By 1909 the car was still only about as powerful as a kind of motorised sewing machine, yet some Liberal MP was so wet as to stand up in parliament and warn the electorate about ‘wandering machines, travelling at an incredible rate of speed’ (i.e. 4mph).
Adumbrating one of the major themes for ’elf ’n’ safety campaigners for the next hundred years, this Liberal went on to have a pop at drink-driving. ‘You can see them on Sunday afternoon,’ said the anti-car Isaiah, ‘piled 20 or 30 feet deep outside the new popular inns, while their occupants regale themselves within.’ Already, it seems, the car was associated with sin: unnatural speed, disrespect for the Sabbath and alcoholic intoxication!
His warnings were quite counterproductive, of course, since anybody listening to his speech would have been filled with an immediate desire to drive to the pub. Humanity fell on the car with greed and amazement.
It was as though, as a species, we had found the biggest technical improvement in our lives in a million years of evolution. By replacing the four legs of a horse with four rolling wheels we stumbled on something as important, and as naturally suited to human dimensions, and as obvious, in retrospect, as the shoe—or the wheel itself.
Between 1919 and 1939 the number of cars on the roads in Britain went up twenty times, with the millionth Morris rolling off the Cowley production lines shortly before the Second World War, and as the invention began to percolate down through the socioeconomic groups, it began to democratise the planet. Until the First World War, it was a luxury item. As Hilaire Belloc puts it:
The rich arrived in pairs
And also in Rolls-Royces.
They talked of their affairs
In loud and strident voices.
But even as he wrote, a production breakthrough had taken place in America.
He went on to say:
The poor arrived in Fords
Whose features they resembled.
They laughed to see so many lords
And ladies all assembled.
And there we have it, in the merriment of those Ford-driving folk: the chirpy insolence of democracy. They knew that in spirit and in essence a Ford was the same as a Roller; though the rich man might still have his castle and the poor man might still be at his gate, they both possessed implements as essentially alike as one fork is like another, and although one fork may be of steel and one may be of gold, they will be equally suited to their task.
From the very beginning, rich and not-sorich had basically the same set of four wheels propelled by the same internal combustion engine, and controlled by the same steering wheel, and above all we human beings found that the car created a great equality in our ability to occupy, at any one time, that rectangular patch of road beneath the chassis.
It is in the nature of the machine and the design of roads that we must wait in the same traffic and stop at the same lights, and it is significant that it was only in some of the worst left-wing tyrannies, such as the Soviet Union, that for part of the twentieth century the ruling elites had car lanes reserved for themselves. Everywhere else the car levelled and democratised the experience of motion, and it is no wonder that the spread of the car coincided with the spread of universal suffrage in the west and with female emancipation.
Even more completely than a bicycle, a car neutralises any female disadvantage in strength. It gives her a cabin, a door that locks, a place to put her stuff. It allows her to be Madame Bovary without having to worry about the discretion of the coachman, and in spite of all the efforts by the male sex to blacken their name, the overwhelming statistical evidence is that women drive better and more safely than men. They may fail their three-point turns, on average, more than male driving test candidates, but having passed, they have fewer accidents and attract far lower insurance premiums.
It is a sign of male desperation, and failure to adjust, that throughout the twentieth century we find deprecation of female driving skills—even from the finest stylists of English literature. One thinks of Evelyn Waugh and his ho-ho account of Mrs Stitch, bowling along the pavement in her glossy black machine until she ends up in a male urinal. Then note how two of the greatest American novels of the last century revolve around exactly the same sexist plot device—viz. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. Remember: in both cases a man takes the rap for a woman’s fatal and incompetent driving. Isn’t that typical, eh? Blame the woman.
Ever since Eve, ever since Pandora, the male sex has muttered the same essentially protectionist mantra, that the womenfolk can’t be trusted with the technology, and if you seriously want to restrict the freedoms of the female sex and you seriously believe that modern western values are deplorable, then you actually continue to ban women from driving at all—as they do in Saudi Arabia, home of Osama bin Laden.
But for the British male and the American male and the rest of the western male sex, there was only one conclusion to be drawn from the sight of women at the wheel of a car. If you were going to let them drive, then you might as well let them vote as well, because apart from anything else, if you continued to deny the vote to female drivers, then the suffragettes would eventually stop hurling themselves under the hooves of horses and start running you down on street corners.
Yes, it was the car that made it impossible and ludicrous to deny women the political equality that had eluded them for 40,000 years, and for that achievement alone all remaining feminists should go outside now and reverentially kiss the hubcaps of the first automobile they see.
It was the car, too, that liberated the poor, that mobilised the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, that gave the victims of the Depression the chance to build a new life in California.
How did Herbert Hoover win the 1928 presidential election? With what vision did he inspire and enthuse the American electorate? He promised a ‘chicken in every pot—and a car in every garage, to boot’.
And what was it, 60 years later, that finally brought down communism? It was a car. It wasn’t just that the Ossies drove their Trabants round the Berlin Wall and through Hungary in such an unstoppable tide that in 1990 the East German state collapsed. The Trabant was not merely the instrument of revolution; it incarnated the point and necessity of the revolution.
It was a horrible two-stroke belcher of brown particulate smoke that would have rusted as fast as the Italian Stallion, except that its shell was made of a weird commie resin strengthened by wool or cotton. Its top speed was 112kph and it was a living sputtering embodiment of the economic humiliation of socialism.
It wasn’t Ronald Reagan who won the Cold War. It wasn’t Margaret Thatcher. It was the daily misery of East Germans trying to get their Trabants to work, when they could turn on their televisions and see images of their West German counterparts and relatives roaring around in Golf GTIs. Yes, it was the car that spread capitalism and destroyed communism; no wonder Polish Pope John Paul II gave a Trabant a special blessing when he visited Sofia in 2002.
The car was at the centre of the most important events of the last century and was in many ways responsible for them; and still the motor revolution goes on because the number of cars is still growing, and growing fast.
When Leo and I crashed that Fiat in 1983, it was one of 18.6 million cars in the UK. Today there are 30.6 million registered cars. That’s right: the number of cars on UK roads has almost doubled in the last 25 years, and there are still about half a million new registrations a year; when you consider how much longer a car lasts these days,
