“What Englishman will give his mind
to politics
as long as he can afford to keep a motor car? ”
George Bernard Shaw
The Apple Cart, 1930 Act 1
Who decided it was reasonable for ordinary people to drive? Who decided it is safe to allow the majority of people who choose to do so the right to move themselves around in huge, heavy vehicles at speeds too high to allow them to stop within a reasonable distance?
Who decided that driving a car was a right? Who decided that it is reasonable to allow people to burn up the Earth's limited fossil fuel supplies in this way? To use enough petroleum to bath in just to travel to work each and every day. Who decided that it was entirely the concern of the driver and the car maker how powerful an engine can be used in a car? Who decided that it was not reasonable to change the rules about the safety of a vehicle once it was first registered? Who decided that when there were too many cars for the existing roads that the answer lay in more roads rather than fewer cars? Nobody. Nobody decided that we should have a huge car culture and a culture of the Right To Drive. The Car Culture did not have a mother or father, it just growed. Now it has grown to the size at which it is too powerful to resist or control. We are now Homo automobilicus; the motorized man.
My mother tells me that first words were food and car. That about sums it all up. But why are we now so dazzled by the car that we cannot think straight about it? We are car addicts. Like all addicts we see we have a need for our addiction and we are blind to all reason. We are fascinated by cars to an extent that is simply not healthy. If you doubt that car addiction is a powerful evil force simply try the following experiment: watch MTV for 15 minutes and count up how many cars feature, I bet they outnumber guitars by 5 to 1. Cars on MTV are a special example of our car fixation. They are put there to give the music an aura of sex and glamour.
In the innocent 1960s car manufacturers used sexy women to help sell cars. This has now come full circle. Sexy cars are used to sell music to an audience too young for sex. So many music videos feature exotic fast cars to gain the attention of their young audience. Cars are glamorous, put nonentity musician behind the wheel of a supercar and the musician benefits from the association. The makers of the Mini might have considered giving one to the Beatles was good publicity but I bet that all the Ferraris than feature on MTV were bought or hired with music money. Ferrari does not benefit from being associated with Dr Dre.
What is a supercar for? What does it do? To me the answer is fairly obvious, it is a statement. It says
I have very large amounts of money and I am flaunting the fact to you. For you lowlifes to afford one of these would take a lifetime of saving. Driving this shows everybody that I am quite simply better than you, and better than you could ever be. If you got one I would get something else instead. Eat my dust, loser.
They are the equivalent of ermine robes, gold chains, liveried coachmen. They are conspicuous consumption. They are designed as phallic symbols, their job is not so much to show women that the owners are desirable males but to show other males that the owners are better males. Their transport role is very much secondary. The purpose is not to go quickly from the villa to the beach, I am quite certain I could do better on a ten year old 250cc motorbike that any hamburger flipper could afford. The point is not to travel, but to be seen to travel, not to travel fast but to be seen to have the option.
Supercars have no benefit to the civilization that allows them to exist. They use up scarce resources and they contribute to the perception of inequality and unfairness. They are beautiful objects but so are pyramids and crowns and feather cloaks that take a lifetime to make and cost the lives of hundreds of rare birds. They are objects that belong in museums only.
What about more ordinary cars? What should be done about them? I feel that the car culture has evolved by default and it is time it was controlled by some sort of rational overview. Nobody decided that power should be available in unlimited amounts. It just happened. No large country ever decided that an upper limit on engine size or power should be imposed. Car makers have simply supplied whatever the car buyer was prepared to pay for in that particular market. In Britain the demand for size and power was modest. 1.3 litre engines were about the norm, and car lengths and widths were modest too. In the USA higher norms developed because of lower fuel prices and wider roads. Driving a 7 litre American car around in Britain is difficult, many roads are too narrow for you to pass without worry and parking spaces are all too small. There is no law to stop you driving such a car but it is difficult. In Italy many roads are even narrower but traffic travels fast when it can so Italian cars are small but often with high performance engines. It all happened by accident. On the subject of accident I suspect that Indian cars are so slow and heavy because roads are too bumpy to allow great speed in comfort and the likelihood of crashes is so high that heavy slow but solid cars make a lot of sense.
How fast is fast enough?
I think we should ask the Germans, nobody else has a clearer idea about fast cars in actual use, legally, on their own roads. Only Germans design fast cars for their wives to drive home in.
Many German cars are limited to 250 Km/h (155 MPH) by their manufacturers. I think this is eminently sensible. It is possible to make cars go faster than this, it is even possible to make cars go faster than this without being unable to stop, but it is bloody difficult.
BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Porsche came to a gentleman's agreement that 250 Km/h was quite fast enough and to push things further would be a bad idea. To do it safely would make their cars too expensive, to do it anyway would be criminal negligence for professional engineers. It was better all round to put a limiter in, and they made their agreement at just the right time, before competition had hotted up too much to set a ceiling at an almost reasonable figure of 250.
I think that insurers of cars should be under a legal obligation to certify that the vehicle they are insuring cannot be driven in excess of 155 MPH and that any driver of a vehicle which is not limited to that speed (or obviously incapable of exceeding it by the laws of physics) is driving without insurance and liable for an automatic six months prison sentence.
What possible excuse is there for wanting to travel more than 155 MPH on ordinary roads? Come on, be reasonable here. It is dangerous by definition to be exceeding the safe design limits of the vehicle and almost every vehicle is unsafe at such a speeds in the real world. That means the car is putting other people in danger too. The difference between 155 MPH and absolutely flat-out will be effectively a negligible loss of utility. I bet if you added all the miles driven by all cars on all public roads on the planet you wouldn't come up with more than ten thousand miles per year being done in excess of 155 MPH, a tiny fraction of a fraction of 1% of the total road miles travelled. So a ridiculous amount of money is spent to exceed 155 MPH, usually for a mere matter of seconds, usually when people are not actually going anywhere in particular. It doesn't add up to a sensible way to run a transport system.
A tiny handful of cars would need to be either retro-fitted with speed limiters, or declared to be museum pieces and track day cars. Any car that could be suspected of being capable of exceeding 155 MPH is hardly likely to be the one and only road-worthy car owned by a disabled penniless old granny, is it? It surely would not cost more than £20 for a car to be issued a certificate by a testing station that showed it did not have a power-to-weight ratio which required it to be fitted with a speed limiter, and such a requirement could be added to the annual test that all cars over three years old are required by law to have.
This could be the start of a new deal between cars and the state. We ensure our cars can't exceed the overall national speed limit of 155 MPH and the state ensures that roads (at least some of them) are made safe for those speeds. Anybody who wants to race on the roads should forfeit their right to drive. At all. Ever. Race tracks are for racing, roads are for transport.
If
an upper limit on car performance is imposed by law the reason to keep
using conventional internal combustion engines and oil based fuels reduces.
Electrically powered cars have been designed at many different times but
have always stumbled because of perceived lack of performance and range.
Battery technology is improving, powered by the mobile telephone boom.
This new technology combined with new realism in car performance could
be the answer. Zero emission cars for all. OK, not today, but it is surely
coming along soon.
For some very strange reason that I can never understand it seems illegitimate to ask the owner of a car to stop using it or make changes to it. Why? We are quite happy to tell hotel owners and landlords that they have to meet new regulations or cease trading. We also do similar things for aircraft and ships. It is also quite common for owners of computers and television sets to be left with a useless device by the advances in technology. I cannot see why cars should be an exception.
Cars need seat belts, efficient engines, quiet and clean exhausts, safe brakes and some of them need speed limiters. That is it, they need them. If your car does not have them, fit them, or stop using it. It is really quite simple. Times change, the fact that your car met all legal requirements once is neither here nor there, standards change. A car is a piece of machinery that affects everybody it passes. If it is noisy or dirty it pollutes. If it is very uneconomical it depletes the Earth's finite resources, that affects everybody. If it is too fast for safe operation it should not be driven. Cars can kill. Life is a hereditary disease with a 100% fatal prognosis but that doesn't mean we should not take reasonable strides to avoid death when we can.
We are now living in a car culture and there is no way back to the days of the horse. But we are still the master. The car is our servant. I have not mentioned much about the benefits of the car, these are self evident.
We need to get things in perspective. Cars are essential to modern life but they need not be quite as all powerful and sacred as they have been. We do not exist to serve them. They exist for our benefit. If we make a few changes in the way we run our lives we can continue to enjoy the huge benefits of personal mobility without paying such a high price for it. What I am suggesting is pruning the car culture, cutting back on excesses to allow the whole tree to survive and prosper longer.
My first car was a Citroen 2CV. It had a maximum speed of 72 MPH and the British motorway speed limit is and was 70 MPH. I found it quite sufficient for the job of taking me where I wanted to go. Naturally being a young male I wanted to see just how fast it could go. On a very long hill I managed to get the speedometer needle to bury itself in the end stop at 85 MPH as I approached a 90 degree bend and had to apply the brakes I felt that I had done as much to break a speed barrier as if I had hit Mach 1. The vehicle was obviously right on the limit. That car was a heap of shit. Slow, noisy, unsafe and not even especially economical. But it was fun and it was mine. Modern cars are so much better. They are safer and more economical to drive and much safer to crash. A few years ago my mother was involved in a horrendous crash, in a small car. If it had been a car from the 1930s like the 2CV or even a car from the 1980s she would certainly have been killed. Thanks to modern car design, seatbelts, airbags and the NHS she's still around to tell the tale.
Cars are penis extensions for many men. We should acknowledge this. It is time we stopped this by putting limits on them. In the middle ages men wore codpieces to cover their genitals. Fashion evolved larger and more showy codpieces but eventually a limit was reached, when they were too big to allow a man to eat at a table the fashion pressure eased off again and they declined to more manageable proportions. I simply think that our car culture is reaching a similarly ridiculous level. Cars should go back to being a means of transport rather than a silly way for rich men to pretend they have a bigger dick than the next man.
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