JOHN HUMPHRYS: Have these past months of lockdown finally driven away Petrolhead Fever?

Later this afternoon, I shall do something I haven’t done for about six months. Drive my car.

That’s assuming it starts. It’s been feeling its age for some time now, which is hardly surprising given that it will be 26 next month. It’s a Rover. They stopped making them 15 years ago.

My relationship with cars has always been a troubled one. My first — bought when I was 17 for £27 — was a pre-war sit-up-and-beg Ford Anglia.

It did the job, except when it was raining. The windscreen wipers worked on suction: great when the car was stationary but the faster you went (by which I mean anything over 20 mph) the more slowly they moved. At a giddy 40 mph, they stopped altogether.

As the long months of lockdown approach their end, we may find that our enforced separation from our beloved cars marks a turning point

I sold it, eventually, to my tight-fisted news editor on the Merthyr Express for a pathetic £17.

He drove off to boast about his bargain to his girlfriend. She got in, slammed the door and the window fell out and smashed. He demanded his money back. I refused.

It’s been pretty much downhill with me and cars ever since.

From all of which you might accurately conclude that I am not exactly a petrolhead. Jeremy Clarkson has nothing to fear from me.

But I suspect even Jeremy, in his more private moments, would acknowledge that the nation’s seemingly never-ending love affair with cars is cooling.

I’d go further. As the long months of lockdown approach their end, we may find that our enforced separation from our beloved cars marks a turning point. Let’s hope so.

The promise held out when the first Benz ‘Patent-Motorwagen’ took to the road in 1886 has been more than delivered. By the time Henry Ford sold his first Model T, 22 years later, it was obvious that the world would never be the same again.

Cheap, reliable cars liberated billions of people. Their horizons widened in ways that had been unthinkable for all but the richest.

A century later it is a different picture.

The Government is committed to a ban on selling new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars. So pretty soon we’ll all be driving electric cars

Yes, there is still huge pleasure to be had from slinging a suitcase into the boot and heading off for the hills or the seaside. But it has come at a terrible price.

The damage to our towns and cities and our children’s lungs has been incalculable.

There were two deeply depressing images from Bournemouth this week: the litter and the car gridlock.

And yet, dirty, smelly, noisy, polluting, environment-destroying machines though they may be, it is hard to imagine surviving without them.

Or is it?

The Covid crisis has taught us a lot about ourselves and the way we live.

Vast numbers of us have discovered that we don’t need a car to go to work for the very obvious reason that we can perfectly well work from home. And the business bigshots who have to pay the bills for our expensive offices rather like the idea of cutting those bills in half. Or more.

This is something that’s not going to go away.

That’s why I have been feeling largely optimistic during these months of lockdown. Is it possible that we may — just may — be approaching the end of our love affair with the motor car?

At the very least, there is a sense that the days of cars being status symbols are ending.

An estate agent acquaintance tells me that London houses with great sweeping drives once sold at a premium because certain sorts of people felt the need to show off their gleaming motors lined up nose-to-tail. No longer.

Let us pray that the days of that truly preposterous ‘status symbol’ — the SUV — may finally be numbered. Before lockdown, it dominated the market.

One of the great mysteries of the modern world is why. Why would anyone living in a city wake up one morning and say: ‘I know what I need. An extremely ugly vehicle that resembles a small tank and uses almost as much fuel. One that’s more likely to kill someone if there’s a collision — which there very well might be because their drivers feel less vulnerable. But, boy, it’s great looking down on drivers of modest little family cars.’

That word ‘modest’ is important. My generation boasted about cars. Young people today don’t. Much more importantly, there is strong evidence that a growing number of teenagers aren’t even interested in learning to drive.

It’s not only the pubs that are opening next weekend. So are driving schools and test centres. But the last report by the Department for Transport shows there has been a sharp decline in the number of teenagers learning to drive.

But there’s the Greta Thunberg factor, too. One of the many great things about the next generation is that so many really do care about the environment

Some 20 years ago, about half had a licence. Now it’s less than a third. There’s been a drop in those aged between 21 and 29, too.

It could be because it’s so much more expensive now than it has ever been. It typically costs at least as much to insure the first used car for a new driver as it does to buy it.

But there’s the Greta Thunberg factor, too. One of the many great things about the next generation is that so many really do care about the environment.

One poll after another shows that top of their list of big worries is global warming. And cars spew an awful lot of greenhouse gases into the skies.

No problem, you say, the Government is committed to a ban on selling new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars. Indeed, it’s been brought forward from 2040 to 2035. So pretty soon we’ll all be driving electric cars. Problem solved.

Well... maybe. But electric cars use energy, too. And that will have to come from renewable sources such as wind and solar power or else what’s the point?

At the moment, there’s nothing like enough of it. And we’d need a tremendous number of batteries.

They, in turn, will need vast amounts of minerals such as lithium. The environmental damage of mining lithium is quite literally incalculable.

There is only one solution to the car crisis. Use them less. And that’s why these past months of lockdown have been so instructive.

I wonder how many of us, who’ve been forced to work from home, have looked out at the cars in their drives and thought: ‘Gosh, how I miss not being able to drive to work. One of the great joys of my life is sitting in that traffic jam, knowing I’ll be late again and that I’ll have to do it all over again this evening. And tomorrow, and... ’

Obviously, we can’t all work from home. But enough can to make a significant difference.

One of Winston Churchill’s most famous sayings was: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’

He was talking about the creation of the United Nations after the war finally came to an end. It’s a different kind of crisis we face today, but it would be a great shame to waste it.

If only these blowers would bite the dust

Before I began writing this column, I was commissioned by the Mail to write about leaf blowers. I hate them.

They are so noisy that the operatives (as the council undoubtedly calls them) must wear ear defenders.

Never mind the poor saps like me who happen to be within a hundred yards of them and will be deafened.

They are also utterly pointless. My own exhaustive time and motion study has proved that a person with a broom is roughly seven times as efficient. And infinitely quieter.

Now the council has produced a form of torment that makes leaf blowers appear benign.

Dust blowers.

Yes… you read that correctly.

Because there are few fallen leaves in mid-summer, they have mobilised the blowers to blast back into the flower borders any stray specks of earth that might have encroached on our paths. The result is exactly what you would have forecast.

A dust storm.

I encountered my first one last week. We adults helped desperate mothers, scooping up small children and rescuing them from the choking dust while the operative, safe behind his goggles and air filter, blasted away happily.

I considered registering a complaint with the council but, sometimes, you just know there’s simply no point.