I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been doing some slow-speed manoeuvring in a Volkswagen Group car with my seatbelt off, I’ve shifted my weight to get a different angle on the passenger-side mirror and the car has turned off and put itself into park mid-manoeuvre. Or the times I’ve set off and realised I needed to get something from the boot.
With modern cars, that means going through the whole rigmarole of turning the various things on or off again. Some of them then have to slowly boot up their infotainment again, load a profile, reconnect Apple CarPlay…
The loss of control that comes with modern cars doing things they’re not asked to do is frustrating, then. But the ritualistic nature of switching a car on and off means a lot to me as well.
Maybe this notion will disappear as we get a generation of drivers who only ever know cars with start/stop buttons, but I love starting an older car with a key. Every car I’ve personally owned has had a key that I needed to insert into a barrel and turn.
The act of making sure the gearbox is in neutral or the clutch is down, twisting the key one step to turn some lights on, then another to prime vital systems and then one final time to wake the engine is a symbolic gesture in motoring.
It’s like uncorking a bottle of wine. I seek out bottles with a proper cork, not because the contents are necessarily of higher quality than in those with a screw top but because the short yet meaningful process of using the corkscrew that ends with the gentle ‘pop!’ somehow gives it all a bit more gravitas.
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