Smokeys, Bandits and Cannonballs

The lost era of the Proud Highway

People don’t associate cars with freedom the way they used to. Even in car commercials, we’re reminded that those smooth “Tokyo Drifts” we see are performed by professional drivers on closed courses.

These days, the car is an efficiency device. It’s a mobile office, or maybe a recreation center. It’s a source of safety and comfort, not freedom, escape or rebelion. Thelma and Louise looked at their lives and faced with a choice between rocketing into the Grand Canyon or returning to the men who had abused them, chose the accelerator. These days, the cars have censors and can take over control. Forget launching yourself into one of the wonders of the world, your BMW won’t even allow you to squeeze into too tight a parallel spot.

Hunter S. Thompson’s “Great Red Shark,” was a steel monster that cut through the desert like a predatory fish through the ocean. It had no mind but its twisted driver and would ambivalently obey all commands for speed and direction.

A modern Chevy Bolt, by contrast, will collect data as you drive, including how far you travel, how fast you go and whether you accelerate or ease into turns. That data is then transmitted to manufacturer GM, which sells it to LexisNexis, which uses it to compile risk reports for insurance companies. With their cars tattling on them about their driving habits, some people have seen their insurance rates rise substantially, despite not filing claims, being held responsible for accidents or being stopped and ticketed. Another wrinkle: many of these drivers say they never consented to having their data collected or resold. Some even outright said no, but their cars betrayed them anyway.

With a hat tip to the Starkman Approved newsletter, here’s how GM CEO Mary Barra describes her goals: “Our vision is to create a world with zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion.” If this is truly what GM wants, it’s a thumb to the eye of the company’s legacy. GM brought us the Corvette and the Camaro. We are a long way from the sporty muscle cars and drag racers of the 1960s, but driving in America used to be about freedom and now it’s become something very controlled, clinical almost as if we’d ceded the allure of the open road to some corporate Human Resources department.

In a way, we did and there was a big cultural clash about this. Film director Hal Needham, a former stuntman and NASCAR team owner made a bunch of car-centric comedy adventures like Smokey and the Bandit, Hooper and Stoker Ace, all starring Burt Reynolds. The Smokey movies were particularly rebellious, with Jackie Gleason playing a hapless and cruel law enforcement officer named Buford T. Justice, who hunted Reynolds’ Trans-Am driving hero for sport. Then there were the screwball car comedies like The Gumball Rally and The Cannonball Run, the latter featuring an ensemble including Reynolds, Dom Deluise, Jackie Chan, Roger Moore and the core Rat Pack. And don’t forget the 50 police-car pile-up in The Blues Brothers. For awhile, the popular culture around cars was all about testing the limits of law enforcement.

Oh, wait... The Cannonball Run was real!

A lot of people don’t know that the Cannonball Run was a real event — a coast-to-coast speed race on public roads featuring everything from exotic sports cars to a purloined utility van, with a cash prize at the end. Journalist Brock Yates dreamed it up as a protest of the national 55 mile per hour speed limit that the federal government pushed on all interstates in 1974, partially as a response to the OPEC oil embargo, which had sent fuel prices surging.

Higher pump prices also meant that Americans had to get more practical about their cars, preferring smaller, more efficient vehicles that lacked the power of previous behemoths. Over time, cars evolved to become more computerized and software-driven and can no longer be as easily modified as their mechanical predecessors. Cars are now more likely to be networked and trackable, which is something that really came about when we dropped manned toll booths for E-Z Pass lanes. The highway no longer offers anonymity and it’s not hard to imagine that in the world that Barra describes, police would have the authority to shut vehicles down, or force them to pull over. Manufacturers would also be able to turn cars into bricks. Maybe insurance companies would have the same rights.

Already, long haul truckers are subject to all sorts of surveillance by their employers, including cameras that analyze eye movements for signs of distracted driving or fatigue. This could easily be deployed in non-professional settings, perhaps not as a legal requirement for as a condition for getting liability insurance at a good rate. Already, as we have seen, GM is more than willing to monetize driver data for this and other companies will, too.

The 55 MPH national speed limit was removed in 1995, as fuel prices fell. In the 1990s, car culture regained some of its rebel creed. We all laughed as the hapless urban planner in the movie Singles kept trying to sell his idea of a fancy commuter train for latte loving professionals, only to be met, time and again, with the refrain, “People like their cars.” Others romped around the countryside in Humvees, a piece of combat equipment turned into a luxury status symbol. We were not far from The Fast and The Furious or Grand Theft Auto.

But, some things have changed. Though hybrids have been available since the start of the century, we are now in a transition towards electric vehicles and those are all going to be computerized and networked and some will do the driving for you. Sure, you can hang onto an old Dodge Charger but will you be allowed to drive it? Will it be insurable?

Nobody is talking about outlawing the old mechanical beasts, but that’s not how they’ll die out. What we’ll see, instead, is a thinning out of the infrastructure to support them. A community may decide that only self-driving cars can operate in a certain area. Fueling stations might become scarce. The liability of self-directed driving could climb when artificial intelligence is available to do the job for you.

Meanwhile, people have also grown skeptical of the auto industry. It’s now been well publicized how car companies lobbied public planners to build car friendly communities that became car dependent, at the cost of pedestrians, cyclists and the environment.

It will be interesting to see, over the next few decades, how books and movies like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas go over. They might read the way westerns do to a contemporary eye. One thing we do need is a new focus for rebellion, or even just pushing boundaries, because the freedom promised by cars has now been subsumed by technology and things are changing on the road.