Cars

Thursday

Christopher Buckley

Dr Spacelove

Americans traumatised by their current president could be forgiven for thinking that his demand for a ‘space force’ was about protecting the country from aliens. Aliens, that is, of extraterrestrial persuasion, not the ones currently hurling themselves against the southern border. What, really, is implausible these days? As baseball savant Yogi Berra said when told that a Jewish woman had been elected mayor of Dublin: ‘Only in America.’ But as it turned out, Donald Trump’s demand to have a new sixth branch of the US armed services is about protecting America’s satellites and cyber capabilities. A worthy goal. Per the President’s custom, he didn’t inform the White House that he

Thursday

Toby Young

Why have I bought a car I don’t actually like?

I am currently in Brittany with the family, having made the 11-hour drive from London on Monday. It sounds like quite a lot of effort for a few days’ holiday, but my friend Wendy Steavenson invited us to stay and that so rarely happens when you’ve got four children that we felt we couldn’t turn her down. No doubt Wendy will regret this after 24 hours, as nearly all our previous hosts have. The journey wasn’t as much of an ordeal as it sounds since Caroline did the driving and I sat in the back and read Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West. It’s a highly readable, 351-page polemical essay

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Ferrari – heavy, expensive, wasteful, dangerous and addictive

Has a more beautiful machine in all of mankind’s fretful material endeavours ever been made than a ’60 Ferrari 250 Granturismo? Go to the Design Museum and decide. I have driven many Ferraris and the experience is always unique. They are alive, demanding, feral, sometimes even violent or truculent. Addictive, too. Once, in Haverfordwest, I arrived sweating and puffing after seven hours in traffic. I parked the 246 GT at the hotel for a moment but then, unable to ignore the hot, seductive car, I got back in and drove up and down the coast road; up and down, up and down. Just because it was there. Kierkegaard thought that

Thursday

Jamie Bartlett

The driverless car revolution will open up all sorts of dilemmas

Philip Hammond wants fully autonomous driverless cars on our roads by 2021. That’s not too far away, is it? I know it sounds like a science fiction year, but it’s only about fifty months off. Technologically, it’s plausible. Earlier this year I travelled over 100 miles in a driverless truck across Florida with the BBC. True, it was on long straight highways and not through Slough town centre in the rain, but still. Millions are being spent on this technology, and in the race between Google, Uber, Tesla and the rest, there will be rapid progress. And there is no doubt that driverless cars will be safer than these killing machines

Matthew Parris

The era when you could love a car is over

There are four of us in this relationship: my partner and I, his horse and my truck. His horse is 12, my truck 18. I’m jealous of his horse. He’s beastly about my truck. In our household Julian has only to say ‘nitrogen dioxide’ over dinner and my jaw tightens. ‘Particulants’ saps my appetite. ‘Scrappage scheme’ will drive me from the table. But, yes, I cannot dispute it: my beloved machine is a filthy polluter. The grey 1999 Vauxhall Brava five-seater ‘king-cab’ pickup illuminates every red light on the Guardian environmentalist George Monbiot’s dashboard. It’s noisy, smelly and smoky, and it’s older-generation diesel. But it’s my faithful friend and has barely done 100,000

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Uber was the ugly snowplough that cleared the path but its dominance is bound to fade

An Uber insider tells me not to write off the ride-hailing giant too soon, because it’s a very smart company for all its faults — and because the numbers of drivers and users for whom it is part of daily life will make it difficult for Transport for London to uphold its licence withdrawal on appeal, so long as Uber makes gestures of humility. But the moral of the story, says my source, is that as a ‘tech disrupter’ invading a regulated sector, the company created by Travis Kalanick ‘relished the fight with governments and entrenched interests far more than was normal or reasonable’, rather than seeking to be part

Saturday

David Starkie

HS2 could be obsolete before it even opens

Those who built the Channel Tunnel never saw the low-cost era of airline travel coming. When the tunnel rail link, or HS1, opened in 1997, Brussels’ bureaucrats were busy putting the final touches to the Single Skies initiative, which created a common market for European air travel. It wasn’t long before Ryanair, easyJet and the other low cost carriers took off. Cheap and frequent flights throughout Europe diverted leisure travel from nearer shores (served by Eurostar) to farther flung places across the continent.  And the 20 million passengers a year scheduled to use the tunnel in the first decade of the 21st century never quite showed up. Instead, the number

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Thank God for overpriced lawyers!

When you buy a house in Britain, there is an extensive and well-established series of checks you must perform to ensure the property is suitable for habitation. When undertaking a survey, you should ensure that the boundaries of the property conform to those recorded at the Land Registry, and that the property does not lie on a flood plain or risk structural damage from coastal erosion or subsidence. Unfortunately, there seems to be no mechanism to protect householders from the worst possible eventuality — which is to find out that you have a lawyer living next door. Wherever you have a shared wall or fence, there exist countless opportunities to

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Ideal homes

Artists, poets and philosophers have not paid much attention to Milton Keynes …although comedians have. This urban experiment has been mocked by lazy satirists who find ambition derisory and concrete cows hilarious. Milton Keynes is 50 this year and it has an honourable place in the history of that ancient chimera, the Ideal City. It was conceived in a decade when the improving influence of the ‘white heat of technology’ could be cited without irony (or embarrassment). In those days, technology involved calorific value, not cold, invisible bytes. The name sounds like an ad-man’s invention. But until 23 January 1967, when the new city was designated, Milton Keynes was an

Thursday

Harry Mount

Not owning a car

On two occasions, sainted members of my family have offered me a car for nothing. Both times, I turned them down — and not out of selflessness or for green reasons. I said no because I knew it would mean me sitting still in a metal box for hundreds more hours every year. If I were the only driver in London, I’d have accepted the free cars in a second. Even if I could have been transported back to 1970s London — when in my memory the streets were largely empty — I’d have said yes. But driving in London — and in British cities, generally — has now got

Thursday

Conor Flynn

Sweden: Multiple thrills, minimal risk

All too often in life there’s a gap between expectation and reality. Not with driving on ice. The expectation is tantalising, but the reality is demanding, exhilarating, and so much fun you’re surprised it’s legal. I’ve been doing it for 13 years, taking groups of around 15 on an annual trip to Sweden. Every single time it’s an absolute joy to witness the hilarity, thrills and sense of satisfaction that our guests enjoy in just three days. We start each visit with a little bit of theory for the technically minded — though nothing really prepares you for driving on a frozen lake. The fundamental skill to master is how

Thursday

Bryan Appleyard

The descent of man

Why do humans want to build robots? It seems, on the face of it, to be a suicidal endeavour, destroying jobs and, ultimately, rendering our species redundant as more intelligent and effective beings take over. Lacking, as we now do, an agreed metaphysical justification for human specialness — for example, the soul — it must only be a matter of time before we submit to the machine ascendancy. So far, it has been a subtle, incremental process that conceals any wider significance. Take satellite navigation. This was first introduced in the 1980s and is now more or less universal. Maps have become quaint. As a result, we walk or drive

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

On the road | 1 December 2016

‘We’re going to get lots of negative attention from environmentalists,’ he cackled, great puffs of blue-grey smoke emerging from the exhaust of his two-stroke car. Will Self was crossing Tower Bridge in a Trabant, that most potent symbol of the East German socialist state, bending almost double to fit himself round the steering wheel (he’s six foot five inches in his socks) and cursing the lack of wing mirrors. Things could only get worse as he and his old friend Michael Shamash set off on their 700-mile trek across the Channel to Zwickau, in the former GDR, home of the Trabant car. Imagine trying to merge on to a German

James Delingpole

How I learned to embrace my inner toff

I do hope it’s a terrible winter this year: a total bastard where everyone’s snowed into their drives and those few who do manage to escape end up being slewed across the road or filmed in tragic tailbacks by drones for BBC news bulletins or stuck in ditches and having to tramp miles across icy fields trying to find a friendly farmer to pull them out. Nothing personal. It’s just that I’ve finally got hold of the car I always wanted — a Land Rover — and I’d hate people to think I only bought it for class-identity or small-penis or show-off reasons. I want to feel vindicated as a

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 3 November 2016

Strike force Nissan is to expand its plant in Sunderland, building two new models there. The Japanese company is praised for not losing a day to strikes in three decades in the city. But labour relations weren’t always so good. — In 1953, when part of Nissan’s business was assembling Austin cars in Japan under licence, the company suffered a bitter 100-day strike. Occupying US forces became involved, helping the Japanese government to arrest union leaders. — As a result of the strike, a new, less militant union was formed, with a Harvard-educated leader. The union accepted job losses but became involved in discussions over new technology. Global race And where

Thursday

Toby Young

Driverless cars will make your life worse

On the face of it, there’s something quite appealing about driverless cars. It will be like having a chauffeur-driven chariot at your beck and call, except it will be no more expensive than owning a car. Indeed, it might well be-cheaper because you’ll be less likely to have an accident, so insurance premiums will be lower, and it will use fuel more efficiently. Not only that, but we’re told journey times will be shorter because driverless cars don’t need to keep more than a few inches apart, thereby reducing congestion. And they’ll be quicker still if the inner-cities are reserved for driverless cars only. No need for traffic lights, roundabouts

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The stupidest target in British transport

Two books to recommend to my fellow transportation nerds: Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy by David Metz, formerly chief boffin at the Department for Transport; and Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy by Christian Wolmar. The first is excellent throughout, the second is excellent right up to the final pages when, as many British transport commentators are liable to do, Wolmar rhapsodises about European approaches to city planning with their ‘bicycle superhighways’ and, yes, those bloody trams. You know the kind of thing: ‘In the Norwegian port of Slartibartfast, all cars are banned from the city centre before midnight, and the

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 8 September 2016

There is no cherished assumption that now goes unchallenged. The latest one is that country air is good for you. Ronald Reagan was much mocked when he said in 1981 that ‘trees cause more pollution than automobiles do’, but scientists later surprised everyone by saying that he was at least partially right. And now it is claimed that if you live near to a pig, cow or chicken farm, you might as well be living in Oxford Street. A study conducted by Utrecht University in Holland has found that more Europeans die from air pollution in the countryside than in cities, mainly from the fumes of manure storage and slurry

Monday

James Lewisohn

In praise of the banger: Why it's time for Brits to stop splashing out on new cars

Last week, visiting friends in Italy, I had an epiphany in two car journeys. The first ride was in a spiffy-looking new Fiat 500 I’d rented. I’d been excited about driving this pretty update of a classic Italian design. Yet the brand new cinquecento was wheezy even as I drove it off the airport, and arthritic on the autostrada, petulantly ignoring my demands on the accelerator even as I bullied it with gearbox and clutch. Challenged by the steep ascent to a hilltop trattoria, it sputtered to a halt and demanded the eviction of two of my passengers (my hosts; a faux pas). This was a voyage of shattered dreams.

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The great pretenders

There is fakery in the air. And maybe the French are done with deconstruction. A drone operated by a French archaeology consultant called Iconem has been languidly circling Palmyra, feeding back data about the rubble with a view to reconstructing the ruins and giving the finger to Daesh. Cocteau said he lies to tell the truth. Iconem flies to tell the truth. In April, an exhibition called The Missing: Rebuilding the Past opened in New York which examined ‘creative means to protest preventable loss’. It was timed to coincide with the temporary erection of a frankly underwhelming two thirds-scale replica of the Palmyra Arch in Trafalgar Square, London. It goes