I somehow got a driving licence, but have hardly ever dared use it, and so I’m a non-driver. That has lowered my social status even below what it otherwise would have been. In my life I’ve found myself the only pedestrian in Los Angeles, and the only white pedestrian in Johannesburg. Begging lifts from acquaintances, I’d end up in the back seat like an eight-year-old. In the mating game too, non-driving was a handicap. “I’ll swing by your place on the Bakerloo line” lacks a certain ring.
Yet now something is changing. Driving is going out of fashion. Cars are ceasing to be status symbols. I may finally be the man of the future.
We can now see that the car’s supremacy lasted almost exactly 100 years. When Ford’s Model T was launched in 1908, ordinary people gained unprecedented mobility. Driving, in the days of the open road, was fun. Drivers were called “motorists”, as if it were a hobby.