Who’d swap a lifetime of memories for a self-drive car?
As technology threatens to turn us all into passengers, charted RAY CONNOLLY — who’s from his greatest adventures behind the wheel — asks ...
Do You enjoy driving? I mean, really enjoy it? If you do, make the most of the next few years — because it seems that the joy you experience at the wheel of a motor car may soon become an endangered activity.
Congestion on our roads has already bitten into much of the fun we once had in a car, but the cure for that congestion is about to destroy the pleasure completely. It’s called the self-drive car.
And, judging by the millions being spent on its development, all we’ll soon have to do is get into our vehicle, tell the computer in the dashboard where we want to go and then sit back as it carries us to our chosen destination.
What could be better than that, some might ask. For me, everything. Driving isn’t just about getting from here to there: it’s one of the great pleasures of life. It’s when we are most alive, when our senses are at their highest alert, when our eyes and ears are in perpetual communion with our fingers and feet.
Sitting there, hands at ten to two, we survey everything that is in front, beside or behind us, as we judge to within inches the gaps between other vehicles, our feet working seemingly unconsciously as we brake or accelerate, our brains automatically calculating the camber of the road on long bends.
And, no matter how loud the music to which we’re listening, our ears stay tuned to recognise the merest of unexpected rattles above the purr of the engine.
‘ What a piece of work is man … this man, anyway,’ we want to congratulate ourselves as, like pilots in a spaceship, we sit there in total control, as we make our journeys. It’s an exulting sensation. I love driving. I love the romance and feel of it, the challenge every time I set off, the welcome tremor of power as the engine is switched on and the ignition sparks, the realisation of freedom to go absolutely anywhere I want to go.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not a car fanatic. I’ve no idea how many ccs any of my cars has had. Nor do I know how cars work. I don’t need to know, as long as they do.
I’ve never read a motoring magazine or watched a single episode of Top Gear, and I’ve no ambition to have a hundred thousand pounds worth of steel, rubber and glass sitting outside my house.
It isn’t the cars that I love: it’s the driving.
It’s been this way since I was nine, when a very kind farmer hoisted me on to the seat of his tractor and said, ‘ Just steer down the row, Raymond,’ as he climbed on to a device we were towing for planting turnips.
obviously, it was a two-man job, so I was suddenly a man.
I’d somehow already become the owner of a primitive, homemade version of a go- kart (basically old pram wheels and a couple of planks of wood), but sitting there in rapt concentration as the diesel engine chugged us down the field and we edged forward at about 2 mph, was the real thing. Like Mr Toad in The Wind In The Willows, I was hooked.
Dodgem cars at fairgrounds followed a few years later. With the electricity sparking and the rock and roll never louder or better, I would waltz around the arena, trying to dodge the other cars rather than bump into them. I wanted to drive, not crash.
Passing a driving test at 17 in my mother’s Hillman Minx was the 1958 equivalent of an initiation ceremony, and not much has happened in my life since then that can compare with the euphoria of that day. Since then, my cars have been
like the stages of manhood, as I’ve slept in them, eaten in them, romanced in them, and had my heart broken in them. Mostly, though, I’ve explored corners of my world in them.
My first car was a two-seater, red 1951 Alvis TB14 bought in 1962 after a summer working on a pea-viner machine on a farm.
I was 21, and for a few delightful weeks, I drove around the small town in which I lived, elbow resting nonchalantly on the open window, fantasising that I looked like Roger Smith in the detective series 77 Sunset Strip. He was the handsome one who went on to marry the Swedishborn actress Ann-Margret. But the Alvis was a huge beast with dodgy suspension, and hopelessly impractical — especially when I took it to London, where I was at university. I’d fondly hoped it might be good for attracting girls, but one of the few I managed to take for a drive was very unimpressed when it stalled in Trafalgar Square.
She was American, and, as I jumped out and used a starting handle to get it going again — which took a little time, I admit — she was consumed with laughter.
It was like a scene from a Laurel and Hardy movie, she ridiculed: ‘You looked as though you were winding it up’ — which wasn’t the impression I’d hoped to convey.
I sold it the following summer to buy an airline ticket to New York, from where my friend Ian and I drove to Kansas delivering a clapped- out old Ford taxi to a farmer there. You could do that in those days, the small ad columns in the newspaper always looking for people to deliver cars across the country for them.
It was a wonderful way, in the words of Paul Simon, ‘to look for America’, rolling down the endless highways, and to hear America, too, as every small town had its own radio stations with ‘ Little Stevie Wonder’, Trini Lopez and Peter, Paul and Mary accompanying us as we drove.
My first proper job resulted in an MG Midget at just the time that the M6 opened, and the big thrill then was going for dinner in a motorway café that straddled the shining new road.
This was Sixties’ sophistication with a schooner of sherry. Happy, carefree days. Empty roads, no 70 mph speed limit quite yet (it wasn’t introduced until December 1965) and no telling what was beyond the asphalt horizon ahead.
It turned out to be a Singer Chamois, which was a posh version of a Hillman Imp, for which I traded in the MG when, now married, we had a baby and needed a back seat for the carrycot. I’d reached a new stage of manhood — responsibility.
As the numbers in our family grew, so did the size of our car.
A Vauxhall Viva followed. I’m embarrassed by that now.
But then I got lucky and wrote a film called That’ll Be The Day and spent my first cheque on a white Citroen DS, which came not only with a radio but a built-in cassette player. Hi-tech had arrived.
Big and floaty as a boat it was, and if I ever had a dream to live, this was it, as I would glide pneumatically around London, every bump ironed out.
In my mind, I was now that smouldering French leading man Jean-Paul Belmondo, with The Eagles and Neil Young my soundtrack, and headlights that
changed direction when I turned the steering wheel.
Years passed, cars came and went, for hire or buy, a two-seater Pontiac Firebird in Hollywood, which was surprisingly under-powered, or a family Ford Falcon station wagon in New Zealand, before, on hitting the age of 40, a throaty Ford Escort XR3i took me back in time to being a teenager again.
Some guys dye their hair when the grey starts showing; I bought a flashy, noisy car. I got over it. Flying may be quicker, but, anything to avoid the nightmare of an airport, a Renault 5, complete with snow chains, carried us up into the Swiss Alps for skiing.
After that it was on to Prague and beyond, along sometimes pot- holed roads to Poland’s border with the Ukraine in the months after communism evaporated in eastern Europe.
You see a lot and learn a lot more driving a car than you ever will sitting in a plane. Like many Rear view: Clockwise from top, the Alvis, Ray’s children with the Falcon, Ray (white shirt) with pal John Rimmer and his MG, and his XR3i readers, I must have criss-crossed France on its silken autoroutes three dozen times, feeling safe and at home in the little enclosed world of one of my cars, and never once have I thought flying or a train might be preferable.
With a car, you can always change your route, get off the beaten track or take your time.
I’m back in the armchair comfort of a Citroen, again now, a Picasso that I bought 14 years ago and which friends now class as vintage.
Maybe it is, but then, so am I, which is probably why the idea of a self-drive car so appals me.
I can see their advantages, the savings in fuel, whether petrol or electric, when all cars are working in perfectly computerised synchronicity. AND I imagine stress and road rage will become aberrations of the past as, unhindered by the need to actually look where we’re going, we motor peacefully along into the future, reading, sleeping, working, making phone calls or watching TV.
Then, on arrival at our destination, we will climb out of our car and send it off to find somewhere to park itself.
Actually, I quite fancy that last bit. But all the other stuff, which seems programmed to take the actual driving out of driving, the joy out of a journey, just isn’t for me. I realise that, historically, I’m just a blip in time who happened to come along in the mid-20th century when the internal combustion engine was making it possible for ordinary people to discover the instant freedom for travel and speed that had been denied for anyone born in an earlier age.
And which, I now suspect, will soon be nigh on impossible for generations that follow.
But all that sitting in a car finding ways to usefully fill my time while the onboard computer has all the fun? Where’s the romance in that?
How do you imagine that you’re Jean-Paul Belmondo or even Toad of Toad Hall if you’re just a bored passenger being ferried around by a flipping computer. It just won’t do. The problem about the future is that whenever something is gained, something else is lost.