SENSE OF OWNERSHIP AND SOCIAL STATUS
For if we ever reach a post-private vehicle age, some norms that we have taken for granted will become redundant as well.
Two of these norms relate to cars in particular: our sense of ownership and social status, and the manner in which cars have become linked to masculine identity.
First, it cannot be denied that the modern car, since its mass production and distribution in society, has been associated with personal convenience, private agency and social mobility.
Cars have always been sold to us not merely as vehicles that take us from point A to B, but also as instruments of social mobility that mark our place and standing in society.
(In that sense it is interesting that this tool that is meant to move us around also fixes us in a certain spot in the social pecking order.)
Those of us born in the 20th century have been fed a steady stream of glitzy ads that send out the same message: You are the car that you drive.
Many of us can also recall the jokes of the past, about how East European cars were seen and cast as the poor cousins of the West European counterparts, ugly relatives garbed in Soviet-era hulks and parts.
Why, up to the 1970s even Japanese cars were treated with condescension and scorn, and to be seen driving one meant that you were going nowhere (socially).
If it ever comes to pass that societies give up private cars for shared driverless vehicles, this identifiable marker of social status will no longer be around to play its role, and what might replace it?
Related to this element of social status was the notion of aggressive and possessive masculinity. We need not be hypocrites here and we should admit that from the beginning of the car era, cars and men were intertwined as in some kind of cyborg human-machine relationship.
Despite the advancement of women and growing awareness of gender bias, there remains a juvenile aspect of car ownership that associates cars with male identity.
This is particularly galling at car shows and expos where invariably a horde of half-dressed women are conjured up, and told to stand, pose and lie on the bodies of cars as if they were roadkill trophies that had been run over at full speed.
Young men (and old men too) are fed the same stream of egocentric commercial propaganda, encouraging them to drive fast cars and seek fast women; and this fantasy has been fuelled by the possibility of private car ownership.
This was all the more evident in the 1970s to 1990s, when magazines devoted to cars (and motorbikes) often had some female model on the cover, presented as if she was an accessory to the product itself.
Films glorified the fast-driving macho hero – who often performed unreal and unbelievable feats of daring driving on the screen: dodging oncoming vehicles, driving on pavements, ramming through fences, etc.
Of course, in real life such situations are rare, and when they do occur they also happen to be criminal in nature – but the fantasy of the fast-driving macho hero remained and endured, and one can only guess how many traffic accidents and needless deaths have been the result of this infantile fantasy being digested uncritically by some.
Should shared driverless cars become a reality in the near future, this fantasy will be rendered obsolete as well, and it would be interesting to see what that might do to some tender and bruised male egos that would no longer have a toy to play with.
