The cultural gap is real. The car world traditionally appeals to a very different demographic. Remember all those crappy flash intros every geek would hate? Car businesses loved them.

Working on cars is a very social experience: you pick up the interest from relatives or friends, and space requirements for the hobby are such that, in urban surroundings, you usually cannot hide it from people, so they will see what you’re doing and stop to have a chat; you will often need help to push this or that relic around; you will have to talk to garage owners for many reasons, etc etc. Whereas IT is traditionally a loner’s world, and more so since the internet became central to it.

Then consider that the world of car enthusiasts is shrinking. The big expos have consolidated for lack of visitors, and car evolution itself is shutting out enthusiasts by producing more and more products that cannot be tweaked or even repaired without professional assistance. When I was a teenager my dad was often going on about the fact that me and my friends simply did not do any of the motoring-related activities he did as a kid.

I’ve known exactly two geeks in my life who were also car enthusiasts. One was a very atypical programmer, fundamentally a businessman who loved PHP. The other came from a deep UK working-class background, and cars were basically a way to stay in touch with that, a mean to maintain an emotional link with his friends and family. Everyone else only cared about cars enough to use them to from A to B and to hold a non-geek conversation (“did you see Top Gear last night? Ludicrous display! The thing with Jaguar is they always try to walk it in...”).