The Car Club Conundrum
Hi Friends!
This past week I was honored to speak at the summer meeting of the Alfa Romeo Club of Arizona. They are fun and passionate group of enthusiasts and I had a great time. The general scope of my presentation was not only discussing specific market values and trends, but also the past, present and future of the brand overall. I showed up with the expectation of speaking for about 20 minutes. What I didn’t expect was the hour plus Q&A session that followed.
Of course, a good chunk of the questions asked were marque specific, but the topic turned fairly early on and in a direction that was much more broadly sweeping: “What is going to happen to car clubs moving into the future?”
Car clubs not only serve as social organizations, but additionally as vehicles for the preservation of historical documentation, technical know-how and more. Clubs that serve the larger, more prominent brands like Porsche and Ferrari, have done a very good job of moving their operations forward in anticipation for the future, but some of the smaller organizations have noticeably struggled here.
Questions of concern that I received this week surrounded things like custodianship of records, infrastructure of electronic elements (websites and the important information and documentation that they contain), and most specifically car club magazines and newsletters.
These publications tend to tie people together and provide a tangible component for people to share their knowledge and their enthusiasm. There’s a lot of fear that because these are expensive and require tremendous amounts of work by individual members that they may be going away. As somebody who tends to wait by his mailbox every month for a couple of these, this would be tragic.
Over the nearly 90 minutes that we spoke, I’m not sure we really solved this problem per se, but the fact remains (which we basically all agreed on) that the more people that get involved, the easier it is to keep the wheels on these things. I think sometimes we tend to not think about the finality of long-term institutions like car clubs, but that finality definitely always exists someplace, somewhere and the fear is that may be sooner than a lot of people are actually prepared for.
If I took anything from this experience earlier this week, it’s that we all need to get more involved.
If you’re a representative of a car club that may be facing these issues down the line, let’s have a conversation. This stuff is important and we’d love to exchange ideas and help keep car clubs on the road.
That’s it for this week…
Darin Roberge