Why we’ll soon laugh at the idea of owning a car

HUGO RIFKIND
October 24, 2017
The Times

In the not so distant future, we might eat worms. Most meat will be prohibitively expensive, you see, but worm meat won’t be. Obviously, it will be the poor who eat worms the most, because relatively rich people aren’t going to eat worms much, are they? Not unless they taste fantastic, and they clearly don’t, otherwise we would already. Now suppose you were to ban the worm-burger: you would push up food costs and hit hardest the people who can only afford to go to work, of a morning, on a worm.

Think of the worms when you consider the T-charge, an extra levy on the most polluting diesel vehicles that was introduced by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, yesterday. The policy, said the Conservative London Assembly environment spokesman Shaun Bailey, “disproportionately penalises London’s poorest drivers”. To which one can only say: well of course it does. Bans on cheap, nasty things tend to hit the poor, because these are the things they are more likely to have. Which is unfortunate, yes, but also a peerless way to miss the point. 

This is not a war on the poor. It is a war on the private car. It shall not end until the private car is dead. And, what is more, however much you currently love your own car, you will not be sorry. You will be glad. This is a bit of the future you can look forward to. Unlike the worms.

In the future, at least in a metropolis, you will not own a car. No, not even an electric one. Which right now, I’ll grant you, feels hard to believe. Electric car ownership is on the up, worldwide. Globally the UK lags somewhat but it is government policy that all new cars should be electric by 2040, which on current ownership levels will require charging points to become as widespread as lamp-posts.

Increasingly, though, I’m convinced that the “on current ownership levels” part of that prediction is a big mistake. The ubiquitous personal electric car will turn out to be the equivalent of a Betamax, or a MiniDisc, or a Sinclair C5 (which, ironically enough, actually was one). It will be a technological cul-de-sac. Almost as soon as we can all have one, we shall probably opt not to bother.

In some cities, you may already wonder why you do. When my first car was stolen, it genuinely took me a month to notice. My current car is used a little more often, for child-ferrying purposes, but if you forced me to calculate how much richer I’d be if I sold the damn thing and took minicabs I’d probably start to weep. Emotionally, like a lot of people, I just have a preference for driving myself.

What happens when I’m not though? Google, Tesla, Apple, Uber and others are all working on self-driving cars. As ever, the temptation is to assume that the future looks much like the past; you’ll have a car, much like now, but which you won’t have to drive. 

This weekend past, for example, I drove my family down to the south coast. Traffic was bad, so we crawled for three hours. The same trip in a driverless car would have been faster for everyone, because algorithms can be more collaborative than humans. More importantly, though, if I’m not going to be driving my car, why should my car be anything like a car today? Why should I sit there, watching a wheel turn? Why should it have any more in common with a car than my vape does with a cigarette?

In the original 1990 film of Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger leaps into a taxi, batters a robot taxi driver out of the way and seizes the joystick. That joystick always bothered me. Why does a robot need one? Once cars are truly driverless, we can dispense with all the bits of them that make them pleasant — or perhaps even possible — to drive. On a long journey, why not have shuttered windows and beds? And, once cars are no longer much like cars, why would we necessarily use them as we use cars now? Perhaps people will have secret affairs in them, like millionaires in limousines, making the earth move around the London orbital. Perhaps, if the fare is cheaper than rent, other people will virtually live in them, moving house each day when the battery runs out. 

Mad? Perhaps. When you no longer actually drive, though, and a magic robot wagon can be summoned in seconds, what could be madder than having your own car, which costs half your salary and spends its life sitting outside your house? It’s already mad, really. You wouldn’t leave your telly out there, would you, idly checking in the morning to see if the drunks you heard last night had kicked a bit off?

My point is, it isn’t really going to be like eating worms, giving up your car. Even if it might feel that way now, with the car as a lingering symbol of freedom and machismo. London drivers of elderly diesels were complaining yesterday of a lack of street signage warning them of the surcharge, and they have a point. Yet when the next tightening of the screw comes, perhaps against combustion engines generally, it will hurt less, not more, because behaviour will already be changing. And, in the end, when even electric cars are deemed unwelcome, it will barely hurt at all. By then, you probably won’t own one, anyway. 

Think of that famous Victorian social revolution when, within the space of a couple of decades, urban streets were suddenly cleared of horse manure thanks to the arrival of the motor car. Today it is hard to imagine the stench, or the dirt, or the relief once it was gone. Think, also, of your own street, and how nice it will look without all those vast, stinking, noisy cars parked on it. This is the future, and it really isn’t so bad. Except, maybe, for the food.

THE TIMES