"Taking the fun out of motoring"

There has been a general opinion in the world of forums, blogs and general banter of late regarding the removal of the “fun” element of motoring.  This is something which has been gently becoming the default attitude on motoring by most people you speak to now.

The argument is that this is all the fault of “the man”.  The problem, according to many I speak to, is that “the man” is determined to remove every last bit of fun from our lives and quite high on his list is the fear that we Brits may actually enjoy driving our cars.

There are two sub-groups in the proponents of this argument.  Firstly the folks too young to remember this supposed golden era of motoring which occurred at some fairly unspecified point in the past but must have been before they passed their driving tests, and the second group are those elderly curmudgeons like myself who have been there, seen that and of course it was all much, much better “in my day”.

I'm going to ignore the youngsters in this, they are just buying into the same nostalgia packaging that my parents' generation used to convince me as a kid that the 60s were the swingingest time and that I had missed out by growing up in the 80s.

The grumpy old man perspective is part fashion (hense all the TV programmes, books, newspaper columns and the like devoted to “grumpies”) and part a feature of, well, just growing up.  Or at least growing old.  See when you are young, you are full of energy, drive, enthusiasm and this great desire to see all the wonders that the world has to offer.  Then you get to 30 or so and you realise that you've pretty much seen the great diversity and that although you haven't really seen it ALL, what of it that there is left unseen is just more of the same with a slight iterative variation.  Cars, bikes, booze, women, music, comedians, movies, and so on and so on.  Yes, you appreciate them, yes you may be enthusiastic still, but the edge is gone.  Some try to maintain the buzz they had in their 20s or whenever by just ratcheting up the level and going to a wild excess.  But that really isn't sustainable.

So we end up looking back at our 20s as a golden era and telling ourselves and everybody else who'll give us the time of day that those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end.  And seriously, Mary Hopkins was cool once.  Or so I am told.  So when some old git like me is telling you that the fun has been taken out of motoring what they mean really is that they are old, and getting grumpy.  One of the big things you have to ask is what the fun is which has been taken out of it.  And for many people its the having a laugh with your mates, tear-arseing about, chasing girls and getting in a few scrapes, laughing it off and then going clubbing.  Or whatever.  Honestly, my life was just like a Fast & The Furious movie, but with Capris, Mantas, Cortinas and so forth.  That bird just don't fly when you are 40.

There is another way of looking at this and its one which I have been noticing myself over the passing years.  Motoring in the UK is becoming more tiresome, yes, and not just because of the additional mileage on my bones.  But its not the price of petrol, the price of insurance, the encroaching regulation of IVA/BIVA and laws to make you insure your car whenever it is taxed.  Its not even the speed camera.  Its traffic.  To be honest most of my driving I am lucky to get anywhere near the speed limit let alone to be worrying about speed cameras.  There are quite simply way more cars on the road now than there were 10, 20 or 30 years ago.  If you then equate “the fun of motoring” to be linked directly and proportionally to your ability to drive really quickly on public roads without getting held up by other traffic then, yup, you are screwed.

There are plenty of folks pouring scorn on younger car enthusiasts who modify their cars – not to go faster or handle better – but to be more “pimped out”.  Styling, accessories, audio and entertainment equipment seems to be the order of the day.  But if you can only insure a 1.2 litre Vauxhall Corsa then what IS performance?  If you live in the urban sprawl and can never get to more than 40 MPH, what does performance matter?  One hot rodders' adage I like is “its not how fast you go, its how you go fast” and for British metropolitan motorists its not even about “fast”.

You have two choices really.  Redefine what fun is by enjoying owning a car which is cool, and is still cool even if its stuck doing 20 MPH in a school zone, or crawling up to roadworks on your congested commute, or you do something about the congestion.  Seems to me that half the cars on the roads are driven by people who have no interest in actually driving, they just do it because its the default way to get from where they are to where they need to be.  Restructuring how non-enthusiasts get about would certainly free up some road space for the rest of us.

I don't see that happening.  Any attempt to improve public transport is viewed as being an opportunity for the government to chuck a pile of money down a well and any attempt to discourage folks from “unnecessary” use of their cars is reviled as a new form of Stalinism.

So that takes us back to the point about redefining fun.  I've moved on from thinking love is being drunk and trying to persuade some equally drunk lass to come back to my place, or at the very least up an alley and behind some bins.  Equally I have to say I don't have to drive at ten tenths every minute I'm behind the wheel, I get a kick from when people point or wave or photograph my car, from the fact that just driving it is cool.  For ten tenths there is still the rac