“They’re going to do it”: Eric Clapton’s bizarre belief that driving will soon be illegal
Rockstars are strange people. Seemingly, there is something about spending the majority of your existence on the road, playing in front of thousands upon thousands of adoring fans on a nightly basis, and consuming enough illicit substances to take down a small nation, that forever changes a person’s psyche – who knew? As such, it is easy not to bat an eyelid when somebody like Eric Clapton says something as bizarre as “Driving will become illegal”.
In addition to sounding like the set-up of a lengthy Stewart Lee routine, that particular quote is merely a drop in the ocean when it comes to the strange, outspoken opinions of the veteran guitar hero.
Over the decades, Clapton’s public output has spanned the spectrum from the beloved ‘Layla’ – a song written for Pattie Boyd, the wife of his good friend, George Harrison, who would later go on to marry Clapton – to the horrifically racist speech he made in 1976, in which he pleaded to “keep Britain white”, despite being irrefutably indebted to Black music throughout his career.
Although Clapton has become rather less sinister in the years since he committed himself to sobriety back in 1987, that hasn’t stopped the guitarist from periodically leaving interviewers scrambling for a response upon throwing out something as off-the-wall as the idea that the global powers that be wish to make motor cars illegal.
That was what Clapton told Uncut back in 2015, anyway. “The internet has speeded life up, but the actual physical possibility of getting from one place to another is grinding to a halt,” he explained. “In ten years’ time, we actually won’t be able to leave home and go anywhere.” Asked exactly what he meant by that, the guitarist muddied the waters even further: “The road will become, literally, a thing of the past,” he declared.”
“I’m thinking that maybe in ten, 15 years’ time, driving will have become illegal,” he continued. “Because they’ll have introduced another form of transport, with robot cars and things. You won’t be allowed to drive.” Concluding, “They’re going to do it.” Exactly who “they” are remains a mystery, as does where Clapton got this odd belief from, and why he chose to bring it up in a wholly unrelated magazine interview.
While in the years since that interview was given, driverless cars have become a reality, they are still far from being the norm, and nobody with any sense is suggesting that they replace regular cars in their entirety. Even in the incredibly unlikely event that “robot cars” do take over, presumably they would still need roads to drive on.
Perhaps, instead, Clapton was focused on the idea of electric vehicles, and plans to reduce the globe’s carbon footprint by reducing the amount of petrol vehicles on the road – a touchy subject for petrol heads like the former Cream guitarist. While that is certainly a much more realistic hypothesis, driving electric cars still counts as driving and, again, the roads would still exist.
Ten years have already passed since Clapton made that declaration, and neither roads nor driving have yet been made illegal by the powers that be. If his prediction is correct, though, drivers have about four years left to make the most of their time on the road before the robots take over.
