Cars Were Supposed To Be Fun

Cars were supposed to be fun. You turned a key, chose a road and went somewhere. Then the automobile discovered accounts, permissions, subscriptions, software updates and the extraordinary commercial usefulness of knowing where its owner has been.

Big Tech saw data. Elon Musk saw something larger: a way to remake the car, the factory and perhaps the future itself. Tesla forced a sleepy automotive industry to wake up, made electric cars desirable and changed what drivers expect a car to be. Through SpaceX, Musk's public ambitions also reach far beyond the road to Mars.

That achievement deserves more than worship or dismissal.

Cars Were Supposed to Be Fun is Ashley Drury's fast, funny and sceptical journey through automotive history, electric ambition, connected-car data, artificial intelligence, subscription logic and the slow transformation of the car into a device. It asks why every control became a screen, why ownership now needs an account, why a parked car requires an update and whether progress has quietly confused capability with improvement.

It is an argument about what Tesla got brilliantly right, what the old industry was too complacent to see and what car culture risks losing when software takes the wheel.