Car trips are bad trips

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/07/car-trips-bad-trips-henry-ford

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As a child, my perceptions were formed in the back of a car. The world was viewed through Triplex toughened glass at 35mph. Notions of luxury and wellbeing were permanently influenced by the slippery leather chairs of a Humber or the curious ultraviolet light illuminating a Jaguar's walnut-veneered dashboard. Here I was psychologically secure, my regular companions a bag of crisps and a Penguin book as we motored stylishly into the "country", wherever that used to be.

I come from the last generation to know the extraordinary institution of a recreational drive. My father, nattily dressed and moustachioed, would on certain fine days suggest an outing in the car that had no purpose other than to be an outing in the car, such was the pleasure involved for all participants.There was no destination, just a circular journey: a notion as deliciously paradoxical and absurdist as a play by Samuel Beckett. And just as historic.

The psychological aspects of driving today are altogether less comforting, as a new survey of 2,000 motorists commissioned by Shell makes clear. One-third of drivers never drive for pleasure, and the rest do so only occasionally. Suffocating legislation and predatory local authorities threaten to criminalise even the saintliest individual suddenly possessed by the anti-social chutzpah required to drive a car. The only rational response to confiscatory tickets and invasive speed cameras is either intense spasmodic psychomotor agitation or harrowing paranoia.

The only rational response to traffic conditions is hysteria. Last night I met a successful businesswoman (my wife) who had been moved to hopeless tears of frustration by the barbaric tussle of driving a mere three miles in central London: a grim cast of purple-faced and cruelly determined black-cab drivers, psychotic rubble-trucks, crawling buses, lost souls and no respite from the Inferno because there is never, ever, anywhere to park. There are days, I suspect coming soon, when it will actually not be possible to complete a simple car journey.

As a result, my children regard cars as unnecessary and expensive encumbrances, not the status symbol or romantic attribute they remain for me. Recent US research showed that very few people under 30 considered any automobile manufacturer a "cool" brand. And those who owned cars would much prefer to keep their smartphone, if required to make a competitive choice between wheeled transport and the electronic type of connectedness.

But there is poetry as well as pain here. Henry Ford created his gasoline buggy to escape from the deadening tedium of life on a midwest farm. Against all the contrary evidence, cars retain this magical potential to transport the spirit as well as the body. Harley Earl, Detroit's coruscating wizard of kitsch with his repertoire of chrome and pleated Naugahyde, rightly understood that even the meanest car journey should have the intoxicating suggestion of an exotic vacation. It is curious to consider howan instrument of democratic liberation has become an oppressive tyrant, imprisoning us.

Roads too have lost their glamour. Movies and rock music glorified some of the world's great roads: Route 66, the Grande Corniche and the Pacific coast highway are part of our collective dreamscape. The delightful and deluded fiction of roads as romance. It is difficult, surely, to experience anything other than terrible bathos on the M25 or the East Lancashire Road.

So why do people still drive? One answer is that using a car is, literally, enjoying intercourse with a machine, thus allowing the driver total engagement with high-modernist wish-fulfilment, even on a modest journey to the superstore. Then there is the design aspect. For many people, possession of a brand-new car provides, no matter how briefly, access to perfection that is unique in a troubled world. Or put it this way: the meanest Korean hatchback has an interior finer than the majority of homes (with better ventilation and sound).

When I first went to New York, in the 1970s, I found myself at a swanky party at which the hostess took me aside to point out some other more distinguished guests. "There's a Pulitzer prize-winning novelist! He's a judge! That woman's on the board of MoMA!" And then she asked darkly: "Do you know what they are all thinking about?" I confessed I did not. She said: "Parking." A generation later we have caught up with Manhattan's pioneering motoring anxieties. To adapt the demotic of that age: a road trip has become a bad trip. Cars, Roland Barthes said, are our cathedrals. Best, perhaps, to enjoy your cathedral when it's parked.