The Future Of Cars
Evolution is beautiful. The bareness, brutality and rawness of its inevitability really hit home recently when I was watching an episode of Dark (must watch, especially if you enjoy stretching an episode to three hours because you need to incessantly refer to a notepad scribbled with notes about myriad characters), and even though the show itself is hardly about cars, there were back-to-back scenes that featured mainstream vehicles in 2019, then 1986, and finally 1953.
An Audi A6, an ’83 Opel Rekord and a ’52 Ford Taunus 12M. For their time, they looked like they were home. If I were generally surveilling Earth’s state of affairs from a fluff of cloud somewhere far up, I’d be content with what I’m seeing, evolutionarily. For the most part, we’re getting along just fine.
In fact, if some graphics whizz could whip up an infographic showing just how cars have been evolving over the years, I’d very much like that. Definitely merit a retweet, that. But what’s next? Please, for the love of unfettered cookie dough, don’t let things go the way of the ridiculously dull self-driven pods, like the ones seen in Greg Daniels’ Upload (It’s a pandemic and there’s a lockdown; I watch a lot of TV. Let’s move on). A chap sitting on a bench seat inside of a sickeningly unimaginatively designed pod, reading an iPad and instructing thin air to take him to his office via the 405 isn’t what you’d want to sign up for, especially if you’ve come to this website. There’s even, laughably, a setting one can toggle (yes, I’m still talking about Upload) that allows you to choose between prioritising the passenger or the pedestrian. What I gather this means is that in case there’s an accident sensed by the computers, a predetermined setting will be the difference between a suicide and a homicide. I’m sorry, but I’d like that control in my hands, not a computer’s. And for that matter, I’d like to get behind the wheel on a nicely-crafted, ass-caressing bucket seat instead of a ruddy bench, thank you very much.
Let’s not get things to be so dire and desperate that we give up control of our vehicles, ladies and gents. Let’s not relinquish control. We already do that when we’re sitting in a tube along with 400 others for company and 800 bags of peanuts high up in the air; we’ve already ceded decision-making to our rather lethargic government, and we’ve all but given up on deciding what position the lid should be in on our potties. Let’s not let the sanctity of cars slip through our fingers.
And it ruddy well is up to us. Up to you, as you read this. You are the conduit through which people settle on a decision. It’s because of people like you that BMW’s designers felt it necessary that an entire population would like its grilles to be the size of Mexico. See, now that was a mistake. I don’t want to see that on an M4. I don’t want to see that on an M3. I don’t want to see it on any vehicle. The only time I want to see a grill that big is when it’s turned 90-degrees the other way and has a piece of meat cooking on it.
Grilles are just the start. There’s so much more we could be talking about, and with the help of this website’s owner, who’s also a dear friend of mine, I intend on bringing that up in future articles.
The point remains, though. Evolution is beautiful. And what I love about this particular kind of evolution — the evolution of cars — is that we can collectively and responsibly choose the direction of our evolution. The future of cars is in our hands. We don’t have to settle and wait for aeons for something to just take its course (like receding hairlines — why did evolution deem that a path?!). We can make a difference. So if I may be so brazen: have some taste. If you’re incapable of it, fake it. Cultivate it. Develop it. Lean on friends that have it. Beauty depends on it.
