TOY CARS FUELLED GENERATIONS OF KIDS INTO PETROLHEDONISM, BUT, SAYS JAMES, THAT NOW SEEMS TO BE A THING OF THE PAST...

“LIKE MOST PRODUCTS OF THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES, THE CORGI ASTON WAS ACTUALLY PRETTY CRAP”

If Karl Benz hadn’t invented the car, then someone else would have. The internal combustion engine was being developed furiously, and road vehicles with wheels were already established, so combining the two seems like a pretty obvious idea, like adding an electric motor to a hand drill.

So is the Benz Motorwagen the most infuential car of all time? Yes, in that it was the frst; but no, because all it really did was win the frst motor race.

Last month, I curated a small exhibition, Cars that Changed the World, at London’s ExCel. The Benz was in it. So was the Model T. But the car that changed the world more than any other, I decided, was a toy: the Corgi James Bond Aston DB5, with ejecting baddie.

Look: now it’s over, I can admit this was a bit of a long and drawn-out shaggy-dog story with cars, along the lines of “This bloke walks into a car exhibition…” It ended with a slightly abstract and carefully lit art installation, featuring an emptied Hoover bag with the legless Goldfnger henchman nestling in the pile of fuf. We thought this was tremendously funny.

But there was a serious point behind it. For many of us, the love of cars started with Corgi, Matchbox and Dinky, and was translated in adulthood into the real thing, and just before that into the cars we begged our mums and dads to buy. No toy car was as exciting, or as formative of our characters, as the Corgi Bond Aston.

The Corgi Aston was the most technically advanced thing in the toyshop. It had a springloaded passenger seat, and in it was a plastic fgure whose face seemed to have been painted by Stevie Wonder. It was amazing.

Now, you’re probably expecting me to set of on a dad-style rant about how we made our own entertainment in the old days and used our imagination, but I’m not. Like most products of the Sixties and Seventies, the Corgi Aston was actually pretty crap.

Within my lifetime, we have gone from that to an incredibly realistic virtual driving game that lives on a device in your pocket. We’re not talking about some historical shift that took place between ancient Egypt and now, just the enormous progress made in car-themed playthings over 50 years. Why would kids today want the Corgi Bond car? It’s about as appealing as a whip ’n’ top, or a Victorian industrial ailment. Computer games are just much, much better.

Me? I prefer Pacifc Fleet to driving games, because I can go outside and drive a real car, but I don’t have access to any battleships or 12-inch shells. But if I were only 12, well…

And this brings me to the point I actually want to make here, which is that I was talking to a market-research kind-of bloke the other day, and he revealed something shocking. Learning to drive and owning a car is no longer the number- one priority among people approaching their 17th birthdays. They’re more interested in ‘devices’. Driving is down to third or fourth place.

This is hard for someone my age to comprehend. The memory of my frst drive alone in a car is one of the clearest and dearest I have. It stands alone, like Adam’s recollection of his fall (Byron).

But, then, it would, because until that point, life had been a frustration. Without a car to drive, there wasn’t much else to do, apart from ride a very heavy bicycle, wander the streets or risk your neck clambering around the nearest building site in search of a damp jazz mag. There is now more in your phone than there was in the whole world in 1980.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the brilliance of driving simulators would leave today’s youths positively gagging to get at the real thing. Forza should have 100 times the stimulant efect of Corgi’s Bond car. But maybe virtual driving, free of restraints or risks, is so good to those who grew up with it, that the real thing is a bit of a let-down. It means everyone who worries about the world being dragged to a gridlocked halt by car ownership can relax. In another 50 years, no one will give a pig’s arse about cars. They’ll probably disappear and remain only as a digital construct. As always, everyone got the future wrong. When the internet was new, they were all telling us how we wouldn’t have to go out to work anymore. We could just stay at home.

That was patently untrue. But no one realised we wouldn’t want to drive to work in the future. We can be transported there by some other means while doing a hot lap of Fiorano.

No complaints from me. I wish I’d been born much later.