The car, our second home

Last year we sold the family car. It has been an enormous improvement in our quality of life. No parking tickets, no traffic jams. No children vomiting at 70mph. No tussles with my wife about whether to take the motorway or the scenic route, no rows about whether the windows should be open or closed, the air conditioning on or off, the heater high or low.

And yet I have a sense of loss. After all, a family car is not just a car. It is a whole culture. As one academic paper from an American research company I came across recently states, “The car is a central space for … families to spend time in … as central as time spent at home. The car (is) much like a living room with large windows on street level or the front yard.

“The car witnesses several of the intimate human behaviours that are also carried out at home such as: eating, fighting with spouses or siblings, singing out loud, talking to ourselves, being entertained, picking our noses, sharing – from trivial to deep – conversations and moments with our loved ones, and even having sex.”

Yes, you can do a whole lot in a car that you can do at home. It is indeed a second home for many, although a very small one without a toilet or a back garden. Outside London, where the concentration of space makes it optional, a family car is virtually as important as a home. People, I am told, have two or three of them. There, they even keep them in garages (the idea of having a garage is as remote to me as the possibility of driving a Rolls-Royce).

The car gets more significant the more space there is. As Nicholas Humphrey, who directed the wonderful 1990s television documentary series about the car From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring, told me, “If you live in the countryside, arrivals and departures are very public. They are not concealed by a parking space. There is a fear of approaching a private driveway in a bad car.”

Whatever the practical reality of getting from A to B, a car also represents something to people. It is the most obvious status symbol you can own and, unlike a house interior, it is on public display. It “makes a statement” – though, with the growth of bumper stickers such as “Little Princess on Board” and “I’m Speeding Because I Need a Poo”, the statement is often “I’m a Bit of a Tool”. (Oh, for the simplicity of the traditional triangular flag sticker, “I’ve Been To Beautiful Weymouth.”)

People invest a great deal of their emotional life in their cars. As the introduction to the accompanying booklet to the documentary series states: “They promise us physical as well as social mobility and furnish us with the most conspicuous form of personal adornment after the clothes we stand up in.”

In the case of the family car, the most famous example of this is the Chelsea tractor, the 4×4 that never sees the countryside and may be adorned with spray-on mud.

One can’t really escape this status aspect. Our family car was a dented and dirty Ford Focus, bought without thought, but as Nicholas Barker (who wrote the accompanying book) says: “To drive a car which is considerably cheaper and more dilapidated than most people on a similar salary is in itself a form of inverted snobbery. I have the confidence to drive a diminutive VW Polo only because I live in a large house in a fashionable part of London.” Ditto.

Ironically, the idea of the car as an advertisement for oneself is far more common now than in my early days of family car travel. It’s ironic because the science of aerodynamics has determined that most motors do not look very much different from one another.

Back in the day, if you drove a Ford Anglia (pointy, angular, a little bit flash), a Morris Minor (rounded, friendly, sturdy), an Austin A35 (happy, up for a bit of a lark) or a Hillman Imp (bit sexy, bit fast), you were definitely making a statement. But the statement you were mainly making was that you could afford a car in the first place. It is easy to forget that the assumption of car ownership is only a couple of generations old.

We didn’t have a car when I was growing up in the late 50s and early 60s. The first one we owned was an ex-army Jeep that had no ignition key, just an on-off switch. Not surprisingly, it was soon stolen.

Later, we survived on a diet of Morris Minors and Morris Travellers, by which my father swore – literally, as the bastards were always breaking down (their reputation for reliability in my experience was thoroughly undeserved). However, they were cute as hell, with little orange plastic arms that extended from the bodywork to indicate a turn, and in the case of the Traveller, beams of timber holding the whole weird construction together.

It is easy to look back at these now classic motors fondly – and I do – but there was a dark side to them. The heaters were often non-existent or ineffective, which is why the car blanket was a thing in the 60s and 70s. Going on a long night drive to some grim holiday B&B in Scotland was no joke, as the temperature gauge plummeted and the heater gasped its last.

Boredom was the principal enemy, with no in-car entertainment to speak of. The radio, if it worked at all, was crackly and usually tuned to some dull radio station knocking out Mantovani from dawn to dusk. Stopping at a motorway service station was like taking a brief excursion into an eastern European prison catering facility.

Culled from guardian.co.uk