Car-free day – Frank McNally says farewell to a four-wheeled friend

When my old car lapsed into a vegetative state four years ago, I decided against resuscitation. That would have required putting a new engine in it, for one thing. And it looked so peaceful sitting outside my house: all the more so because, thanks to the Dublin Bike station around the corner, and the pay-by-hour GoCar beside it, and a longer-term car rental up the road, I didn’t miss using it much.

But as well as being still vegetative, four years on, it had recently started sprouting vegetation.

Also, I noticed that even taxi drivers (with whom the make and vintage are still popular) had stopped inquiring about its availability.

So after giving it a final clean-up last week, I donated the car's body to science, or at least to the Dublin Fire Brigade, which is where many such bangers end up.

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In part, I liked the idea of it getting a Viking funeral. With this in mind, I was also tempted to skip the ordeal of cleaning the boot out, and the glove compartment, and various other pockets filled with the detritus of life as our family lived it between four and 10 years ago.

When your children are small, the car becomes a spare room on wheels.

In between holidays, for example, the boot was where we kept plastic buckets and spades. It was where outgrown sports shoes and other discarded items ended up too. But it was also full of stuff I couldn’t remember us ever using, and even some things of whose function I was unclear.

So the idea of just leaving it all there to fuel the pyre, like the sacrificial offerings that accompanied Norse heroes, had attractions.

In fact, rather than clear out the boot, I thought briefly about filling it in, with stuff out of the house.

But I didn’t do that in the end. And clearing out the car proved the right option, because when Dave from the fire brigade arrived to collect it, he laughed at my notion that it would be going up in flames, never mind my teenage son’s hope that there might be explosions (“ask him if we can get a video”).

The truth was both more prosaic, and grimmer.

They use old cars to stage accidents, putting dummies inside and then having trainees extract them in various scenarios.

Dave suggested ours might end up on its roof, with another vehicle on top. I shuddered at the thought of people facing this in real-life situations. But it’s necessary work. And as my car was winched onto a lorry, bound for Valhalla, it was comforting to know it would serve a good cause.

The same day this happened, the Bloomberg news agency had a report from Germany about preparations for "peak car": the point, expected in a few years, when motor sales go into what's called structural decline, because of changing habits.

German cities already have the same bike schemes, scooter schemes, and zip-car rentals, as other places.

But the report focused on a new car-pooling service, wherein a computer app matches people making similar journeys and a driver gets them there for half what a taxi would cost. The service had overcome a big traditional dislike of public transport users – other people – and its success has added to the many reasons why younger, city-dwelling Germans are forgoing car ownership as an unnecessary expense.

I enjoyed reading this. It felt good to be on the side of a trend involving youth: that hasn’t happened for a while.

But there was more pessimistic news from the world of self-driving car technologies, which romantics among us had hoped would transform urban life, making it safer and cleaner, while freeing the vast amounts of space currently wasted under parked cars, and all this in no more time than it took the smartphone to achieve world domination.

Well, an autonomous vehicle exhibition in Stuttgart recently was less optimistic, according to one account. At best, experts expected a much slower process than marketeers were letting on. At worst they feared a backlash from the inevitable accidents, and worried about a “seminal” event that might scupper the whole process.

Oh well. I remain a driver for now, in any case, albeit much more selectively than when I owned a (working) car. By coincidence, my licence came up for renewal recently. And completing the form, of course, I came to the bit about whether you wanted the code 115, for “organ donor”, on your card. I had to suppress another shudder, but I ticked the box.