Car makers are getting very pretentious in their twilight years. I make this sweeping assertion because, on the time-honoured principle that one should know thy enemy (I’m a cyclist who doesn’t drive), I have just spent an amusing two hours perusing The Secret Life of Cars – an “anthropological study into human behaviour and motoring”, no less, commissioned by BMW.

The people who make what they modestly call “the ultimate driving machine” say that they wanted to explore “how it feels to drive in contemporary Britain”. Or, as BMW’s “driver interfaces psychologist” puts it, with a rhetorical flourish worthy of his exalted rank: “We’re constantly asking the question: what kind of psychological space is a car?”

What indeed? To answer that, BMW asked the Oxford-based Social Issues Research Centre to conduct a big survey into driving attitudes. Unsurprisingly, it reveals that cars now play a huge part in most lives. So huge that a BMW bigwig can declare, without a trace of irony, that “our engineers are now really engineers of human experience”. I suppose one should just be grateful that he didn’t echo Stalin’s exact words, and call them “engineers of the human soul”.

Still, it’s a claim that the survey backs up. Some people, it seems, love their cars more than their partners. That goes for women as well as men. Indeed, 26 per cent of women (and 30 per cent of single women) address their cars by a nickname. The researchers call this curious phenomenon “somatomorphism”. A shorter word would be “sad”.

Even more eye-popping is what the report describes as “the socio-cultural significance of the cupholder”. You may think a cupholder is a humble plastic ring on the dashboard into which you ram your grande cup of coffee so that the scalding liquid squirts all over your knees when you go round corners. Not a bit of it! The cupholder, it seems, has a deep Freudian connection to our feelings of security and wellbeing. The report quotes the “French cultural anthropologist” Clotaire Rapaille. “What was the key element of safety when you were a child?” he asks. “It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid.” And this, he concludes triumphantly, is why “cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety in cars”. Convinced? Me neither. But then, we aren’t French cultural anthropologists.

The theories aired in The Secret Life of Cars don’t stop with cupholders. The researchers also mull over a motoring dilemma they call “red devil versus green angel”: our conflicting desires to revel in the power of a gas-guzzling belter, or to feel environmentally smug by opting for some hybrid chug-chug that has the carbon footprint of a thimble but does all of 12mph in a following wind. They also discuss the “hierarchy of seating positions” in a family car. This, it seems, boils down to whether dad automatically expects to drive (yes, on the whole); and why children are distressed, rather than pleased, if one parent sits in the back during a long journey (because the parent is invading “their” space).

The researchers even stood on kerbs and observed how many drivers were singing – yes, singing – as they went by. What a revelation! As you might expect, we sing more when the sun’s out. But the researchers also found that drivers “sing in far greater numbers – up to four times as many – in the morning rush hour than the evening one”. Sadly, they don’t offer any explanation for this bizarre statistic, and I confess that I am stumped too. Do we sing at dawn because we need to cheer ourselves up on the way to work? Or are we simply too shattered after work to croon along to the radio? I think we should be told. Where is our French cultural anthropologist when we need him?

But one fundamental urge comes through clearly. Time and again, car owners identified the “cocoon-like security” of the car – the enjoyment of personal space, the chance it gives for “me time” – as the reason why they prefer to drive, even where public transport is cheaper and more convenient (which, in Britain, it rarely is). As the BMW report grandly puts it: “Surveys have shown conclusively that, among Western consumers, reverence for cocooning is increasing.” The researchers suggest that, far from being irritated by delays and frustrations of daily commuting, many car drivers welcome the extra time to be alone, in comfort, with their thoughts or the soothing voice on the radio.

If there is a serious point for governments and transport authorities to ponder in The Secret Life of Cars, this is it. You can send herds of bendy-buses thundering through the streets. You can lift congestion charges to alpine heights. You can make it impossible to park, and devise one-way systems of such Byzantine complexity that the roads are in perpetual gridlock. It won’t add up to a hill of used hubcaps. While people are wedded to the idea of the “personal cocoon” that is their car – warm, safe and reliable, no matter what’s happening outside – they will never be lured on to public transport.

It’s a familiar story, isn’t it? As with schools and healthcare, the gap between private opulence and public squalor has grown into a chasm. And with car makers offering ever more enticing “home comforts”, the contrast with the sweaty, privacy-stripping, life-sapping, overcrowded hell-on-wheels experience of travelling on British trains grows more pronounced every year.

What’s the remedy? Well, when TV was killing movie-going, back in the 1970s, the cinema chains cannily responded by lavishly upgrading their facilities. The investment paid off handsomely. Movie-going became chic, classy and comfortable. Now everybody goes. And public-sector theatres and concert-halls are scrambling to follow suit.

One day, undoubtedly, the penny will drop in the public-transport sector, too. But not, I suspect, in my lifetime. As a nation we are still too enthralled by our cars – and, of course, those weirdly Freudian cupholders.

Bah humbug

What a whirlwind start Gordon Brown has made in his one-man campaign to clamp down on the unacceptable frivolity of the country he now governs. A fortnight ago he dumped supercasinos. Last week he tried to tighten up the drugs laws (only to find that he had unwittingly appointed a Cabinet of dope fiends). This week he is apparently thinking about reversing the 24-hour drinking legislation brought in by Blair. Not even Oliver Cromwell moved quite so fast to stamp out the gaiety of the nation. And Gordon still has 152 chopping days left to abolish Christmas.

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