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Women and Cars
Muscle Cars: What Would Jesus Drive?
How to Beat Speed Cameras
Empires of the Future
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 know the answer. Experience has taught many countries around the world what is a safe driving speed, or at least a reasonable compromise between speed and safety. 120 KM/H (approx. 75 MPH) would be my idea for a world-wide upper speed limit for major highways, but most would be better a little lower.
Urban multi-lane highways should be limited to 100 KM/H, which is very close the American 55 MPH limit. If faster speeds than this are allowed paradoxically overall traffic flows reduce. As speeds increase so do safe stopping distances, bigger gaps between vehicles reduces the capacity of the road.
I also think that with this in mind limits should be put on the performance of cars. Tests should be done to determine a reasonable upper limit in power-to-weight ratio. I suggest that with a global speed limit of 120 KM/H nobody bar the emergency services should own a vehicle capable of exceeding this speed or of reaching it in less than 30 seconds. Is that unreasonable? I think not. Driving at faster top speeds or more rapid acceleration is simply dangerous to all concerned and offers no real benefit. I do not believe that freedom is a virtue in and of itself. There is no virtue in being able to break the law. Cars should be physically prevented from going more than this speed, the technology is widely used in commercial vehicles, all that is missing is the political will to apply it.
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. If you have the choice between 120 KM/h top speed, noise and fumes or 120 KM/h top speed and virtually no noise or fumes which is now the cool option?
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 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 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. I have a car now but I did not not run one for nearly four years. That was not out of some high moral stance, I simply could not justify the huge expense of running one. We used to have two at one time. I travel to work by train and on foot. My wife walks the children to school and back. We travelled by rail for our holiday breaks. The biggest strain used to be the weekly shopping but we order online and get it delivered, by road.
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.
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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. Why should I need more performance than that? 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. |
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.