Cars are Stupid

Come on, face it. Cars are stupid.

Take Italian cars: too stupid to go where you point them, and unable to move without bits dropping off them. At the other end of the spectrum, German cars are over-engineered to extraordinary heights of idiocy: the new Mercedes S-Class, for example, has a control which allows you to decide how long the light over the rear numberplate stays on after you switch off the engine. French cars are perfectly designed for their intended purpose, which is to provide accommodation for chickens. Japanese cars have names like “Cherry”, “Sunny” and “Cedric”, so they are already silly even before the Asian cabbie gets his hands on them and adds the fluffy dice and gilt-edged tissue box cover in the rear window. Stupidest of all, of course, are American cars, the most representative of which are the lumbering monsters known as “sports utility vehicles”. Slumberdown produce sportier models than these: and the utility of these vehicles is restricted to transporting people the size and shape of sofas, in a straight line, at 50mph and 8mpg, forever.

Exclusivity is, of course, no defence against imbecility. Anyone who buys a 200mph Porsche to drive it on the road at a maximum of 70mph is clearly a boob; anyone who takes such a vehicle on a race track is guaranteed to do thousands of pounds worth of damage to his brakes and suspension and is therefore a boob on stilts. He is however still more rational than the owner of the Ferrari 355, which needs its cam belt changing every 10,000 miles, necessitating the complete removal of the engine from the body every 12 months or so. Supercar? Superstupid more like.

As exclusivity, so ubiquity: the unavoidable Ford Mondeo and Vauxhall Vectra, for example, are stupid because there are so stupidly many of them, with so many stupid options; 1.6, 1.8. 2.0, 2.0i, 2.5, 3.0, V6, V8, turbo, diesel, turbo diesel, a thousand infinitesimal steps up the ladder of luxury to match a thousand fiercely defended meaningless niches on your company’s car policy. The manufacturers have extended this idea with the notion of “common platforms” according to which any number of models are built using all the same parts except the wrapper. General Motors builds Saabs, Vauxhalls, Opels, Holdens and so on and so on around the same bendy chassis.

So, cars are stupid, though in jaw-droppingly many and various ways. But why is this? Whence this rampant nit-wittery?  The answer is simple: people. People are very, very stupid, which is why modern cars are – it must also be admitted – so brilliant. People thus demand features on their cars – like cruise control, automatic gearboxes – which allow even twits to operate them. People being not only stupid but also frit, it goes without saying that total accident protection is a sine qua non; and because, should any problems arise, they would no more dream of opening the bonnet themselves than they would of treating a sore throat by removing their own tonsils, iron-clad reliability should be included in the package. And being above all greedy and mean, they don’t see any reason why car manufacturers should not provide all these things at affordable prices.

The manufacturers, arguably the greatest nincompoops of the lot, are too stupid to think of an argument to the contrary. Which is why most of them are in such dire financial straits.  And I don't just mean the union-ruined basket-case GM.  Even the normally prudent Germans are not immune: BMW’s exit from Rover cost them hundreds of millions, and the takeover of the shambolic Chrysler by the normally clinically efficient Daimler-Mercedes was an unmitigated Katastrophe. And in once-mighty Japan, the once-very-mighty-indeed Nissan made such a mess of its business that it was forced into the ultimate humiliation of being taken over by the French, in the form of Renault.

To summarise: cars are simultaneously stupid and brilliant, largely because people are driven in their actions by a mix of idiocy, ignorance, laziness, fear and greed. In all the world, only a tiny handful of people remain unconvinced of this self-evident truth. They are called Marxists. I once found myself at Speakers’ Corner listening to one. For minutes on end, and without a murmur, I endured his fatuous historical analysis, non-existent sociology, feeble-minded political claptrap, ludicrous economics and pie-in-the-sky hopes of imminent social upheaval. But when he got onto cars I could restrain myself no longer. “How can it make sense,” he asked, “to build more than one kind of car? We don’t need more than one kind!” Able to contain myself no longer, I inquired with feeling – what about big families? Don’t they need big cars? “Well, OK, maybe a couple of . . .” And what about courting couples? Don’t they need something with a capacious and comfortable rear seat? How are we to motivate the travelling salesmen in his Mondeo 1.8L, if not by means of the Mondeo 2.0i V6 Ghia? Unthinkable the estate agent without her dinky little Mini: absurd the African minicab driver absent his Korean charabanc. And comrade, surely you are forgetting your old friends the lumpenproletariat: what of the builders, locksmiths, plumbers, glaziers in their white Transits? And with an eye to your own advancement, tovarish: however would the senior party apparatchiks achieve clarity of historical consciousness without their Zils?

I hardly need to point out the irony in this particular case, which is of course that the most stupid cars of them all were built by Marxists. It is tempting to think of Marx’s notorious “scrap-heap of history” consisting entirely of abandoned Skodas, Yugos and Ladas. The Trabant was slightly less absurd because it was at least put together by Germans. Nonetheless, it made a noise like a model tractor, and was rumoured to have been built out of lacquered cardboard. Stupider still, there was a waiting list longer than one of Fidel Castro’s speeches, because communist working practices and methods of distribution meant that it took ten years to get your hands on one. The fall of the Berlin wall produced no more poignant picture than that of a many-mile long queue of overladen Trabis waiting at the border to just get the hell out of East Germany. Of course, there is a perfectly sensible explanation for all this. Even a car isn’t as stupid as a communist.

Cut it any way you like: people are stupid, and since cars are designed, built, bought and driven by and for people, their nonsensicality should come as no surprise.

But the stupidity of people only explains particular forms of stupidity; my point is quite general. In addition to these myriad forms of nonsensicality, every car is stupid in the same way.

Let me say it slowly so you get it. Depreciation. Servicing. Tax. Petrol (which means tax again). Insurance. Parking. Congestion charging (London only – for now). And interest on the loan you took out to buy it. Even on the most sensible of Saabs, the most mediocre of Mondeos, the combined expense runs into thousands every year. Take a chauffeured limo everywhere, have your shopping delivered by Harrods and you’ll still end up laying out less than just the cost of renting a garage to keep your Fiesta in.

And that’s before you count the cost to your health. I’m not talking about the canard of pollution; modern cars are about fifty times cleaner than they used to be and these days emit toxins less dangerous and in smaller quantities than, say, the average Frenchman. I’m talking about the damage to the nerves caused by the inadequacy of the roads, and by the eternal struggle to find somewhere, anywhere, to park. In London, the second rule of the road is that when you want to move you will be stationary and when you want to park you won’t be able to stop (the first rule of motoring in the capital, as all Londoners know, is “if you put your hazard lights on,  you can park wherever you like”). Add to the brew the inevitable car thieves and what the idiot authorities laughingly refer to as “traffic calming” measures – speed bumps and width restrictions are about as “calming” as a pinch of Colman’s up the anus – and it’s a miracle that there are any sane motorists left in the entire country.