The enshittification of motoring

The other day I was a bit early picking up my other half from the station so I stopped at a local Ford dealership to have a look at some of the used cars on the lot. Occasionally I have flights of fantasy about owning something a little sexier than a ten year old Vauxhall.

As it happens I quite like my Insignia. It’s not a performance car but it’s a competent motorway cruiser and it’s very nimble on the back roads, and though it’s a contentious thing to say, I think the Insignia is a good looking car. It’s good enough for my purposes.

I have to say, it certainly wasn’t my first choice of car. I wouldn’t have minded something a bit more prestigious but I’ve had German luxury cars before and they’re nothing but expensive sensor faults and non-mechanical problems. I went with the Insignia because of its ubiquity. A full round of new brake discs and pads doesn’t break the bank, and when you open the bonnet, if looks positively agricultural. It’s very simple to maintain to the extent that even I can do certain repairs with the aid of a YouTube video.

What lets it down is the fuel economy but to get better economy in a similar spec car I would’ve had to buy smaller which doesn’t really do for a tall chap like me, and it turns out that economy comes at a premium. The cheaper they are to run, the more expensive they are. A low mileage Ford Focus would have cost more than my Insignia. On balance, I think I chose very wisely. My car is a masterclass in adequacy. It does what I need it to do and no more.

That is essentially my baseline when looking for a new car so at the Ford dealership I sat in a a newish Focus, just to see what it was like. The first problem was putting the seat back far enough. It’s on an electric motor and it’s slow. The second problem is that everything is now a function on a screen on the centre console. This common for new generation cars. Absolutely everything computerised on the Tesla.

I hate this. I just want to be able to reach down and press a button or pull a lever without taking my eyes off the road. I don’t want to have to pull in and navigate function menus just to adjust my wing mirrors. Then there’s the other problem. It was too small. I don’t especially need a larger car but when you move down a size bracket, everything else including the seats and steering wheel are scaled down a little bit. I just don’t like sitting in small cars (even though the new Focus is huge by contrast with its predecessors).

I was disappointed by this because I do actually like how it looks and it gets better economy than my Insignia. But with that goes the new breed of smaller capacity engine with all kinds of accoutrements to make it do the same thing. And with that goes a whole new level of complexity and expensive points of failure.

The problem here is that isn’t just the new Focus. I had a look at a couple of other cars on the lot, and the choice is limited. Almost every other car is an SUV now, and I don’t want an SUV and I don’t want a complex driving interface. It’s all academic since I will not be able to afford one this side of 2029 anyway, but this will be the choice in the future. Ford has discontinued the Mondeo and Vauxhall has shit-canned the Insignia. All you can get now is bloated, boring, expensive, complicated and slow.

As for going electric, I have not yet seen anything that persuades me I want that level of inconvenience in my life. My benchmark is that I want to get from York to Fairford and back without having to recharge. There are no charging points at airshows. Despite the leaps in recent years, the range problem is still a problem, and the daily reality of owning an EV just doesn’t appeal to me.

The problem here is that with all new cars essentially being shit, is that this shit is the feed stock for the used car market, which is causing problems for the sector, People can’t buy the used cars they actually want. Buying a used EV is a roll of the dice, and buying a used hybrid could mean buying a very expensive lemon.

Because of this, normal cars like mine are actually holding their value quite well. I’m not the only one who just wants a normal road car that doesn’t require a computer science degree just to switch on. Only we’re not even allowed to have those. The government is now punishing drivers of older cars by pushing road tax up to £760. You’ll have to pay that just to put an ancient V6 Mondeo on the road. You are only allowed to drive expensive, bloated, boring and complex machines and if you can’t afford one, then tough. Then if you buy what the government is nudging your towards, they will shift the goalposts.

Depressingly, the EV mandate only makes this worse. European car manufacturers are compelled to manufacture cars that people don’t want to run on electricity that we don’t have, which we can no longer even afford to make thanks to Net Zero, so China is dumping its EV surplus on us - which will either lead to new tariffs ensuring nobody at all can afford a car, or the complete death of the European car industry.

There are lots of moving parts right now that disrupt the auto industry, not least the war in Iran, and the skyrocketing cost of diesel, but with the Labour government looking at a per mile tariff for EVs, there’s no way for the motorist to win. The bottom line is that they are killing off personal mobility.

For my part it means soldiering on with my ten year old Vauxhall for as long as it can cope with me as a driver. Only we won’t end up like Cuba with people maintaining old classics because the government will price them off the road. Those in the lower income bracket will simply have to give up motoring entirely, which is ultimately what the uniparty wants.

There is, however, a certain logic to all this. If the objective is urban densification, and to reduce the overall number of road journeys, then the motorist does have to be squeezed, but this creates an yet another problem when people are electing to move out of the cities to get away from third-worldism and into dormitory estates on the outskirts which necessitates a car in order to commute. The government’s solution to commuting is to eliminate jobs so people don’t have to travel at all.

In the meantime, those of us on modest incomes who still need to get around will be running older, thirstier cars weaving between potholes created by boring new SUV bricks handed to people with fake disabilities. Long gone are the golden days of motoring when you could pick a newish Audi A4 for £7k and actually drive it. You are now condemned to bland techno-junk if you can afford to drive at all. One by one, the little things that make life in Britain worth living are being erased.