Lifestyle adjustments after locking can mean the end of our debugging in cars. Some of us will miss the age of the automobile
The last few months have shown us something that many ideas we would never have noticed in our lives: empty roads. Miles of asphalt without a single vehicle that spoils the view. Parked cars piled up, floors were abandoned and garages closed. As the blockade subsided, the cars refilled our streets. But the wonderful interruption showed a chosen future.
Some cities, such as Milan, have already said they need to make permanent adjustments caused by the pandemic, and orders have been placed across the UK for more areas for walking and biking. Lighting fixtures that signal the end of the overall dominance of the car on how we plan cities and how we plan are now flashing.
For more than 15 years, I have been the editor-in-chief of the Observer. Like so many other things, the pandemic ended my weekly column. Although environmental considerations also played a role in his disappearance, it is difficult to check the cars if it can’t be driven anywhere, despite the temptation of those perfectly empty roads.
What do the 15 years of car hunting tell me about the next car bankruptcy? The automobile has radically reshaped our lives since its invention. Steam and even hydrogen cars can be dated to the 1770s, but 1886 is thought to be the “birth year” of the fashion locomotive. That’s when Karl Benz patented his first Motorwagen. There are now 1.3 billion cars on the world’s roads.
In terms of captivating design combined with brilliant technology, the last part of the century has in fact been the golden age of the automobile. If engine manufacturing is an art form, the last decades will be the trademark of the automobile, its Renaissance era, as a revolutionary breakthrough that accumulated. But a look at his rearview mirror will tell you that this era will also be known as the last time cars can be driven with intelligent conscience, an era of automotive innocence before driving becomes so compromised; transported with the wisdom that these beautiful machines were destroying our planet.
The guilt never did for a docile passenger, and the pompous soundtrack of a gurgling V8 soon begins to sound like a death sneck.
I’ve enjoyed cars for as long as I can remember. My mom has a picture of my childhood sitting in my pot, kneeling and covered in red sandals, seriously guaranteeing my fleet of colorful little Dinky cars. Then I grew up and thanks to my work, I discovered myself the wheel of the real versions of the same models I played with. As a journalist, I drove everything from the first 1948 Land Rover Defender Series, with its famous HUE 166 registration plate, to the last Jaguar E-Type that came off the production line at Coventry in 1974. I turned around Le Mans in a 1954 old race car with the grandson of William Lyons, Jaguar’s discoverer. I drove an exclusive futuristic VW prototype with consumption figures so low that you can move from London to Edinburgh with just over a sip of fuel.
There were Minis and Mondeos, Fiats and Ferraris, minivans, SUVs, quad bikes … I don’t forget to think it was fun to take an Aston Martin to McDonald’s drive-in and see that there was a Lamborghini in line. I. I took our family’s trash to the top of the board in a Rolls-Royce, and the staff cheered me on.
I have long been dazzled by the car’s mechanical mastery of threats to drive at maximum speed with a flammable liquid tank at the rear. I’m surprised he can drive comfortably in the frozen tundra or in a burning desert with his impeccable paints thanks to a 60oC oscillation. Why doesn’t all this fall apart? Cars give us unlimited freedom. These are our escape pods, parked in permanent standvia.
So what’s going to happen to them now? The next generation of motorists will once again see a transformative generation that reinvents vehicles. But how temporarily will that happen? Will we soon be driven through fleets of autonomous zombie cars? When self-driving cars, however, become the norm, a point that is not so close to what some suggest, one of the biggest adjustments will be to reduce the number of fatal accidents. It’s very unlikely he’ll die in an accident.
It’s not just lives that will be saved. The autonomy will generate power gains in several ways. These cars will not be owned; We’ll rent them for hours or days, which means we probably wouldn’t want as much. and our streets won’t be so full of underutilized cars. Traffic lights, traffic symptoms and markings will disappear: cars know where they’re going. Our cities will be quieter and cleaner. Our built environment will be less governed by road infrastructure.
The elderly, sick and even visually impaired will be able to enjoy driving without relying on taxis or others. Self-driving cars will also be much more energy efficient. Some studies estimate that fuel intake will be minimized by at least a quarter.
This all sounds pretty good, but this auto-utopia is still far from reality. There are so many obstacles to overcome. First, there’s the cost. Ultra-fast sensors, lasers and cameras are not cheap. Then there’s security. On average, a vehicle in the UK is involved in a fatal turn of fate once every two hundred million kilometres. This gives you a clue to the phenomenal scale of testing that autonomous systems will have to go through before humans are in a position to put the guide wheel back on a computer.
What about the insurance? If there’s an accident, who and what’s responsible? Mapping providers? The GPS system? The pilot? Will our premiums be transmitted? What about our un claimed bonus?
In theory, any car can be changed to be autonomous. But, for some reason, we have a tendency to associate autonomy with electric cars. Battery technology, which has been around for more than a century, is still in its infancy. As the adoption of electric cars increases, their strength materials will become smarter, more productive, and more efficient. Lack of fast chargers and outreach anxiety will no longer be a problem. Clearly, we desperately want more public charging points, and the adoption of electric cars will not be up and running without the installation of thousands of easily accessible cargo sites across the UK. But the lack of service stations did not prevent Henry Ford from deploying his T-model, which beats the world. He once said, “If I had asked other people what they wanted, they would have said sniffer horses.”
Banning all new sales of gasoline and diesel cars until 2035 will concentrate our minds. But how moral and sustainable is the production of an electric vehicle? The manufacture of cars, and in particular the essential minerals for batteries, extracted in countries with poor environmental effects and even worse abuses of their work, is still ecological. Replacing an internal combustion engine with an electric motor is just a short-term solution. Are we, in fact, throwing our unrest into the street?
Of all the scenarios about what we will take in the coming years, the one that I consider most credible is that many of us decide not to drive at all. Somehow, it’ll be a relief. The constipation of travelers, road stops and city traffic jams make the existing trip a frustrating nightmare.
Before the closure, Birmingham – once proudly, the UK’s “city of motorways” – had already announced its goal of getting other people out of their cars, riding motorcycles and buses, and then getting back on their feet. If Birmingham progresses, it will be inscribed in the York, Bath, Sheffield, Leeds, Edinburgh and Brighton regions, among others, which have already experienced days without cars. Bristol has announced plans to ban diesel in the near future.
A little further on, Madrid has banned older cars in its centre, and Paris follows a similar route. The sustainable transport charity Sustrans estimates that of the 6.8 million personal vehicle journeys in Greater London, 4.2 million can be made on foot or by bicycle.
It’s ironic that the answer to all our car disorders is as undeniable as we’re likely to shut down the engines, get out and use our own legs.