Join the future and concentrate on your sound system rather than distracting engine noise. I believe there will be a tipping point within 10 years where ICE cars as daily drivers will become "uncool" (although these cars will always be appreciated for historical and nostalgic reasons). Just as horses were banned from the streets of New York (for safety reasons and a different type of "pollution" of 1,200 metric tons of horse manure per day in 1900), ICE cars will eventually be banned as well. I think even before any bans take place, ICE cars will be just too expensive to operate (as gas stations start to go out of business, mechanics & spare parts become more scarce, and insurance companies increase premiums for lack of safety features).
Yes, my father (born in 1920) remembers people talking about how cars were pollution free. I've heard at least one person claim that the terms "tailpipe" and "tailpipe emissions" predate the time when cars were common.
Predicting the future of cars is difficult right now. A number of people are predicting car ownership is going to end when autonomous EVs make services like Uber very cheap. I think the real answer is going to be messy and more complex.
Right now the average age of cars on American roads is 11+ years old. That means 1/2 of the cars out there were built before 2006. A significant number of those car owners are driving older cars because they can't afford anything newer. It's going to be quite a while before the used EV market has enough cars with long enough range to be able to replace those old ICE.
In more urbanized areas, there will be a growing fleet of autonomous cars for hire and when the services get reliable enough, a lot of the poorer people will abandon their cars in favor of ride sharing because it will be more affordable. However, I think those who can afford a newer car will opt to own their own. It will be both a status thing as well as a cleanliness thing. You won't have to get in a car which has been occupied last by someone and their feral children or someone who had too much to drink and lost control of their stomach contents.
Outside of urban areas, car ownership will still be necessary and ICE will predominate in these areas long after cities have gone mostly electric if not completely electric. In part rural people are more conservative and less willing to adopt new technology, especially new tech that has been touted by the more liberal. Plus the rural poor will need transportation, won't have access to ride sharing services, and will have lots of fairly new ICE to choose from at cheap prices.
ICE will also be kept by enthusiasts with the money to store them, but they will be hobby cars. Just like you see old cars restored to pristine condition on the roads today, there will be old classics kept running by people who care. These will usually be occasional use cars and you'll see them more in summer than year round.
Over time more and more roads will become autonomous only, but there will need to be secondary roads where non-autonomous cars can be driven. Taking your non-autonomous car out on one of these roads will become a hobby.
Horseback riding is a common hobby today. It's estimated the current horse population in the US is about 1/2 what it was in 1915. Most of those kept in 1915 were for necessary transportation use and while there are working horses on ranches and among communities like the Amish, the majority of American horses are ridden for recreation.
I suspect ICE will go the same route. There will be some uses where ICE are more useful, but EVs will dominate and eventually most of those EVs will be part-time or full-time autonomous.
Many European cities are passing laws now to ban ICE from city cores by next decade. The US is more resistant to those sorts of laws, but ICE will become rarer in city centers as EVs become more common and especially once autonomous ride sharing services start taking private cars off the road.
Once consumers start wanting EVs, that will start the first disruption of the car business. Followed close in its heels will be autonomous cars which require changes to the laws, but there is a lot of pressure on law makers to make these changes. In a decade driving a 2017 Infiniti might be about as prestigious as driving a Kia Spectra is today
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njvZSyzs3wg
I could be completely wrong. Maybe there will be some kind of big cash for clunkers program that sends a huge number of ICE to car heaven and puts way more autonomous EVs on the road at a much faster pace? Maybe legislators will realize that autonomous vehicles will cause massive unemployment and require a driver to "monitor" the system and be ready to take over?
People can be fickle too. Millennials are tending to have less interest in cars than any generation born in the 20th century or even the late 19th, but who knows? People do things that are not economically wise for vanity or peer pressure all the time. Even among the poor car ownership might become even more of a thing if used ICE get cheaper and the price of gasoline goes down and stays down. It may become a thing of pride for poorer people to drive an older ICE. Among Mexican Americans restoring and driving older Chevys from the 1960s and 70s is a great source of pride. (I grew up in East LA and some of those cars are amazing works of art.)
