Cars

During the first half of this year, Chinese carmakers achieved a feat of hyper-production that sounds less like industrial manufacturing and more like a plague of locusts. In just six months, they unveiled 650 new models – an average of four brand-new cars every day. At the same time, on the other side of the Pacific, Elon Musk abandoned Tesla’s car assembly lines. He retooled the entire factory to mass-produce the Optimus humanoid robot. What on earth is happening to the world’s car industry? These two bizarre developments seem to signal the end of the global automotive industry as we know it. The age of spanner-wielding, oily-fingered car worker emerging from under a jacked-up rolling chassis appears to have been vaporised.

I live on a road where parking is forbidden. This has not stopped any of us from needing cars. Instead, we crowd each evening into the small cul-de-sac opposite, where ten vehicles can park legally, and 15 can park optimistically. The sign is unambiguous: ‘Three hours. No return within two.’  Most days I manage to comply. Some days I even set an alarm. The cruelty is that nothing happens for ages. Weeks pass. Months. You begin to suspect you have cracked the system or even that the sign is entirely ornamental, the sort of bluff recognisable to anyone familiar with the steady arrival of ‘Final’ notices.  Then, without warning, that little yellow envelope appears on your windscreen. The wardens have descended like a pack of seagulls on an unattended tray of chips.

A few weeks ago, I was driving four of my children to school in my tinny, battered Toyota. We were running late – as per usual – and were speeding – or, rather, chuntering – down a particularly treacherous road. Of all the questionable surfaces in my area of rural Essex, this one is notorious: marked by a huge pothole the size of Snoopy the dog’s head, which bleeds into a smaller, gloopier crater. As I was trying to navigate it, however, a large shadow zoomed into sight in my rear-view mirror. With a jolt and a tremendous bang, it pushed me, my family and my poor, beaten-up Toyota into the crater. Who would be so sadistic as to do such a thing, you may wonder? Was it a vengeful ex? A drunk driver? Another parent running late and pushed from road rage to road insanity?

No one is quite sure who invented the phrase ‘the shock of the new’. It may have been the American writer Harold Rosenberg back in the 1960s. Alternatively, it may have been the late, great Australian intellectual Robert Hughes, who used it as a title for a TV series. Whatever the answer, the phrase aptly captures a very human moment: when you encounter something so strangely and profoundly innovative you experience a visceral, emotional jolt. Those two thinkers applied the phrase to modern art, to the first jarring encounter with impressionism, Cubism, abstract expressionism. But it can also be applied, perhaps more appositely, to the first encounter with remarkable technology. Technology, in the famous vision of Arthur C.

Most of the time cheating is frowned upon, but a quarter of all driving tests in Britain are now taken in automatic cars and apparently that’s fine. The trend is only set to continue, too, as more and more people pretend to care about the environment to take advantage of this loophole and obtain a driving licence without the slightest concept of clutch control. It’s absolutely outrageous, not to mention completely unfair. I spent hundreds of pounds being taught to drive properly, in a manual, only passing on my second attempt, because mastering a gearstick is hard. Copping out and taking your test in a glorified fairground dodgem isn’t just shameful, it’s basically fraud. No matter what it says on your certificate, you can’t drive, you can just steer and brake.