The Wiki Man: My other car is an iPad

A fortnight ago, I wrote about the arbitrary metrics applied to train travel — and how a trivial reduction in journey time, a measure with little relationship to human pleasure or productivity, has been used to justify the insane cost of a new rail link to Birmingham

A fortnight ago, I wrote about the arbitrary metrics applied to train travel — and how a trivial reduction in journey time, a measure with little relationship to human pleasure or productivity, has been used to justify the insane cost of a new rail link to Birmingham. In the interests of balance, I should point out that our decision-making involving cars may be little better than with rail.

Professor Paul Dolan at the LSE has extensively catalogued this ‘attention bias’, a distorting effect whereby the factors influencing, say, our choice of car may have little to do with the consequences of owning that car for the next five years. We may, for example, compare only the purchase price of prospective vehicles while ignoring their wildly different rates of depreciation; or, less logically still, neglect the cost of ownership altogether because our attention is seduced by the opening action of the rear cup-holders.

And that’s only considering the thought processes of car buyers. Many cars are designed with at least one eye on motoring journalists — a bizarre caste whose preoccupations may coincide in no way at all with the concerns of the real people who buy a car. What percentage of the readership of The Spectator has ever used the word ‘oversteer’, I wonder?

Of course it is difficult to fill column inches without reference to torque, turbo-lag or low-profile tyres — since simply being comfortable when driven at constant speed in a straight line (the leading requirement for motorway driving) doesn’t generate much interesting prose.