Cars & Culture.

Cars, Culture and Us.

England.
Photography & text article by David Cross.

From the heady days of cheap gas and open roads to today's era of smog and congestion, the automobile has seen many changes yet remains itself, fundamentally the same. Battery power is just arriving as are the extra power generation units, but this is taking time to come through and it looks as if, there are still problems to be solved before we all jump on board.

Cars are very expensive to own, run and as we all know, highly polluting. The toxins that bypass the catalytic converter are extremely harmful to all life and the “lead” added to smooth the engine has had an impact on our lungs, and possibly is the cause of the growing number of allergies that are experienced. The car has also added to the abysmal weather we have here in the UK, and worldwide, through its impact on climate change, and of course, our reliance on crude oil has done nothing to decrease tensions globally. Thus, I find it highly lamentable to see the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, who made a fortune driving around, needlessly poisoning us all, now sat on his tractor essentially bitchin’ about the weather and his failing crops - currently he is complaining about inheritance tax, I wonder what will be next?

Since the inception during the late 1800’s and early 1920’s through to the growth explosion in the U.S in the 1950’s, the car has become a function of necessity for millions of people worldwide. Here in the west we live in houses that are regularly separated from our work by dozens of miles or more. My partner’s office jaunt is a round trip of 120 miles. The supermarket and local shops are four miles away, too far to cycle with baggage, or is it? Perhaps I have just become used to being busy, short on time, or just plain lazy?

The car has also become a trophy. Big success, when success is perceived through the accumulation of money, is displayed through the purchase of a big car, or perhaps tractor. There are today a growing number of people who go out on a limb to buy cars on finance and indicators show that as many as 80% of new cars bought in very recent years are financed, and a few have suggested that this bubble might burst, much like the mortgages - think Lehman's Bank.
Having bought the car, the car enthusiast will spend a lot of money adding and subtracting various features, such as furry dice, name tags, stripes, and the latest bling accessory to hit the market - the wrap. This is a piece of plastic stretched with some skill, around the car to change the appearance. Twenty years ago or more I knew a car dealer who would have used this daily, such was the dubiousness of his stock.

It’s very unlikely that Henry Ford could have had any idea, even in his wildest fantasies of how big the market would be for the car, but he did have a certain vision, one that we might consider enlightened today. Ford was a forward thinking man with a team of talented designers and chemists behind him, and he was aware of the safety aspects as well as the reliance on expensive and heavy steel, he may also have perceived the manufacturing threat from abroad, however this is well before the now respected Japanese brands, that were quick to flood the market.

The good American boy in him soon joined some interesting dots and he went looking for “a project that would combine the fruits of industry with agriculture”.
Just before WW2 Ford built a prototype car from lightweight tubular steel and panels made from grown fibres. There is some argument as to what was actually used to create the composite and resin, and perhaps it wasn’t as green as we might think, but it was noticeably lighter than a conventional model and he proved that much of the automobile could be grown. Today we have expensive carbon fibre, reserved for top end brands, it isn’t grown and uses a lot of manmade ancillaries to fashion into anything. Yet, we also have composite grade flax and bio-resins. Of course, the weather has gone a little wonky and trying to grow anything is proving more and more difficult.

We were promised by the outgoing Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, that the air would be cleaned and the petrol car had seen its best days. Unfortunately, in a U-turn, certain energy companies were given free reign to explore for new reserves. It just happens that Sunak’s family has investments in that sector and shortly afterwards, the 2025 ban on new petrol cars was lifted. We can only hope for a new attitude towards energy, the environment and corruption with the incoming Keir Starmer, though it's unlikely.

The U.K. government, recent and past, has a woeful attitude to the environment, one time Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher said, when talking about the Falklands war, …”it’s good to have a real issue to deal with, rather than humdrum issues like the environment”. As reported in the Guardian in 2005, Tony Blair ‘s government was found through leaked documents to have tried to secretly ditch key global - warming targets. Perhaps as Jacques Rangasami suggested in issue 1 of Humanity magazine, a cultural shift really is required. What if car manufacturers were forced to make M.P.G. the fashionable selling point?

We are a long way it seems from a real solution to the car problem, if that is, you actually perceive a problem. Many people do not, or they simply don’t care. Where I live there is a large number of old classic vehicles that crawl around, and they stink! How any of them pass the emissions test is beyond me, it’s an offensive smell, one that you can taste in the nose and mouth and feel on your face. It’s horrid. Having spoken to a few, it’s obvious that they care more for the car than future generations - ironic in at least one case, as the old classic is being saved for the grand-daughter!

The classic enthusiast will wax endlessly about the golden era of motoring, and I get it. Modern cars are ugly and lack anything we might consider soulful. This is hardly surprising as human hands do little work on the construction, hand bashed panels have long been replaced by ten tonne presses and robotic welding. Some of the mechanisation has also led to specialist repairers and in some cases, short lived ownership, as more and more cars are recycled than ever before. It’s very unlikely that the car of today will ever become a vintage classic, also the roads are so terrible that few people really like driving, road rage and potholes are just a few of the alarming things that are encountered, and as I’m aware, are not mentioned in the Highway Code.

Further, we might soon have to contend with the robot driven car, and given that one of the world’s biggest and most experienced software companies recently had a global outage, we have much to be concerned about. Already, an engineer was runover at a press event, when the AI car on show decided to select reverse, and in America a woman was killed when her electric vehicle also chose reverse and deposited her in a pond. The doors locked and the toughened glass was unbreakable.

The internal combustion engine and wiring looms have been around for a very long time, and they breakdown. Computers also have the occasional wobble, and a software error at 70 m.p.h. will be more than an inconvenience and it’s unlikely you will live to chat about it on social media.

Cars have in recent years become much larger than before and there are also a lot more of them on the roads. According to various statistics, circa 1.9 million new cars hit the roads of Britain in 2023. This brings the total figure up to around 40 million. - there are 37 million people of working/driving age. Given that Great Britain has in the region of 260 million miles of roads and the average car spends around 90% of its life parked, we will assume that those who make the rules believe we have room for more, after all, nobody is calling for a halt in production.

Even the protest movement is slowly being criminalised with members of Just Stop Oil being jailed recently. Regardless of the tactics and inconvenience, isn’t it just a little bit nuts that people who are essentially protecting the environment are being jailed? A wise man once said, “when all the land is poisoned, you will realise that you can’t eat tyres or used engine parts”. Okay, I made that up, but it’s quite possible that the world will need to witness a new power source entirely before we witness any change.

The financial power is very slowly moving from fossil fuels (to digging up toxic metals in Africa which isn’t an intelligent solution, though it pays a meagre wage to those who work the mines), and this will itself cause a new range of difficult scenarios. Already in France there is talk of a ban on electric powered cars from China, and the way these things work, there is bound to be a reaction.
There are many fine documentaries on this subject of electric power which explain in detail the new problems that have arisen and the chronic exploitation of the workers, for example. So as we drive our modern vehicles towards our uncertain horizons, one thing is clear, in respect to the environment, we still have no idea where we are going, what the hell we are doing or whose interests it’s in, to essentially ruin the planet.
Maybe that’s a straight forward enough question to ask of your local M.P?

Thankfully, road traffic accidents are decreasing, though only by a small amount - maybe all of those electrical safety features do work, as I refuse to believe that driving quality has improved, let’s be honest, there are a lot of unpredictable drivers on the roads, and cyclists too. According to the data issued by the government, a staggering one million speeding fines were issued in 2022 at an average cost to the driver of £200. More than enough to repair the pot-holes, which there are an estimated, well, the figure is uncertain but with nearly 8000 call outs to vehicles damaged by pot-holes in the first quarter of 2024, let’s guess at a few hundred thousand?

On a lighter note, though not for pigs, the German manufacturer responsible for the air-cooled camper van, produces more sausages than cars, and the highest speeding fine ever issued was in Northern Europe. The cost being £500,000 and the drivers luxury motor impounded.

Drive safely.

Thanks for reading and sharing. You can see more of the documentary work by David Cross here.