Cars: Accelerating the Modern World review — How our dreams of speed inspired and hurt us

According to this compelling exhibition exploring the impact of cars on 20th-century society, it was speed that was the initial motor behind the astonishing spread of the automobile.

First on show is a 1953 Firebird modelled on a jet fighter, complete with a bubble cockpit and running boards like swept-back wings. Parked behind is the first true production car, the Benz Patent Motorwagen 3, which went on sale in 1888. Top speed? A stately 10mph.

The show explores how car production transformed industry and consumerism, streamlining everything from hats to bacon slicers, remaking cities and even nations (Hitler’s autobahns) in the process. The effect on our environment is the least explored aspect of a show that essentially celebrates the car as a creative phenomenon.

An obsession with driving-as-flying was there at the outset, captured here in charming illustrations from late 19th-century Paris, and in the prototype Pop.Up Next (2018), a flying car co-designed by Italdesign, Airbus and Audi. These suggest dreams of freedom as much as speed have steered our fantasies, a freedom whose price in consumerism and environmental degradation was already being questioned by 1970 in songs such as Janis Joplin’s Mercedes Benz. Electric cars continue this individualistic quest (Tesla’s Elon Musk thinks that public transport “sucks”).

We’ve yet to realise that we’re not stuck in traffic; we are the traffic.

From November 23 to April 19 (vam.ac.uk)