Here, Peter Giesen and Sheila Sitalsing alternately write about what happened to them or what they noticed on the road and on the roadside.
The Hyundai Kona is a somewhat drowsy civilian car, silent witness of an aging motorist corps that highly appreciate ‘the high seat’. Until you hit the accelerator. Then the Kona shoots from 0 to 100 kilometers in 7.6 seconds. For example, the bourgeois is faster than the American working-class boy who took 12.2 seconds in 1965, tumbled backwards in the racing cockpit of his Ford Mustang, the muscle car par excellence.
It is wonderful to perform a weaving maneuver with a Kona. You step on the gas and leave all the petrol and diesel cars behind you. But what will it be like if everyone drives electric, in 2035 or later? Then you no longer have an overview, but the Tesla’s and Kona’s shoot past you on all sides, accelerating at lightning speed from the back field.
Ever faster cars require measures that keep the motorist’s sublimated murderous spirit in check. Cars have become safer since the 1970s when road fatalities were at their highest. In addition, seat belts were made mandatory and alcohol was banned in traffic. To the dismay of many motorists, who regarded such measures as an unacceptable infringement of their personal freedom.
Road deaths have always been regarded as the acceptable price for the ‘freedom’ of the motorist. But we live in a time when risks are eliminated as much as possible. Technology boosted the power of the civilian car, but technology will increasingly limit the freedom of the driver in the coming decades. Anyone driving a modern car already experiences a form of gentle coercion: the lane assist that keeps you on track, the ‘intelligent’ cruise control that brakes if someone drives in front of you. From July, all new cars will be equipped with an intelligent speed assistant, which determines your speed based on other traffic and information from speed signs. You can disable this assistant. Still. But there is no escaping it. Slowly but surely, the driver is strapped into a corset of technological limitations, until he has as much influence over his car as the child who gets behind the wheel of a merry-go-round. When the fun of driving disappears, there is no longer any need for high speed and acceleration. It will be a long time before this technology is perfected and accepted. But the road pirate’s days are numbered.