Will We Still Love Our Cars?

(5 minute read)

For many years, I lived in Windsor and worked in central London, roughly twenty-five miles away. I normally drove to work.

Because of the congestion, particularly once I reached central London, the journey could easily take an hour and a half each way. That meant I spent around 15 hours a week simply driving to and from work. At weekends, I probably used the car for another 3 hours.

So, even though people regarded me as someone who used his car quite a lot, I was actually driving it for only about 18 hours out of every 168 hours in a week.

For the other 150 hours, it sat outside my house.

I still had to buy it, insure it, tax it, maintain it and watch it gradually fall in value through depreciation, whether I was using it or not. Cars are wonderfully useful machines, but when you look at them purely as an investment in transport, they are remarkably inefficient.

That makes me wonder whether private car ownership will still make sense in 2076.

I don't mean that cars will disappear. I suspect they will still be everywhere. The more interesting question is whether most of us will still own one.

There is a striking pair of old photographs from New York that illustrates how quickly transport can change.

The first was taken at a parade on Fifth Avenue in 1900. The street is crowded with horses, carriages and buggies, with perhaps one or two automobiles among them.

A photograph taken at a similar parade only 13 years later shows almost the opposite. The street is full of cars, while only one or two horse-drawn vehicles remain.

In barely more than a decade, the horse went from being the normal method of urban transport to something increasingly unusual.

That is an astonishingly short period of time, only a fraction of a human lifespan. Could something similar happen again?

Imagine living in a city in 2076.

You leave your apartment and tell your personal AI butler where you want to go. Within a few minutes, an autonomous car arrives outside.

You get in, read, work, speak to someone, watch the news or simply look out of the window while the car drives itself to your destination.

Then you get out. The vehicle doesn't remain parked outside for the next eight hours. It drives away and picks up somebody else.

You haven't bought it. You don't insure it. You don't maintain it. You don't worry about depreciation, parking charges, servicing or whether somebody scratches it while you're shopping.

You simply pay for the journey.

In some ways, we are already moving in that direction. Earlier this year, I had a glimpse of that future for myself.

In January, I attended a writing conference in Austin, Texas, and while I was there, I travelled in a self-driving car a couple of times. I think it was a Tesla, although I was paying rather more attention to the fact that nobody was driving it.

The first journey felt distinctly strange, particularly when the car began turning, stopping and reacting to traffic by itself. By the second trip, however, I was already beginning to take it for granted, which is perhaps the most interesting part. Technology often feels extraordinary only until it works reliably enough for us to stop noticing it.

I currently live in Thailand, in a busy tourist city on the coast, and I don't own a car. I don't need one.

I can walk to many places, use an ordinary taxi or take a moped taxi for shorter journeys. (Those are quite scary in the mad Thai traffic, but great fun.)

If I lived in the centre of a major city again, I am not certain I would buy another car. I would probably rent one when I genuinely needed one.

That obviously works much better in some places than others.

In much of America, people live in suburbs or rural areas where distances are far greater and public transport is limited. A family living twenty miles from the nearest town may still find owning its own vehicle extremely convenient.

But cities may be very different. One of the most extraordinary things about modern cities is how much land we dedicate to cars when they are not moving.

I remember reading years ago that Los Angeles contains so much land used for parking spaces that, if all of it could somehow be removed, there would be enough land left over to fit San Francisco inside it.

Whether or not the comparison is exact, the underlying point is remarkable.

Cars require enormous amounts of space.

We build multistory car parks, underground garages, roadside parking, driveways and vast areas of tarmac around shopping centres, offices and airports simply so that millions of vehicles can sit still.

If people stopped owning their own cars, much of that space could eventually be released for other uses. In the most crowded cities, that could mean more housing, wider pavements, larger public spaces and more room for trees and greenery. Over time, the decline of private car ownership could therefore change not only the way we travel, but the physical shape of our cities as well.

That could change the appearance of cities just as dramatically as the arrival of the motor car changed them a century ago.

Autonomous vehicles could also be far more efficient than human drivers.

They don't become tired. They don't drink. They don't become distracted by their phone. They don't get angry because another driver cut them up.

They could communicate with one another, know what was happening several streets ahead and react much faster than a human being.

That raises an interesting possibility. Perhaps by 2076, owning a car won't seem particularly strange. But driving it yourself might.

Insurance companies could eventually charge considerably more to people who insist on taking manual control. Some city centres might even restrict human driving if autonomous vehicles prove substantially safer.

That would probably horrify many people today. But people once felt the same way about giving up horses. There will almost certainly still be people who love cars.

Some people enjoy driving, just as others enjoy motorcycles, boats or racehorses. I suspect privately owned vehicles will continue to exist even if they are no longer necessary for most journeys.

They may become partly recreational. You might own a car because you enjoy it rather than because you need one to get to work.

Longer-distance travel may change as well.

High-speed rail could connect far more cities. Electric aircraft may become practical for shorter journeys. Supersonic passenger aircraft may return if engineers can make them quieter and cheaper.

We may even see autonomous flying taxis, although I am less certain that millions of people will want small aircraft constantly passing over their houses.

What interests me most is how quickly our idea of normal can change.

The people travelling along Fifth Avenue behind horses in 1900 probably didn't think they were witnessing the end of an era. A little more than a decade later, cars had largely taken over. Perhaps the same thing could happen again.

A photograph taken in 2036 might show city streets lined with parked cars and enormous car parks filled with thousands more.

A photograph taken in 2076 might show apartments, parks and cafés where many of those spaces once stood, while autonomous vehicles arrive, collect passengers and disappear again.

Nobody then would think that was remarkable. It would simply be normal.

Cars gave ordinary people an enormous amount of freedom. I don't think the next transport revolution will take that freedom away. It may actually increase it.

The strange part may be that our grandchildren look back at us and wonder why we spent so much money buying a machine that sat unused outside our house for 150 hours every week.

What do you think? Will most people still own their own car in 2076, or will private car ownership eventually become as unusual as keeping your own horse?

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Till next time,

Brian

BA Gillies
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