We're seeing it in statues being hauled down in city centres and in television programmes getting banished from streaming services. As modern societal values are applied to lives that were lived centuries ago and comedy shows first written and performed two decades previously, transgressions are being unearthed left, right and centre.
Whatever your views on the razing of the Edward Colston statue by protestors in Bristol last week, and on Little Britain's removal from Netflix and BBC iPlayer, it does feel as though the old exculpation - that a set of beliefs or a cultural artefact was 'of its time' - is not going to cut it any longer. Now watch the same revisionist process crash through industries and cultures far and wide.
In many if not most cases, a great deal of good will come of it. In others, all that will be achieved is the derailing of long overdue public discourse as we instead argue the rights and wrongs of white men dressing up as black women, as in the case of Little Britain. But that process of revision is looming nonetheless. You can bet it is on its way to reevaluate the ethics of the fashion sector, of shipping and aviation, of international tourism, of livestock and arable farming, and, in amongst all of that, of the automotive industry, too.
The years roll along and attitudes gradually change. That's what is at the heart of all this. It seems inevitable to me that at some point in the future, be it months or decades from now, society will come to find the fashion industry's use of sweatshops and child labour intolerable, alongside the destruction it wreaks on the environment, and so demand an end to it all (and you'll hear no objection from me). The same will surely one day apply to mass pastoral farming, to battery farming, to big business that decimates natural habitats to clear way for palm oil plantations, and to the shipping and aviation sectors that do such damage to the environment.
And to the car industry as well. So which attitudes that are widespread today around cars and driving might one day offend our children and grandchildren? How might the reckoning catch up with the automotive sector? Perhaps future generations will find it inconceivable that we gladly drove through city centres knowing the particulates that spilled from our car's tailpipes actually killed people (as many as 5,000 a year according to a 2012 BBC report).
Most likely they'll think us dinosaurs for driving fossil fuel powered cars at all, given the damage we know they do the environment globally. The transport sector as a whole is responsible for 14 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions and cars account for a meaningful portion of that, though not an enormous one (by way of example, the European Union says cars contribute around 12 per cent of its overall emissions). In fact, I reckon we'll be judged more harshly in another area: that we ever thought it was tolerable that 1.25m people should be killed on the roads each year either in vehicles or as pedestrians.
Nevertheless the car industry does have one big advantage over yesterday's television shows and the statues that were erected a long time ago, for unlike both of those, it doesn't stand still. Thanks to the pressures of intense competition and comparatively short life cycles - not to mention the way it is structured financially - the automotive sector evolves almost continually. Some change has been forced on it. Some the result of wayward or worryingly indifferent misdemeanours. But change it does, slowly and assuredly, and generally for the better.
If it is to avoid a reckoning, this must surely continue at ever greater pace. If it works hard enough, it can reduce its impact on local and global environments and continue to take great strides in reducing the number of people losing their lives in road traffic accidents. Perhaps if it does that, quickly enough and in a concerted, considered way, the reckoning will always be looming, but never quite upon it (although you and I might yet be considered monsters for the attitudes we once held, of course).
But there are some worrying trends. Recent figures for the EU and the USA suggest the reduction in car tailpipe emissions has stalled, partly because many of us are now choosing less fuel efficient crossovers and SUVs. Deaths on the roads are not falling either. In fact, in North America they are actually creeping up, in part because many more people are living in densely populated cities, but also because the bigger, taller and heavier cars that lots of us prefer are more lethal for pedestrians.
In three respects - local emissions, global emissions and road safety - we are in the midst of a technological revolution that could foster drastic improvements across the board. It doesn't matter if that onrushing technology has been compelled by legislators or pushed along by car makers' better nature, because the outcome is the same: a new era of vehicles that harness the latest technologies to pollute and kill far less.
On emissions, car manufacturers seem to be bending themselves almost to snapping point bringing to market electric cars that aren't profitable, that the infrastructure isn't yet ready to support and that many drivers simply don't feel ready to switch in to. It is an imperfect solution to a multi-faceted problem. And yet there is surely some encouragement to be taken from the breakneck speed at which the industry is innovating. That qualifies as 'working hard enough' in my book.
Meanwhile, in a report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers for policy makers on reducing road fatalities, vehicle safety improvements and safer roads were bundled together as one of six measures that should be taken. The point is, there's an awful lot that can be done to reduce fatalities on the road beyond introducing new tech, not least improving driver training and pedestrian infrastructure, and the burden here doesn't lie solely on vehicle manufacturers.
On and on it goes. The generation that follows immediately after ours will in turn be judged long after they've been and gone, too. Maybe children mining cobalt in the DRC for the batteries in the electric cars they drove will be their great shame. Or the shameless, in-built disposability of a culture which seeks to replace its car within 36 months. More than likely it'll be something you and I can't even conceive of right now.
All that the car industry can do is strive to be better, to continue taking a long hard look at itself and not shy away from the spotlight which is perennially pointed at it. Because the alternative is head-in-the-sand stasis - and, shortly afterwards, learning that judgement day has caught up with it in no time at all.
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