Alas, it’s the end of the road for petrolheads

Modern cars are complex and boring. Gone are the days of tinkering under the bonnet or lusting, like Toad, after a ‘motor’
Carl Mortished

Poor Toad would howl in despair if he knew what the world was doing to his precious motor car. You will recall how the bumptious Toad of The Wind in the Willows, was spell-bound by the sight and sound of a “magnificent motor-car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate”.
Kenneth Grahame’s description is a glorious hymn to the dying spirit of the petrolhead. Sadly, many of these creatures will soon be like Toad, squat in the dust of the road, wailing “Poop poop!” at convoys of hybrid, homogenised utility people carriers.
If the true motor enthusiast still exists, outside vintage car clubs, he should be worried because the car manufacturers would kill him off. It’s not murder, or killing by neglect but the gradual extinction of a creature that thrived in the latter half of the 20th century.
Car sales are in decline — they peaked in Britain in 2003 at 2.6 million registrations but this year only 1.8 million are expected to be sold. The recession has put a scythe to the automotive market but it was already in steady decline, shrinking by a fifth from 2003 to 2008. Bribes to trade in old bangers won’t lift those numbers much but there are more profound reasons to believe that we may never return to the peak of personal motor purchases.
People are bored by cars. The throb of a six-cylinder petrol engine is no longer sex-fuelled thunder but an irritating noise. The motor industry is losing the younger generation. Kids don’t obsess about cars; they don’t cover their walls with pictures of motors and argue the toss in the playground about the merits of a Ford over a Volkswagen. They don’t (as I did) disassemble an old scooter in the garage in a futile effort to make it go faster. The TV programme Top Gear thrives because kids love the stunts, the laddish jokes and crashing cars but not even the flop of Richard Hammond’s locks can hide the expanding bald patch — the petrolhead is getting older.
Cars, even non-hybrids, are too complex, too computerised and too reliable to be interesting. When did you last look under the bonnet? Their workings are too difficult to interest the amateur mechanic, let alone a child. Fun mechanical objects are bicycles and skateboards. This new generation sees the family car as being as exciting as a fridge.
Detroit, once car capital of the world, used to know how to deal with consumer boredom but the public disengagement with the family car is now fundamental. Peugeot-Citroën has begun the process of shifting its business model into new territory. In big cities across Europe next year, the French company’s dealers will rent, by the day, cars or scooters or bicycles.
Exit the snappy-suited car dealer; enter the uniformed car rental clerk. The company that built famous cars, the low-slung Traction Avant, the modest 2CV and the extraordinary, hydraulic DS that conveyed Charles de Gaulle is about to become a utility transport provider. We could blame climate change for queering the car lover’s world but the low-carbon diktats of governments are simply accelerating a process that was already in train.
The electric vehicle will propel motor companies down even more sinister paths to perdition. Petrol is easy to store, you can carry lots of mileage in a jerrycan. Electricity is different, it forms part of a network that is integrated, a closed system that must be balanced.
When motoring went mass-market in the 1950s and 1960s, it was hailed as a liberation to the middle classes. Car-owners were free people who hit the open road, occasionally pausing briefly to fill up cheaply at a garage.
The electric vehicle owner’s world is more complex. You will not just plug in your car and pay the bill. Refuelling cheaply will be a matter of hours, not minutes. According to National Grid, the burden of a million electric cars would impose intolerable burdens on the electricity systems. Therefore intelligent meters will need to be installed in every electric vehicle- owning household to ensure that charging is done at the optimum period. Your car battery will become part of a vast network of stored electricity that the grid will use in peak demand periods.
In the new zero-carbon world you are not a free-wheeling consumer, cruising into a garage to buy a tenner’s worth of petrol and then riding hell for leather up the M1. You are part of a system; your engine is not your own but a cog in a vast electricity machine. Your car will be part of the nation’s energy matrix and your energy consumption will be monitored to make efficient use of its storage capability.
It is hardly surprising that Peugeot-Citroën is thinking about new business models. Who would want to own a car in this world of systems and network balance. The family car is transformed from Dad’s glittering prize to Mum’s domestic appliance and then to its ignominious end as nobody’s integrated transport unit. It’s enough to make you want sit down like Toad in the dust of the road and howl.
Carl Mortished is world business editor