I sat in a friend's 90s Integra last week and forgot what year it was.

For a few seconds, the present genuinely receded. The orange backlight & analog gauges, the cassette player with its mechanical click, the particular softness of that era's plastic. I was somewhere else.

This doesn't happen with other technology. We abandon prior eras completely. The flip phone has vanished. CRT monitors occupy landfills. The iPod click wheel lives in museum exhibits. We don't keep old laptops around for charm - a 2015 MacBook isn't a conversation piece.

Cars persist and carry their moments with them.

A Porsche 944 puts you in the cabin with the guy from every 80s ski movie, all pop-up headlights and angular ambition, back when "sports car" meant something attainable if you stretched. A 2008 Camry conjures the mid-aughts: the aux cord revolution, the specific shade of beige Toyota believed constituted neutral. A 2012 Model S captures that window of techno-optimism before range anxiety was a punchline soon surpassed. The technology transports you, but so does everything else. The smell of aging leather. The weight of the doors. The way light falls across surfaces designed with entirely different aesthetic assumptions. These machines are snapshots into both the preferences and the engineering constraints of their era.

With cars, we oft prefer the old. I have genuine fondness for vehicles that would be laughable in any other category. Few pine for their BlackBerry. But a clean E30? An old-body WRX with its hood scoop? A first-gen Miata? These provoke something closer to reverence than nostalgia.

When I watch my friends making literal science fiction into reality, building robots & s/w that would have seemed impossible a decade ago, it's grounding to sit in these old machines. They're reminders of how different the constraints were, how recently the present was unimaginable. Every other device we own is a tool. A car is a room we inhabit, built by people solving different problems with different materials under different assumptions. Sitting in one is the closest thing we have to visiting the past.