In Praise of Modern Britain

Brian Viner enjoys today’s motor car.

MY father is long gone now. He died unexpectedly in 1976 when I was fourteen, and my abruptly widowed mother, as well as dealing with her grief, suddenly had to learn to drive so that she could muddle on with his business, which required time on the road.

We never had much money, but when it came to buying cars my dad always believed in pushing the boat out. I suppose he thought it would reflect well on him as a businessman, so in 1976 we had a brown Ford Granada, which thrillingly for me was exactly like the one in The Sweeney .A few years before that he had a Jag, the model later favoured by Inspector Morse. Quite why he was so in step with TV detectives, I’m not entirely sure.

Anyway, having somehow or other passed her test first time (she remained a dreadful driver until she finally did Britain’s pedestrians a massive favour and quit, aged ninety) my mum swiftly sold the plush Granada and bought a second-hand Escort. Somehow, nothing seemed to sum up our unwelcome new status as a cash-strapped, single-parent family like the change of car. No selfrespecting detectives drove Escorts.

I dare say that you will have similarly powerful memories of family cars. Most of us do. Whether or not you are remotely interested in engine size and all that stuff, which I’m not, cars are like much-loved pets in the way they evoke a time and a place.

Not to mention a smell. I have a friend whose parents used to drive her and her two siblings to a French campsite every summer. The kids would sit on the back seat of the Cortina, banned from opening a window even a crack, enduring the mingled whiff of their father’s cigarettes and their mother’s Rive Gauche perfume all the way from Hereford to the Auvergne.

That memory alone shows how Britain has changed for the better. No responsible parents now would subject their children to a Benson & Hedges fug for hours on end, and these days the kids would have individual TV screens in the back.

I quite often think of my dear old long-departed dad when I climb into my shiny Mini Cooper convertible, with its built-in satnav that responds obligingly to voice commands. He loved his Granada, but its most space-age feature was a cigarette lighter. Now, a polite disembodied voice tells us exactly which route to take, once we’ve adjusted our nicely warmed, ergonomically designed seats at the touch of a button, and calibrated the air-conditioning so that it’s cooler in the back than the front, or vice versa.

Then we can park with the help of a rear-view camera, and when we insouciantly lock the car while ambling away from it, the remotecontrol key magically tucks away the wing mirrors, so they can’t be clipped by a passing van. My dad would have loved that.

Also, in the Seventies, it was commonplace to see cars stranded at the roadside, having either over-heated or run out of petrol. That’s another long-lost and unlamented spectacle: the motorist gazing, forlorn, at steam hissing from the bonnet. And there’s a greatly reduced risk of running out of fuel because the blinking car tells us itself when it’s getting low, and just how many miles we’ve got left. And, for that matter, the exact location of the nearest half-dozen service stations.

Of course, there were new gadgets even back then. I can still recall my dad’s delight when cars acquired cassette players and he could stick on his favourite Nat King Cole tape – not to mention Herb Alpert and the

Tijuana Brass, which by legal statute was owned by every father in the land.

Unfortunately, sooner or later, the cassette player in the car would always start chewing the tapes, which my father would habitually realise too late to save Herb Alpert. How he would have luxuriated in a Spotify playlist, activated by a gentle tap on the Mini Cooper’s touch-screen.

And it’s not like we’ve reached peak bells and whistles. On the contrary, we’re merely on the cusp of an altogether new motor age. I was driven in a top-of-the-range Tesla the other day, zero to 60 mph in what seemed like a micro-second, and no engine noise on account of there being no engine. Remarkable.

Now, I know what you’re thinking – that it’s all very well extolling the virtues of driving in modern-day Britain, but the traffic’s a nightmare. I can’t argue with that. But let’s not pretend that tailbacks didn’t exist years ago. And it’s much more comfortable, and more fun, to be stationary now than it was then. So, as they used to say in the old days – happy motoring.

“We’re merely on the cusp of an altogether new motor age”