The American car landscape is changing, said as if we all didn’t know this. Sometimes with all the rushing about, we don’t see the change until it happens close to home.

A neighbor decides it’s high time to get a new car. Their tired, four-door Honda is just that: Tired, smokes a little upon start up, and so old, crash tests on the model never existed. I wasn’t going to mention it, but it was small and frankly, ugly with sun-scorched bronze paint and a rear deck covered with stuffed animals. You probably have one of these in your own neighborhood. Before the advent of SUVs and hip-hop stars, any teenager would have been thrilled to own one of these on the cheap. Sure beats the hand-me-down dead VW bug with a broken trans axel of my day.

The neighbor wanted something sporty and black, but four-door because the spouse insisted. Who would I be to point out the fact that four-door vehicles have never been nor will ever be “sporty” in the eyes of true car enthusiasts? “Okay,” they said. “We’ll settle on just black then, maybe something European. That’s considered sporty nowadays, right?” And safe. They insisted it be safe.

It’s been a few months now. Twice a day, that black European car pulls in and out of their driveway, that safe car with LED running lights and four-doors and the back deck not-so-slowly becoming crammed with stuffed animals (because that makes it safer, somehow). Twice a day, the impressionable kids on the street stop their screaming and teasing and vandalism just long enough to stop and watch and whistle, much like they used to do over another neighbor’s 300M when that made it’s first appearance a few years ago. Another four-door, that one, and more gangsta-looking with tall, thin rubber, dark window tint, and gold paint.