes.

When you see a 1960s Mustang today, you are not seeing an average car from the 1960s. You are seeing a survivor. A filtered artifact. The boring cars are gone. The forgettable ones are gone. What remains is a highlight reel, and that distorts our perception.

This is known in other fields as survivorship bias *9, and it plays a massive role in how we perceive automotive history. We compare the best of the past with the average of the present and conclude that the past was better. That conclusion is emotionally satisfying and statistically wrong.

And yet—and this matters—even when you account for this bias, something real remains: the cars that survive are the ones with stories, character, or cultural impact. And those qualities are not being optimized for in modern product planning.

The McLaren F1 Problem: When Perfection Is an Accident

The McLaren F1 is often described as a “perfect” car. That’s not true. It has flaws. It is impractical, terrifyingly expensive to maintain, and utterly unsuited to modern traffic or regulations. But it feels perfect because it was not designed by a committee optimizing KPIs. It was designed by a small group of people chasing an idea.

Gordon Murray has spoken extensively about the philosophy behind the F1: lightness, driver focus, and engineering purity above all else *3. There was no marketing department telling him what the customer wanted. There was a belief that if you build something truly excellent, the right customers will appear.

That belief is almost extinct in the modern auto industry.

Today’s hypercars are technical miracles. They are faster, more powerful, more complex. And they are, in a strange way, less interesting. They are products of a known formula: hybrid assist, active aero, massive tires, software-mediated everything. They compete in spreadsheets and YouTube drag races. The F1 competes in mythology.

And mythology always wins on the internet.

Why Young People Obsess Over Cars They Never Lived With

One of the laziest explanations for classic car popularity is “boomers being nostalgic.” It collapses the moment you look at actual demographics on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, where a huge portion of the audience for classic car content is under 30.

Why would someone born in 2005 care about a 1980s Porsche 911 or a 1970 Dodge Charger?

Because those cars represent a world that feels more human.

Not better. Not easier. More legible. More tactile. Less mediated by algorithms, software updates, and corporate risk management. Old cars are proxies for a broader cultural longing: the desire for things that feel authored, not optimized.

This is not unique to cars. You see it in the resurgence of vinyl records, film photography, mechanical watches, and even typewriters *10. These are all inferior technologies by most objective measures. They persist because they make processes visible.

Visibility creates meaning.

The Algorithm Loves Context, and Old Cars Are Pure Context

A modern car review starts and ends with the car. An old car review almost never does.

When someone talks about a Citroën DS, they talk about post-war France, about futuristic design, about hydropneumatic suspension, about how it looked like nothing else on the road *11. When someone talks about the original Mini, they talk about space efficiency, British culture, motorsport, and the 1960s *12. When someone talks about the Beetle, they talk about its dark origins, its reinvention, and its role in global motorization *1.

The car is an entry point into history, politics, design, and sociology.

The internet is built for this kind of content. It thrives on rabbit holes. A video about an old car is never just a video about an old car. It is a gateway drug to ten other topics.

A video about a new crossover is… about a new crossover.

You Don’t Actually Want Progress, You Want Coherent Progress

Here is where I’m going to challenge you directly: if you think your love for old cars is just about “the good old days,” you are underestimating yourself.

What you actually want is not regression. You want progress that makes sense.

People do not reject modern cars because they are new. They reject them because too many of them feel like the inevitable outcome of regulations, cost cutting, and risk management rather than the expression of a clear vision.

The problem is not that cars have screens. The problem is that the screens often feel like the point.

The problem is not that cars are quiet. The problem is that they are silent in a way that erases drama rather than replacing it with something equally meaningful.

Old cars dominate the internet because they remind us that objects can have souls—not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of having traceable intentions behind them.

The Internet as a Museum and a Battlefield

The modern internet has become a kind of distributed museum. You can, in a single evening, watch a full documentary on the development of the McLaren F1, a restoration series on a 1950s Alfa Romeo, and a design analysis of the original Beetle. This level of access to historical context is unprecedented *13.

But it is also a battlefield, where different visions of the future compete.

On one side: the inevitable march toward electrification, autonomy, and software-defined vehicles *14. On the other: a growing cultural resistance that does not necessarily oppose these technologies, but resents the way they are being imposed without equivalent attention to emotion, identity, and pleasure.

Old cars are weapons in this cultural argument. Not because they are better solutions, but because they are better stories.

And stories are how humans decide what is worth caring about.

The Trap You Might Be Falling Into

Now let me challenge your blind spot.

There is a real danger in turning old cars into a personality and modern cars into a punchline. It is intellectually lazy and strategically stupid.

The future will not be carburetors and manual steering. It will be electric, software-heavy, and highly automated *14. If you care about cars as culture, your job is not to retreat into nostalgia. Your job is to demand that the future learns how to tell better stories.

The McLaren F1 was not great because it was analog. It was great because it was coherent. The Beetle was not great because it was simple. It was great because it was purposeful.

If modern carmakers can relearn that lesson, then one day, people will obsess over a 2025 or 2030 car in the same way they obsess over a 1965 one today.

Right now, they mostly don’t.

And that should worry anyone who claims to love the automobile as more than a moving appliance.




The Real Reason Old Cars Win: They Were Allowed to Be Wrong

There is one final layer to this phenomenon that is more uncomfortable than nostalgia, more structural than algorithms, and more revealing than design trends: old cars were allowed to fail in public.

A 1970s British sports car leaked oil. A 1980s Italian exotic overheated in traffic. A 1960s American sedan handled like a boat in a storm. These were not bugs. They were features of an era where engineering was closer to experimentation than optimization. Companies tried ideas. Many of them were bad. Some were brilliant. Most were somewhere in between. And because the market was less regulated, less globalized, and less dominated by platform economics, these experiments were allowed to exist.

What you are seeing today, when you scroll through endless content about old cars, is not just a celebration of what worked. You are seeing the fossil record of industrial trial and error.

Modern car development does not work this way anymore. The financial, regulatory, and reputational risk of being wrong is too high. A mistake is no longer a local embarrassment. It is a global PR crisis, a shareholder call, a recall measured in billions. As a result, modern cars are designed to avoid being wrong rather than to attempt being extraordinary.

This is why so many contemporary vehicles feel convergent. Not identical—but spiritually similar. The same proportions. The same interfaces. The same priorities. The same safe answers to the same questions.

Old cars dominate the internet because they come from a time when answers were still plural.

The Internet as an Archaeological Site

When you watch a restoration series on a 1950s Alfa Romeo or a deep dive into the engineering of the McLaren F1, you are not just consuming entertainment. You are participating in a form of cultural archaeology.

Every old car that still exists is evidence of a path not taken.

There were futures where Citroën’s radical engineering philosophy became the norm. There were futures where lightweight minimalism won over complexity. There were futures where small, clever cars dominated instead of massive, software-heavy ones. These futures did not happen—but their artifacts remain.

The internet is the first medium in history that allows these abandoned timelines to be explored at scale.

This is why classic car content does not behave like normal “enthusiast” content. It behaves like historical content, philosophical content, even political content. It invites questions that modern product launches never do. What kind of world produced this? What did people value? What did they think the future would be?

A 2025 car answers almost none of these questions. It mostly answers: how do we comply, how do we scale, how do we minimize risk?

Why Modern Cars Rarely Become Cultural Anchors

Think about this honestly: which modern cars feel inevitable in the same way the Beetle, the 911, or the original Mini do?

Not successful. Not popular. Inevitable.

Very few.

Most modern cars feel like temporary solutions to temporary constraints. They are not wrong. They are not embarrassing. They are just… provisional.

This is partly because we are in a technological transition. Electrification, autonomy, and software-defined vehicles mean that everything is in flux. Carmakers are building bridges, not monuments.

But it is also because the industry has forgotten how to commit to an idea.

The Beetle committed. The original Range Rover committed. The McLaren F1 committed. Even when they were flawed, they were coherent. You could disagree with them, but you could not mistake them for anything else.

Coherence is what turns an object into a cultural anchor.

And coherence is extremely difficult to achieve when decisions are made by risk committees rather than authors.

The Myth of “Peak Car” and the Mistake of Pessimism

There is a growing belief that we have passed “peak car.” That everything interesting has already been done, and that the future is inevitably dull, sanitized, and soulless.

This is a seductive story. It flatters our taste and absolves us of responsibility.

It is also almost certainly wrong.

Every generation believes it lives after the golden age. And every generation is eventually proven incorrect—not because progress is linear, but because creativity is cyclical.

What is actually happening is simpler and more uncomfortable: we are between myths.

The old myths—speed, noise, mechanical heroism, individual mastery—no longer fit the world we are building. But the new myths—software, intelligence, efficiency, autonomy—have not yet learned how to be emotionally compelling.

Old cars dominate the internet because they belong to a completed story.

New cars belong to an unfinished one.

The Question You Should Actually Be Asking

The wrong question is: “Why were cars better before?”

The right question is: “Why do we no longer allow ourselves to build things that clearly express a belief about the world?”

Old cars are not better. They are braver.

They come from a time when designers and engineers were allowed to say: this is what we think matters.

Today, most products say: this is what we think will not get us in trouble.

That is a survivable strategy. It is not a culture-building one.

The Future Classic Will Not Look Like the Past

Here is the final and most important point, and it is where many enthusiasts completely lose the plot.

The next McLaren F1 will not be a V12 analog supercar.

The next Beetle will not be a simple people’s car with a rear engine.

The future classic will probably be electric. It will probably be software-heavy. It may not even have a steering wheel in the way we understand it.

But if it becomes a classic, it will be for the same reason these cars did: because it represents a clear, uncompromising answer to a real question.

Not a compromise. Not a committee. Not a market segment.

An idea.

And until modern carmakers relearn how to build ideas instead of just products, the internet will continue to live in the past—not because the past was better, but because it was bolder.

And boldness, more than speed or screens or statistics, is what actually survives.






References

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14 International Energy Agency. (2024). Global EV Outlook. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook