I have never cared that much about what car I drive. In my younger days I had some shockers. There was a brown Mini Metro that turned out to be biodegradable  (the floor rusted through while I was driving it). I had a snot-green Yugo 45 that rarely started and when it did start it had a problem with petrol incontinence. I once parked that car on a hill in Weardale and the handbrake didn’t hold – it overtook me with no driver inside whilst I was walking down a hill but fortunately not so fast that I wasn’t able to jump in and avoid disaster. One of my cars met its end at a scrapyard in Sheffield. As I drove it there, a man behind me was completely engulfed in the thick smoke pouring from the exhaust. All I could see in my rearview mirror was his fist emerging from a cloud of fumes.

Most of the cars I owned in my younger days ought to have come with a slightly larger instruction manual than you normally get: Section 1 would be a list of features, section 2 would be the troubleshooting section and section 3 would be selected prayers of intercession for passenger and driver use on motorway journeys. 

Tracey, on the other hand, has always liked cars and minis in particular. She bought one many years ago and it’s still going well and still looking good. With her passion for all things Mini in mind I booked us in for a tour of the mini plant in Oxford in the springtime and it ended up being perhaps the most extraordinary day of the year.

We have all seen videos of factories before but standing in a vast room full of robots working on minis felt very Blade Runner. Each robot had 65 seconds to complete whatever job it was doing before handing the car over to the next robot, to do its job. The tour took us through all the different stages of car production (a detail that I particularly remember is that female ostrich feathers are used for dusting cars in the paint shop before the application of paint). As we wandered around, we had to avoid the driverless vehicles that were moving around the plant: their journeys were perfectly timed to deliver the right part to the right place in the production line at just the right moment. We watched the human end of the production line, where people work on moving platforms to install electrics, seats and dashboards, each process completed with precision in under two minutes and whilst part of me recalled the dehumanization of the production line as so memorably spoofed by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, I also couldn’t help but be impressed by the innovation and efficiency of this place.

There’s a lot of very clever science behind the successful operation of the Mini plant and to me it was a reminder that there are a lot of incredible scientists out there who are worth listening to. It was a strange and possibly contradictory leap to make from car production to environmentalism, but during our visit I found myself thinking about something I heard Kevin Fong, the popular space scientist, writer and broadcaster say six years ago on the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing. He was talking about John F. Kennedy’s famous speech where he promised that the United States would go to the moon within ten years, and of course it happened. Armies of scientists had to  work with precision on every detail but it happened. Fong argued that if such a commitment was made today to put the same amount of effort into addressing the issues of climate change, then scientific innovation really could turn things completely around.  It was at the time an inspiring thought.  Former US president Barack Obama, echoing the language of former Vice-President Al Gore has said rather more soberly, “It’s important to listen to what scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient; especially when it’s inconvenient.” 

So today I suppose I am giving thanks for the scientists who make the world a better place and I am dreaming of a world where scientific evidence is revered as it should be and listening to such evidence is not considered optional. To put it more metaphorically, this old banger we call science has brought us a long way. Let’s not stall the engine now.