Want freedom? You'll need a car

(This will soon appear in Bournbrook Magazine, to which you should definitely subscribe)

Listen to a song from the early 1960s, and someone’s invariably singing about a car. Tunes referencing Ford Thunderbirds or giant, chrome-laden Cadillacs were commonplace in the same way that songs about bitches ‘n’ hoes are today.

There’s something almost quaint about it to the modern ear. The Beach Boys’ Little Honda, extolling the virtues of a small Japanese motorbike, is a good example:

First gear (Honda Honda!) it's alright (faster faster!) Second gear (Honda Honda!) I lean right (faster faster!) Third gear (Honda Honda!) hang on tight (faster faster!) Faster - it's alright!

Few people get excited about Hondas in the same way today. Singing about modern cars in the same ecstatic tones would be a bit like praising your refrigerator or dishwasher. Cars have come mundane and functional. Household appliances with wheels.

Modern man takes the automobile for granted, or increasingly treats it with undisguised disdain. The numbers of car fanatics among us dwindles by the day, and no wonder.

Driving in the modern world is a soul-hammering experience. Anyone who frequently has to schlep up and down one of Britain’s motorways knows this all too well, as they see seas of red brake lights glaring ominously in front of them.

Add the cost – petrol, tax, insurance, repairs – and the feeling you are paying through the nose is unavoidable. Driving becomes a monotonous, costly drain. Add in the cretinous drivers with whom we are forced to share the road (never us, dear reader!) and the desire to smash one’s head violently against the steering wheel grows every mile.

The car has grown alien. Once, blokes would have to fettle to keep their British-built bangers on the road. Now, everything is so costly, so complicated, and designed in such a way to prevent any self-sufficiency, that knowledge about cars has vanished among the young. Whereas in the past you could change a spark plug yourself, today you need a special key to even look at the engine, covered as they are in a protective plate to stop untrained hands voiding a warranty.

The modern fridge-on-wheels also increasingly looks the same. Who can tell the difference between a new Vauxhall, a new Volkswagen or a new Volvo? I have to admit I struggle. Moreover, car manufacturers compete with each other by offering more gizmos, more gadgets, resulting in the cost of a new car rising and rising. Cars are consumables to be tossed aside when broken and little more: their soul, and our connection with them, has been ripped away.

Yet there was a reason why those teens of the 1960s were so invigorated by the appearance of the car. It meant freedom. The freedom to travel where you want, when you want. If you can afford the petrol, you can go wherever you please. It was the first time in history that you could travel easily and independently over long distances, in your own time and in your own surroundings. Timetables could go swivel.

The revolutionariness of this fact has been lost. So ubiquitous are cars today that the notion that things could ever be different – that we might not be able to go wherever we damn want – doesn’t even register on the could-happen-ometer. That this was the standard for humanity for most of history is scarcely remembered.

This all struck me while on a long journey. I travelled 3,750 miles in three weeks, all in my 30-year-old Mercedes. The R&D process for the car I took – a 190E – started almost 50 years ago. Nevertheless, 1970s technology was enough to get me and a chum from one side of Europe to the other, and then back again, with only a whining wheel bearing eventually spoiling the ride.

Throughout, we listened to the music, the podcasts or held the conversation of my or my co-pilot’s choice. We stopped when we wanted to refuel on junk food, subjecting our guts to a diet of ice-cream, Coke, coffee and stupidly named snacks. If something interesting was signposted, we could choose to investigate or to carry on down the tarmac. A few border guards tried to upset our progress, but their surliness was a small price to pay.

Compare this to the indignities of air travel. Hordes of people queuing interminably in airports, being quizzed by officials of varying pettiness and asked to remove their footwear, to justify the 150ml bottle of shampoo left forgotten in their hand luggage. Crammed onto planes and never left in peace – safety demonstrations, extortionate food and drink, duty free trolleys, charity fundraisers, updates from the cockpit – before being dumped in an airport somewhere far away from where you want to be.

Naturally, you can’t drive everywhere. It just isn’t practical. But it is easy to lose sight of the basic freedom that the automobile bestows on us. Surely this is why those who seek to limit the freedom of others – under whichever guise it takes – are so hostile to the liberty granted by the combustion engine. For every green I hear whinge about the emissions farting out of my old wagon, all my ears detect is the clanking of shackles.

For when you rely entirely on others to get about – be it by bus, by train or by boat – you are not truly free. Even for the shortest of distances. You are waiting on a timetable, or hoping that some sod doesn’t go on strike. As is the modern way, you are outsourcing your increasingly tenuous liberty.

When car manufacturers wonder why the young are less engaged with cars, it is because the yoof do not understand what the car brings them: freedom. The value of that precious commodity has been almost entirely forgotten amid a fog of complacent modernity. For every economic reason there was for Soviet citizens not being able to buy cars easily, there was a political one too – people are far easily to control when they cannot move freely.

More generally, my advice is to avoid motorways. There’s a button you can press on Google Maps to do just that. Usually the journey is only a bit longer, but it is surprising how often you’ll be taken through stunning landscapes that you didn’t know existed, and which are impossible to experience when gritting one’s teeth on the three-laned misery generators.

Often, when stuck on a motorway or in some urban hell hole it is easy to imagine that beauty of the world has been lost. All it takes, sometimes, is a trip out in your car on a road less often used to rediscover it.

And there is nothing more beautiful than being free. That is why the car – and the petrol engine – remain so vitally important. The tragedy in their under-appreciation will only become clear in time and as the accessibility of cheap, independent means of transport is slowly taken away from us under the guise of eco-lunacy.

Complacency will be the death of our liberty. The role of the car in that equation is far too frequently forgotten.