pretentious—and why the hell not, eh?—I am interested in politics and society, and it has always seemed obvious to me that the car has not only made our modern landscape, it has been the biggest revolution since print, and the spread of the car, like the spread of literacy, has been a fantastic and unstoppable force for liberty and democracy.
It was the invention that defined and created the twentieth century. In the last hundred years the car has done more for human freedom, I venture to suggest, than the aeroplane, penicillin, the telephone and the contraceptive pill put together. Add in the ice cream Mars Bar, the computer, the trouser press, the television and the non-stick saucepan, and you still do not approach the revolutionary quality of the automobile.
When any invention has such power to promote individual freedom, the state is always driven to respond. The more widespread a liberty becomes, the more necessary it seems for government to regulate, trammel and constrain.
As I look back 25 years to my life with the Italian Stallion, I see that box-rumped old Fiat suffused with the golden glow of an age of comparative innocence, because in the subsequent decades our masters have decided to control our cars, and our lives, in ever more detail. They want to control how we drive and in what condition. They want to regulate what we do in our cars, where we park our cars, and now they want to tell us where we can drive, installing inboard computers to check up on us. We have got to the stage where you can be threatened with imprisonment for eating a sandwich at the wheel, for heaven’s sake.
I confidently predict that it will not be long before each journey, each turning of the ignition, each firing of the cylinders, will be a matter for negotiation between the driver and the state, because these days your car is deemed to be much more than a threat to life and limb.
It was a Fiat 128 two-door saloon, 1.2 litres, that emancipated me from the shackles of childhood. Inside there took place all manner of brawls, romance, heartbreak and general growing-up. Above all, it was the car in which I had my first crash.
Oh yes: the internal combustion engine now stands accused of threatening the existence of life on earth. The charges are incredible, terrifying. If the scientists of the Stern Review are to be believed—and who dares contradict them?—then every thin trail of exhaust that curls from your engine is snaking up to heaven, where it is joining the exhaust of billions of other machines, and together these vapours have already quilted a thick tea cosy of carbon dioxide about the planet.
And with every second that great transparent envelope of fumes is getting thicker and thicker. Round the clock the sun’s rays are penetrating that integument of pollution and, as with a greenhouse, the light goes in and the heat stays put, so every day the atmosphere gets hotter and hotter, the winters shorter and more feeble, Hyde Park in August is turned into a parched dustbowl, and every time you drive your kids to school another poor polar bear gives a bewildered growl as he plops through the melting floes. In fact our whole future looks so ghastly and stifling that I find myself loosening my tie and mopping my brow as I write these words…
In this sweaty dystopia I foresee a time when you will have to engage in carbon offsetting every time you make a trip to Waitrose. You will have to ring up Environment Secretary David Miliband or one of his officials to explain how you are going to propitiate the wrathful sun god; and whenever we get to drive our cars, the government will insist that we plant a small bush, or possibly sponsor an abattoir to kill a cow, since it seems that cows are up there with planes as emitters of greenhouse gas.
The government will make us have little inboard satellite devices—installed by the state in attack-proof steel black boxes—to verify that we have travelled no further than agreed, and that we have taken the shortest route, and that our engines have parped and puttered no more than their stipulated quota of carbon fart…and…
Aaargh…Is it really going to be that bad?
I don’t mean, is global warming really that bad? I mean, is the future of motoring so grim?
Will the state finally annihilate the joy of the car?
Or will Science come to the aid of Freedom—as she has so often in the past?
If we want to understand the future we must, as ever, look back. Going back in history, we can see reasons for gloom, and reasons for hope, and we can see that the state has always panicked in the face of any transport revolution. From the very introduction of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century, the ruling elite were nervous of mass mobility. All those people! Moving around! And under their own steam! In Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) Lord de Mowbray warns against the railways for having a ‘dangerous tendency to equality’.
As late as 1897 the pathetic male students of Cambridge protested against the arrival of female students; the trouble with these harpies was that they presumed to travel independently, and on complex pieces of machinery that they indelicately straddled, and which they could handle as well as a man. When they hung an effigy of a female undergraduate from a lamp post, it was significant that she was attached to that engine of sexual equality, the bicycle.
These alarms were nothing, of course, to the shock that greeted the arrival of the first motor car. What happened to the first Benz machine upon arriving in London from the docks in 1894? What do you think? It was stopped by a policeman.
Before I start moaning about our namby-pamby, mollycoddled, airbagged society, I had better admit that those Victorians—those tough old Victorians, whose children died in droves, those Victorians who lived cheek by jowl with death and pestilence—were so terrified of the new motorised machines that they make the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents look positively gung-ho.
It really is true that during the first few years of the automobile’s existence in the UK it was regulated by the Red Flag Act, originally designed for traction engines. This measure restricted speeds to four miles an hour in the country and two miles an hour in the town, and required every ‘road locomotive’ to have three attendants, one to walk no fewer than sixty yards in front carrying a red flag.
Admittedly, this insanity was soon repealed but it wasn’t long before British MPs were engaged in their characteristic activity—whipping up public panic about some new threat to health and safety, then demanding legislation. By 1909 the car was still only about as powerful as a kind of motorised sewing machine, yet some Liberal MP was so wet as to stand up in parliament and warn the electorate about ‘wandering machines, travelling at an incredible rate of speed’ (i.e. 4mph).
Adumbrating one of the major themes for ’elf ’n’ safety campaigners for the next hundred years, this Liberal went on to have a pop at drink-driving. ‘You can see them on Sunday afternoon,’ said the anti-car Isaiah, ‘piled 20 or 30 feet deep outside the new popular inns, while their occupants regale themselves within.’ Already, it seems, the car was associated with sin: unnatural speed, disrespect for the Sabbath and alcoholic intoxication!
His warnings were quite counterproductive, of course, since anybody listening to his speech would have been filled with an immediate desire to drive to the pub. Humanity fell on the car with greed and amazement.
It was as though, as a species, we had found the biggest technical improvement in our lives in a million years of evolution. By replacing the four legs of a horse with four rolling wheels we stumbled on something as important, and as naturally suited to human dimensions, and as obvious, in retrospect, as the shoe—or the wheel itself.
Between 1919 and 1939 the number of cars on the roads in Britain went up twenty times, with the millionth Morris rolling off the Cowley production lines shortly before the Second World War, and as the invention began to percolate down through the socioeconomic groups, it began to democratise the planet. Until the First World War, it was a luxury item. As Hilaire Belloc puts it:
The rich arrived in pairs
And also in Rolls-Royces.
They talked of their affairs
In loud and strident voices.
But even as he wrote, a production breakthrough had taken place in America.
He went on to say:
The poor