Society

The underrated, exhilarating joy of getting your first car

In today's big cities, having a car engenders mild pariah status. Then coronavirus screeched into town

July 31, 2020
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Getting your first car used to be a big deal, an event up there with life’s other major acquisitions: a job, a house, a spouse. While it might not have had the same significance—nor, one would hope, longevity—as any of those three, it was something most people aspired to. Not anymore.

Today, in big cities at least, having a car engenders mild pariah status and ownership rates have been in steady decline for years, especially among young people. In the 1990s, 80 per cent of people had owned one by 30. Three decades later, this is only true of 45 per cent of the population—and that’s UK-wide, the figures in London are much lower. Most would call this heartening, what with private vehicles and their very unsensual presence—clogging, speeding, honking, idling, choking up our streets—responsible for between 50 and 90 per cent of urban air pollution. But, even prior to its ecocidal impact being a truth universally acknowledged, driving in London had become the trickiest of manoeuvres.

How different things were in the 90s. Back then, everyone seemed to have a motor, and these were more than mere A-to-B machines: they were minor characters in your lives, the settings for many a cherished memory, and many an uncherished one too. A child of divorced parents, I spent accumulated years being ferried back and forth across town.

I remember a litany of vehicles fondly: the banged-up Citroën 2CV, the Volvo 760 Turbo, the bottle-green Mercedes Estate. These were purchased from raffish men known as dealers with whom it seemed obligatory to enjoy a love-hate relationship, not dissimilar to the one you’d end up having with the car, which  would inevitably break down—frustration usually accepted with plenty of phlegm and good grace, even on the hard shoulder of the M4. Your car’s crapness, after all, was a part of its charm. Fiction bore this out. Sure, all the heroes drove slick sports cars, but it was the beaters, rust buckets and rattletraps which elicited more tender devotion.

“I’ve been driving in my car… it’s not quite a Jaguar,” so begins Driving in My Car by Madness, the ultimate musical paean to an old banger. This song was released in the early 80s, the same era that John Self (no relation), the protagonist in Martin Amis’s Money, was driving (and crashing) his Fiasco, a “vintage-style coupé with oodles of dash and heft and twang,” around town. This vehicle, “temperamental like all the best poets, racehorses and chefs,” is a source of unending embarrassment and eternal pride.

It is also a classic example of a crap car motif that would have its heyday in the 90s with the advent of the slacker hero. Characters like The Dude in The Big Lebowski, whose Ford Grand Torino’s only value lies in its stack of Creedence Clearwater tapes. Or Homer Simpson’s pink sedan. Or the titular machine in Dude Where’s My Car? Each of these is beloved by its owner and ridiculed by everyone else. Maybe it’s obvious that a hopeless schmuck should drive a terrible car. But the direction of travel for fictional automobiles—from Bond’s all-beating Aston Martins to Del Boy’s creaking Reliant Regal—reflects their wider fall from grace.

Today’s cars, with their soft-edges and ghostly engines, are hard to feel much affection for. Was our 20th-century love affair with the automobile based in part on mutual fallibility? Did we create these machines in our own image, then grow to hate them? Are we gods and cars humans, or is it the other way round?

Despite the presence of doubt, when I came of age, it remained necessary to at least learn to drive. So, in 2010, at the age of 19, I duly earned my stripes. Then, for ten years, until one month ago, never owned a car—content instead to divide my time between tube and bike. Beside the fact that I really didn’t need one, the cost of having a car in London, when you factored in things like insurance (much higher for young men), fuel and parking, was prohibitively expensive. Occasionally, I would bemoan my fate, grouping a lack of wheels alongside other fruits enjoyed by my parents’ generation but denied to mine—while admitting that it came a long way farther down heartbreak road than, say, free higher education, a thriving job market or affordable housing.

I’d resigned myself to a life in others’ saddles. Then coronavirus screeched into town. Without the ability, and then the desire, to travel on public transport, the world became a much smaller place. I started to pine for something that could take me far, far away. In mid-June, when it was mooted that a ban on travelling to other parts of the country would soon be rescinded, I began planning a visit to my mum’s in Somerset and opened negotiations with a local dealer.

First and foremost, I wanted something cheap. A potential comic foil, a bit of panache—these were not expected as standard. I must admit, I wasn’t particularly enthused the first time I heard the words ‘Honda Accord.’ But then I saw it. This… this… car. A black saloon, it was made in 2001 and has more dents than an undergrad’s water bottle, not to mention plenty of heft and twang. It cost me £300 and bought me two happy weeks’ haring athwart the moor.

Those first few times I put my key in the ignition and went twist I imagined a chain of jump leads running lineally all the way back to some goggle-clad forebear. Like them, I too owned a big machine: freedom on four wheels. Hate? No, me and my first car’s relationship was all love. Then I took it home. For a newly fledged hoglet without a permit and, living in a top-floor flat on a busy road, not much recourse to get one, London’s myriad parking laws became a suffocating web.

I was a man on a mission. That mission: not to get towed. There are three roads, that I know of, within five miles of me, where one can park for free. For the past few weeks, I’ve risen early every Monday in order to drive to the nearest one and join a caravan of fellow reprobates staking out a space. This week, I was there for an hour before I gave up and drove to the free spot farthest away, in Dollis Hill. Cycling home, on the edge of Willesden, I had a revelation.

For years I’d dreamt of joining the serried ranks of London car owners, despite knowing it’d probably be more onerous than it’s worth. In the end, I was right, but it was fun while it lasted. Next week, I think I’ll return my beloved phaeton. Some things are just too beautiful for this world, or this city at least. Now I just have to find a way to get a job, a house and a spouse.