The Driver Did Not Consent to His Own Abolition. This Magazine Withholds Its Signature.
Jaguar names an era, the third pedal retreats to a shorter list every year, and somewhere a spreadsheet quietly schedules the driver for deletion. On the only question that finally matters, this masthead casts the deciding vote. It votes no.
Jaguar named its next car this week and wrapped the prototype in a camouflage it calls a signature of its future. We have reported the facts precisely as they stand: a name, a silhouette, a promise of an era, and no confirmed price, no range figure, and no horsepower claim, because none of those have been offered. We do not file speculative numbers and call them context. That is not a policy we chose; it is the only policy available to a publication that intends to be believed.
What we wish to add, in our own voice, is this.
The new era Jaguar is announcing is not being announced alone. It arrives in the company of a decade of announcements, from every corner of the industry, that describe the same direction in different fonts. The car is becoming capable. The car is becoming confident. The car is becoming, in the phrase that has now appeared in more press releases than we care to count, a machine that drives like nothing else. What these sentences share, and what their authors generally decline to name directly, is the implicit conclusion: the car is becoming something that needs the driver less.
When driving becomes a subscription, the driver becomes the billing address.
This magazine does not quarrel with what fills a tank or charges a battery. We have said so plainly before and we will not pretend the repetition is unnecessary. But we do hold a position on what the car asks of the person behind the wheel, and that position has not moved. Driving is an act. An act requires the person performing it to have learned something, to have brought something, to be responsible for the outcome in a way that cannot be delegated to the vehicle. The manual gearbox is the last physical evidence that this was ever the arrangement. It insists. It requires. It will not be bypassed by a feature selection.
When the car no longer requires the driver to intervene, the driver is not liberated. The driver is reclassified. The act of driving becomes the experience of being transported with a steering wheel in hand, and the distinction between a driver and a passenger resolves, slowly, into nothing of consequence. The manufacturers call this progress. We call it a change in the terms of the relationship, and we think the terms worth naming before they expire.
The third pedal is still available. On an honest count, on a shrinking list, at a narrowing range of models, it is still available. This masthead will say so in plain language every time the occasion warrants it, and will note the opposite with the same clarity when that occasion arrives. Readers who want to know why we keep returning to this subject should understand that the subject keeps returning first: it arrives every season in a new car that cannot be had with three pedals, and in another that can, but barely.
We are not a publication that decides its convictions by mood. The Congressman box that runs below this editorial is not theater. We have been running it because we mean it, and we mean it on a Monday as much as we mean it on a Friday when the column inches are full. The republic is not obligated to share this magazine's priorities. But it has the information, and the information is the obligation this masthead can discharge.
Write your representative. Tell them a driver is a specific thing, that the act of driving is not interchangeable with the experience of being carried, and that the distinction matters enough to preserve while there is still something left to preserve. History has shown, repeatedly, that the things worth keeping are not kept by those who assume someone else is keeping them.
This magazine is keeping it. The reader can help.