Enjoy your beloved car while you can

Remember ashtrays in cars? Soon cars will themselves become objects of wet-eyed nostalgic reverie. A thrilling era of propelling ourselves, while gassing others, via a series of explosions more or less constrained by gears, steering devices and friction materials, is coming to an end. Enjoy that very loud Porsche while you can. It will soon be illegal.

The great fascination of the car resides not in engineering or technology but in semantics and emotions. A friend has a disgraceful anecdote from his untidy youth to explain the grip cold metal has on hot hearts. A brief fling with a married woman whose husband travelled a lot found him one cold morning, late for a lecture, with a ratty old Citroen that would not start. She cheerfully said: ‘Take his Jaguar.’ His sense of propriety outraged, he replied: ‘What! Take his car without asking him?’

Bryan Appleyard is well known to Sunday Times readers as a thoughtful interpreter of our frets and anxieties, turning his wan eye on the Large Hadron Collider one minute and Kant’s antinomies of pure reason the next. No one has ever felt an Appleyard article to be too short. He is also adept at tech-related mumbo-jumbo, Singularity and aliens. Although happy with pop culture, something in his spirit resists frivolity. His car banter is more Public Intellectual than Public House: a thinking man’s Clarkson.

Despite the enormous influence of cars on townscape, conceptions of liberty and style, the economy, environment, music and movies, the literature about them, and car culture, is only modest. There are prejudices to overcome. When my own book on Harley Earl, Detroit’s ineffable wizard of kitsch who all but invented chrome, was published nearly 40 years ago, W.H. Smith on Putney High Street put it on the same shelf as the workshop manuals for the Morris 1100 and Ford Cortina.