Arriving at the parking lot of a theme park in Germany in-midst 8,000 sparkling middle class vehicles my daughter asks “Kings drive what kind of cars?”.
Cars are a product of industrial mass society that is incompatible with feudalism that supports Kings. One clearly came after the other.
Looking at the current situation we are somewhat like Kings with cars. Fossil fuels make energy dirt cheap so that we can clutter our material surroundings in the wildest ways. In the same time we already have access to information technology that is clearly evolving the mass culture of the 20th century into something new that has neither name nor definition yet.