This article made me laugh heartily, I can't imagine putting one of these in my garage.........haven't thought about the height of garages yet, only the width and length!
Being behind the wheel can provide an escape from predictability. Set the autopilot to get you from A to B and that spirit of adventure evaporates
Long ago, when I was an occasional contributor to the Erotic Review, the magazine commissioned a motoring special, asking its writers to extrapolate on whatever they deemed to be the most thrilling part of driving. My offering focused on the sensuous delight of moving from third to fourth gear, its heady marriage of gearstick, muscle tension and speed.
I thought about that article this week when I heard the news that the driverless car will finally be unleashed on our roads from January. Trials in three British cities will succeed in “putting us at the forefront of this transformational technology and opening up new opportunities for our economy and society”, the business secretary, Vince Cable, told an automotive engineering research facility in the Midlands. And for all the promise of this technology, for all the excitement of this new era, a little part of me died.
There are undeniable benefits to the dawn of the driverless car, of course – our roads will likely be a great deal safer when speeding, tired drivers and erratic steering can be taken out of the equation. But from an emotional and romantic perspective it is a dispiriting prospect: the driverless car belongs in our sexting, vaping, auto-tuned age. There is the smack of fat-free yoghurt and elastic waistbands about it, something hopelessly, passionlessly convenient, something so joyless, wipe-clean and flat.
The thing I love about driving is its physicality. I love the feeling of my hands on the steering wheel and the gearstick, my body connecting with this great motorised force. I love the sensation of movement, propulsion, possibility.
At its most extreme, it lies in the limitless feeling of the road trip, but it exists too in the small rushes of autonomy that can come even in the morning commute or the school run. Consider many of the characters of Bruce Springsteen’s songs – blue-collar men who find a sense of liberation through automobiles. “Chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected and steppin’ out over the line,” is how he describes it in Born to Run – and it’s the stepping out over the line that is important; that sense that in a car you could escape, flee the nine to five and the predictable route of your life. Set the autopilot controls to get you from A to B and that spirit of adventure evaporates.
Springsteen wasn’t the first musician to pay homage to the automobile – many of the earliest rock’n’roll songs paid tribute to the joys of driving. Indeed, the much-disputed title of the first ever rock’n’roll song is often awarded to Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, released in the spring of 1951. The titular Rocket 88 was a kind of car and the song sees Jackie Brenston (actually Ike Turner) raving about the wonder of driving this stylish new automobile and how much it appealed to young women. Was it about a car? Was it about driving? Or was it about sex, youth and new-found independence?
There was something incredibly potent in the simultaneous birth of the teenager, rock’n’roll and the widespread availability of the car, and it’s a potency that still exists. What they all offer is a kind of freedom – not one that comes from lack of responsibility, but from having control over your life, from proclaiming your individuality and desires.
When I was a newly qualified teenage driver I used to love driving alone at night. I would drive my friends home from the nightclub and then keep going, windows down and music playing. And what I loved in particular on those night drives was the precise moment of going past my family home and rolling onwards. In that moment, I was free and the world lay open. I was driving without destination, driving for the sake of it, with no particular place to go.
This article is by Laura Barton of the Guardian and can be seen here:- http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/driverless-cars-ruin-thrill-of-driving
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