Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere?

Christian Wolmar

• Publisher: London Publishing Partnership
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781913019266
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Automotive Transportation & Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Wolmar's entertaining polemic sets out the many technical, legal and moral problems that obstruct the path to a driverless future, and debunks many of the myths around that future's purported benefits.

Chapter 1

The myth of motoring
freedom

The car has dominated our lives for about a century. As late as the end of World War II, and despite the efforts of Henry Ford, even in developed nations few people could afford to buy a car. Now the ‘parc’ (the term for the total number of vehicles in the world) is around 1.2 billion: one vehicle for every seven human beings. By 2035 the parc is expected to grow to 2 billion: one car for every four people.

Between the wars, Ford enabled the middle classes and blue collar workers in the United States to become motorized by inventing production line techniques that cut the cost of manufacturing. Cleverly, he paid his thousands of workers well enough to enable them to buy his product, and this high-tech, high-wage model was imitated elsewhere, stimulating the mass car market. However, in Britain it was not really until after World War II that owning a car became commonplace. There were fewer than 2 million motor vehicles in the United Kingdom in 1950, compared with 37 million today. The 1950s was a golden age when it seemed that motoring offered unparalleled freedom to travel with literally no downsides. As Steven Parissien, author of a history of the motor car, puts it: ‘no one in the fifties worried about emissions, about carbon footprints or … about the ready supply of cheap oil’.1 Cars transformed the way people lived. The very geography of towns and cities changed as suburbs, whose location had previously been limited by the need to be close to a railway station or tram stop, could spring up anywhere. Planning laws were adjusted to take into account this new-found access to mobility. The growth of low-density suburbs was a direct result of greater access to cars. Having a garage began to be seen as nearly as essential as having a kitchen or bathroom (though in practice garages more often than not ended up being used as storage spaces, with the poor car left outside in the rain).

Cars did not solely serve transport needs. They became a ‘must-have’ lifestyle accessory and were objects of pleasure, with different brands – marques – offering distinctive styles and meanings: sports cars were for fun, Rolls Royces and Cadillacs signified affluence, small cars were for convenience or for housewives, mid-range models represented suburban solidity, and so on.

Mobility came to be seen as as much of a right as housing or food. The car was the passport to freedom, and nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of that dream. Georgian terraces were felled, parks – even Hyde Park – were bisected, thousands of people were displaced, pedestrians were shunted into dingy subways so as not to disrupt traffic flow, and whole neighbourhoods were blighted by monstrous constructions such as Spaghetti Junction, the nation’s grandest symbol of the deification of the car.

At first, the cost of adapting our towns and cities to the needs of the car was accepted as inevitable. Indeed, new dual carriageways, bypasses and link roads were welcomed because they were seen as a way of relieving traffic congestion. Early motorways were celebrated for ending congestion once and for all. In May 1963, after the first section of the M2 was opened, a local newspaper in Kent hailed the event in glowing terms:

The people of the Medway towns can hardly believe their eyes. Traffic is flowing freely through Rochester and Chatham for the first time in many years. There are no long queues at the traffic lights in Strood.2

There are now! Neither the euphoria nor the relief from traffic would last long.

The ‘golden age’ was short-lived precisely because the attractions of the car were so great. The very success of the motor car was its undoing. An empty road was a pleasure, a full one a nightmare. The more cars there were, the more roads were needed; and the more roads that were built, the more cars filled them. Cars, it seems, abhor a vacuum, quickly filling up any stretch of new road, especially in urban areas. The car was a great invention until everyone else had one as well. A key research finding from a report published in 1994 by an obscure government committee (the Standing Advisory Committee for Trunk Road Assessment) was that providing extra capacity by building roads led to additional demand because it encouraged more people to jump in their cars. This phenomenon, known as ‘induced traffic’, means that the value of road schemes in reducing congestion is overestimated, but the recommendations in the report that the methodology for assessing road schemes should be changed as a result have been ignored.

The failure to recognize this fundamental flaw has meant that road construction has continued to be encouraged and supported financially, even though it clearly fails to deliver the hoped-for benefits. And so it goes on. In the February 2020 Budget, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced a £27 billion programme of new and improved roads, and he has stuck with that policy despite the huge spending required to deal with the effects of the subsequent pandemic and despite the fact that there was strong evidence that air pollution contributed to the severity of the illness. Even Edmund King, the president of the Automobile Association, questioned whether the £27 billion of road spending was the best way to invest in transport. The phenomenon of induced traffic explains why adding extra lanes to highways so often disappoints local drivers, who find that within a short period congestion returns to previous levels.

The increase in car use developed astonishing momentum because it was effectively self-generating. As more people bought cars, the alternatives, such as public transport, became less viable, and consequently the planners’ dreams became self-fulfilling nightmares. Every out-of-town supermarket development or multiplex cinema stimulated yet more growth in car use as Britain adopted the worst aspects of American planning models. Malls housing B&Q superstores, Homebase garden centres, Toys “R” Us and countless other chains spread inexorably around the country. As transport expert Lynn Sloman summarized in 2006:

In less than forty years, the car has become so intrinsic to the way we work, shop and spend our leisure time that it is almost inconceivable that we once managed without it.3

Other transport modes suffered. While the cuts resulting from the Beeching report are the most infamous, the wiping out of all the nation’s trolleybus schemes, all but one of its tramways (the one in Blackpool was saved), and many of its bus routes and suburban railways resulted in an ever-greater dependence on the car. Even parts of the London Underground, which saw a decline in passenger numbers, were being considered for closure. Cyclists were bullied off the roads and pedestrians were at far greater risk on busy roads where traffic was encouraged by the design of the highway to go faster. The supposed freedom offered by the car proved to be a chimera as choice became more restricted because of the decline in the use – and consequently the availability – of other transport modes. There are, as we shall see, parallels between this period of growing hegemony of the car and the future envisaged by many of the advocates of autonomous cars.

Parissien believes that 1959 represented the zenith of the car as a symbol of freedom. After that, the drawbacks began to appear, slowly at first but then so overwhelmingly that it was impossible to ignore them. A key turning point in the United Kingdom was the abandonment of the plan to build a series of ‘motorway boxes’ in London. A plan for a series of ring roads in and around London had long been mooted, and in the early 1960s, when Ernest Marples was the transport minister, a scheme for three concentric motorways was put forward. The inner one was to run in a circle three to four miles from ­Charing Cross, and it would have resulted in the demolition of 20,000 homes. As I quoted in my previous book, Are Trams Socialist?, this ‘was seen as unproblematic by the British Road Federation [a pressure group for the road construction lobby] because, according to evidence it gave to the GLC, “much of the route lies in obsolete areas which urgently need rebuilding” ’.4 Those ‘obsolete areas’ were places such as Blackheath, Hampstead and Chelsea, which fortunately were saved when the scheme was scrapped in 1973 by a newly elected Labour Greater London Council, reversing the party’s previous policy of supporting the initiative.

There were a couple more attempts to build roads in London, and while elsewhere the centre of many provincial towns and cities would yet be bulldozed to create space for traffic jams, the tide had turned. There was a recognition that not all transport problems could be solved by building extra facilities for motor vehicles and that public transport still had a key role to play. The oil price shocks of the 1970s, together with a growing realization of the greenhouse gas effect, began to put the motor manufacturing industry on the defensive.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the automotive industry has been in an almost permanent state of crisis since then. There has been a series of major upheavals, culminating in consolidations and factory closures across the world. The US industry consolidated to become dominated by four firms who expanded through acquisitions in Europe and beyond. The fallout from the 2008 financial crisis stimulated yet more consolidations and mergers. In the United Kingdom, by the end of the 1960s there were also just four major manufacturers. Three of these were owned by American companies and the fourth, British Leyland, soon had to be bailed out, effectively becoming a nationalized company in 1975. Competition from Japan, which eventually moved assembly plants to Britain, effectively killed off any long-term hopes of recovery. British Leyland, which became Austin Rover Group, was sold to British Aerospace in 1988, and was then bought by BMW six years later. This meant that for the first time in over a century there was no British-owned mass car manufacturer.

Despite the success of Nissan and Toyota in producing cars in Britain for export, the industry has continued to face significant challenges. Moving production to ­lower-cost countries has helped, but it has not solved the problem of selling sufficient numbers of vehicles at a profitable price.

The image of the industry has also taken a battering. It has fought rearguard actions against every environmental regulation, which has led to its reputation being almost as tarnished as that of the tobacco industry.

The story of lead in petrol illustrates this point well. Lead had been added to petrol for decades to prevent ‘knocking’, but in the 1960s environmentalists began to point out that this presented a major health risk. Lead in the air was being breathed in by children, affecting their brain development and causing other health and even behavioural issues. Millions of small children across the world suffered as a result. The removal of lead only happened as a result of a long campaign by activists, including, notably, Jill Runnette, who called herself a ‘Wimbledon housewife’ and who took on the oil giants, the government and scientists to convince the public of the danger of lead in petrol. The campaign was later spearheaded by Des Wilson, a former director of Shelter, who eventually won the battle. The motor vehicle manufacturers resisted at every stage. As Geoffrey Lean put it, writing in the Independent on Sunday in 1999 on the day that leaded petrol was finally banned in the UK: ‘Oil companies have continued to make leaded petrol, long after its dangers have been accepted by doctors and governments, and substitutes became known.’ 5

The reluctance of the industry to address environmental issues as well as its readiness to use fair means and foul in their efforts to retain profitability were well illustrated by the revelation that amendments were made by Volkswagen to its cars’ software in order to dishonestly pass emissions tests. The scandal, inevitably dubbed ‘dieselgate’, revealed that Volkswagen had systematically cheated on its emission ratings by dodging regulations aimed at reducing pollution from vehicles. The car manufacturer’s cheating was uncovered by the US Environmental Protection Agency, and its scale and extent were utterly extraordinary. The agency found that Volkswagen had deliberately changed the way its engines functioned in order to activate emission controls only during laboratory testing and not when running normally. Therefore, while during testing the nitrogen oxide output met regulated standards, in normal running the emissions were up to forty times the legal limit. This was not some insignificant programme run by a rogue element within the company: it was a deliberate policy from the very top, and it involved a staggering 11 million cars.

While this scandal demonstrated the extent to which vehicle manufacturers will resist attempts to reduce the environmental damage caused by their products, it also marked a turning point as the industry recognized that it would have to change. It strengthened the hand of those who were already pushing for a far sharper focus on electric cars, as demonstrated by Volvo’s plan to focus on the development of electric cars. It has promised that half the cars it produces in 2025 will be all-electric, and it has stated that it hopes to have produced one million electric cars by that date.

Globally – and particularly in Europe – however, there a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Perspectives series page
• Title page
• Imprint page
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The myth of motoring freedom
• Chapter 2: The hard sell
• Chapter 3: The triple revolution
• Chapter 4: What can cars do now?
• Chapter 5: Bumps in the road
• Chapter 6: Who will drive the Queen?
• Postscript
• Endnotes
• Photo credits