Why Classic Cars Feel More Real Than Modern EVs

Cars
February 26, 2026

Why Classic Cars From the 60s to Early 2000s Feel More “Real” Than Modern EVs

By Vincent John Jacobs

I drove a mate’s EV last year. A nice one, too. One of those sleek, whisper-quiet machines that everyone’s supposed to be losing their mind over. It accelerated beautifully. The touchscreen was enormous. The seats were comfortable enough to sleep in.

And about ten minutes in, I realised I felt absolutely nothing.

No drama. No theatre. No sense that I was operating something that had any genuine relationship with the road beneath me. Just… motion. Smooth, competent, totally disconnected motion. Like being inside a very fast elevator.

I’ve been thinking about why that is ever since.

The Car Used to Have a Personality. Sometimes a Bad One.

Ask anyone who’s owned a ’69 Mustang, a VB Commodore, a mid-90s Subaru WRX or even a battered old XD Falcon what their car was like. They won’t give you a spec sheet. They’ll tell you stories.

They’ll tell you it ran hot when it was angry. That you had to pump the clutch a certain way in winter. That there was a particular rev range where it just sang. That it pulled slightly left and you compensated without thinking because after 60,000 kilometres, you knew each other.

That’s not a fault. That’s a relationship.

Modern EVs don’t have personalities. They have modes. “Sport.” “Comfort.” “Eco.” A selection of artificial experiences curated by a software team in California. The car doesn’t have quirks; it has settings. There’s a difference, and the difference matters more than the engineers who built these things seem to understand.

The Sound Problem

Let me say something that will get me laughed out of a Tesla forum: the engine sound of an old car is not a flaw. It is the voice of the machine.

When you pushed a ’74 Charger through a corner, or wound out a Triumph TR6 on an open road, or even just sat at the lights in a turbo diesel Land Cruiser and felt that low, diesel-clatter idle, you were getting information. Constant, analogue, tactile information about what the engine was doing, how hard it was working, what it needed.

That sound was feedback. It connected the driver to the mechanical reality underneath the bonnet in a way that no amount of digital dashboards can replicate.

EVs are near-silent by design, and silence is sold as a feature. I get it. I understand the logic. But silence also means isolation. You’re in a pod. The road, the engine, the speed are all happening outside you, and you are merely being transported.

Classic cars didn’t transport you. They involved you.

Steel, Rubber, and the Weight of Consequence

There’s something about the physicality of older vehicles that modern cars (not just EVs) have been progressively engineering out of the experience.

Get into a 1970s or 1980s car and the steering wheel actually fights back. Not aggressively. Just… honestly. The feedback through the column tells you about the road surface, the grip, the weight transfer through a corner. You can feel the tyre squirm before it gives way.

Drive a modern EV, or hell, drive most modern cars, and the steering is electrically assisted to the point of numbness. You’re moving a cursor. You’re not driving; you’re directing.

Old cars made you feel the consequence of your inputs. There was weight in the pedals, throw in the gear lever, resistance in the wheel. You weren’t insulated from the machine. You were part of it.

That has a psychological effect that I don’t think people talk about enough. When something responds to your touch, when you have to develop a physical relationship with an object over time, it becomes yours in a way that nothing with a touchscreen ever quite can.

The Repairability Factor (Or: You Could Actually Fix It)

Here’s where I’ll possibly upset some people.

Half the reason classic cars feel more “real” is because they were more real, in the sense that a human being with moderate mechanical aptitude and a decent set of tools could understand them, maintain them, and repair them.

That’s not romantic nostalgia. That’s a genuine and underappreciated form of connection.

When you’ve had your hands in an engine, when you’ve changed your own brake pads, replaced a clutch cable, diagnosed a miss-fire by ear and fixed it by feel, you understand that machine on a level that goes way beyond passenger. You know it. And knowing it makes driving it different.

Modern EVs are not designed to be understood by owners. They’re designed to be trusted. Updates over WiFi. Diagnostics via app. Sealed battery packs. Software you don’t own.

That’s a philosophical shift as much as a technical one. The old car said: “Here I am. Figure me out.” The new EV says: “Don’t worry about it. We’ve got this.”

For a lot of people, that second one is exactly what they want. Fair enough.

But for anyone who’s ever felt genuine joy behind the wheel of something old, loud, and slightly stubborn, the first one is irreplaceable.

The Honest Concession

I’m not completely anti-EV. I’m not an idiot.

The instant torque is genuinely extraordinary. The running costs are real. If you live in a city and do urban commuting, an EV makes enormous sense. The technology is impressive and it will keep improving.

And I’ll be honest: plenty of old cars were terrible. Unreliable, uncomfortable, environmentally catastrophic. The rose-coloured glasses are thick in this hobby and I know it.

But the question isn’t whether old cars were better in every measurable sense. Obviously they weren’t.

The question is whether they felt more real. More connected. More alive.

And I think the answer, for anyone who has genuinely driven both, is yes. Not because of nostalgia. Not because of tribalism. But because of something fundamental about the relationship between a driver and a machine that is imperfect, physical, mechanical, and entirely present.

What We’re Actually Mourning

The shift to EVs isn’t just a fuel-source change. It’s the completion of a process that’s been underway for decades: the slow, well-intentioned removal of friction from the driving experience.

Automatic gearboxes. Power steering. ABS. Stability control. Lane assist. And now, ultimately, a drivetrain with no combustion, no vibration, no drama, no smell, and no voice.

Each of those things was added with good reason. Each of them made driving safer, easier, more accessible. I don’t dispute any of that.

But something got traded away in the process. And what got traded away is what people who love old cars are really talking about when they say modern cars don’t feel “real.”

They’re not talking about horsepower or cylinder counts. They’re talking about presence. That feeling that the car exists as a thing, a physical, imperfect, demanding thing, rather than a service being rendered by a corporation through a piece of hardware you happen to be sitting inside.

A mate of mine has a 1967 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint. It is temperamental, impractical, loud, and requires more maintenance than a toddler. He would not trade it for any car on the road today.

I understand exactly why.