boy racers, but elsewhere we are fed up with driving as if through the badlands of Beirut. In 1983 we’d have thought it bizarre and decadent that the state should actually spend our money to make the roads worse. We never thought a government would be so Orwellian as to install the Gatsos, the oppressive wayside paparazzi, waiting to catch us driving in a compromising fashion and then—can you believe it?—actually threatening to send the grainy pictures to our home addresses unless we cough up.
The lobby groups love a new safety campaign, because a new safety campaign means an opportunity to raise new funds. The lawyers want new legislation, because new legislation means new grounds for litigation. The politicians are always hoping to identify themselves with some fresh measure to protect the electorate, so that they can imagine themselves as the new Gracchus or Disraeli or Shaftesbury. And the newspapers—well, the newspapers want to sell newspapers by warning their readers of some new terror and then demanding action.
In the face of this overwhelming pressure it is all but insane for anyone to object, even when the safety measure in question is manifestly pointless and anti-democratic. I will not now make a fuss about the ban on mobiles in cars, since I don’t think I could win a statistical shoot-out with the ’elf ’n’ safety boys. I merely point out that driving and telephoning does not seem to me to be fundamentally different from using your free hand to pick your nose, hit the children or turn the radio from Magic FM to something less glutinous.
Nor will I object to seat belts, since they plainly save lives, though my grandfather never wore one in his life, on the grounds (very reasonable, it seems) that they may induce a false sense of security, rather like cycle helmets. And I confess that the Johnson family has been pretty religious about the use of children’s car seats.
But what about booster seats? I mean, stop me if you’ve heard me on this subject before, but what the hell is that all about? When we were children we didn’t have car seats. We didn’t even have seat belts. We bounced about in the back like peas in a rattle, and although our Renault 4 was a glorified vomitorium we all felt pretty happy and safe.
What happened to the first Benz
machine upon arriving in London from
the docks in 1894? What do you think?
It was stopped by a policeman.
And now they tell us that if we have children under the age of 12, or four and a half feet in height, we all have to go to Halfords and lash out 30 quid on a plastic banquette booster seat, and we have to shove it under our children every time we go out in the car. I have done some research, and it is vanishingly improbable that you will make your children any safer with this device, yet the whole thing was cooked up in the dark by some EU transport official, rammed through parliament without any proper consultation. All it has achieved is the irritation of adults and the delivery of a serious blow to childish prestige.
The whole thing is mad, mad, mad, and shows, in my view, why important public servants like the police find it increasingly difficult to deliver the results we all want, and at the risk of being party-political, it demonstrates why we need a new approach to government in this country (cue Tory cheers, Labour groans, etc).
Before I am lynched by anxious parents, may I point out that all these safety measures can have perverse consequences, not least that they have made cars much heavier. We are all, myself included, much fatter than we were in 1983; in fact, 22 per cent of us are obese. The steel frames of our cars must therefore be ever chunkier and more rigid to carry our vast butts, and we also have six airbags and side impact protection systems and roll bars and crash frames and new extra-thick shatterproof glass, and not forgetting the extra buckles needed for those booster seats.
So our cars, like our people, are getting fatter and fatter. In 1991 a Honda Civic weighed 2,127lbs; it now weighs 2,877lbs. The little old Mini Cooper (pre-2000) weighed a mere 1,500lbs, and the new one porks on to the scales at 2,314lbs. The Golf GTI has been on such a binge diet of hi-cal safety devices that it has put on 234lbs in the last five years. The result of this automotive obesity is of course a ludicrous circularity. The engines need extra sound-deadening equipment to hush the noise of the engines struggling with the burden of all that sound-deadening equipment.
Take, by contrast, the Fiat 128 Italian Stallion, a vehicle that did not afford the driver a notable sense of security. It had one seat belt, a long liquorice strap with no inertia reel, which you could wrap cosily around both driver and passenger, and which would do no good in a crash but would fool a policeman. You could push the car back and forth with one hand, and its entire body shell could probably have been composed of the same amount of steel that goes into one crumple-proof Mercedes bonnet. But if the occupants of the Fiat were aware that their machine was no tank, the occupants of other cars—and pedestrians—were at much less risk from the Stallion than they are at risk from its equivalents today.
If Leo and I had reversed at that speed in a modern car, there would have been a much louder thump and a much longer tinkle, and any occupants of the only other car in the district might even have had whiplash.
So we come to the eternal law of unintended consequences. By making cars safer, we seem to have made them more dangerous, yet no politician in his right mind is going to stand up and call for fewer safety features. No one is going to suggest that booster seats should be optional, though they plainly should be. So who is there left to speak for liberty?
Business? Industry? Don’t make me laugh. Industry depends completely on regulation, because it makes the market, and for dominant firms it is always a good idea to encourage regulation that your smaller rivals will find expensive and difficult to obey.
The best and most hopeful thing we can say is that the human spirit is infinitely ingenious, and there will always be a struggle between the desire for individual freedom and the state’s desire for control. The history of warfare teaches us that one technical advance will be met with a response. As the sword produced the shield, and the clamp produced the angle-grinder, so the speed camera produces the fuzzbuster and those handy cans of spray-on mud for the number plates, and the challenge of the Lib Dem road hump is met with the proliferation of mums driving colossal tractor-wheeled 4x4s through the streets of London.
Whatever new measures they come up with to punish the car for its carbon emissions—new taxes, journey restrictions, black boxes—I am completely confident that technology will supply the answer.
The scientists I meet tell me we really are on the brink of something miraculous, in the form of a working hydrogen fuel cell.
After more than a century of global dominance, the fossil fuel-based internal combustion engine is nearing the end. But not the car; oh no, the car will go on—but with exhaust fumes as sweet and inoffensive as a baby’s breath and with a tread as silent as velvet.
And you and I will joyfully buy the wonderful new machines, clean and silent as snow.
And each with a red flag before them as a warning to the deaf.
In the meantime, it is my pleasure and privilege to introduce some of the finest, fastest and most fantastic machines on the road. It is an all-star line-up, assembled from across the globe, and though the car is now a cosmopolitan creation—like the honey in Waitrose—each marque still somehow breathes its national particularity.
We have the best of Germany, Japan, America, Italy, and as I flip down the list I am stunned to see how many British cars there are. It is a comment on our habit of national self-deprecation that you probably didn’t even realise that Britain now has more independent car manufacturers than any other country on earth.
That’s right: us, the Brits, the people whose technical know-how is supposed to be
