The 1962–1966 corpus doesn't imagine the future of personal transportation — it autopsies the present of it. What emerges from these texts is something more unsettling than a failed prediction: a diagnosis that landed, was read widely, and changed almost nothing.

Mumford, writing in 1964, names the disease precisely: "monotransportation by private motor car" has replaced what he calls the "complex efficient system of pre-1940 transportation with its many public and private choices." He's not predicting car dominance — he's watching it consolidate in real time and calling it "technologically primitive." The word lands differently in 2025, when American cities have spent sixty years tearing down elevated rail lines, paving over streetcar tracks, and — exactly as he predicted — demolishing homes and parks to build highways that "only bring more cars in an endless vicious spiral." [Burke, The New Technology and Human Values, 1966, quoting Mumford's 1964 address]

Ellul's contribution is the deeper mechanism. In The Technological Society, he describes how technique strips motion of its personal character — "there was no longer a being in motion, but a point; not a series of acts, but a curve, a trajectory in abstract space and time." His example of "distracted and panicky elderly people in the middle of a Paris street" who cannot conform to the abstract velocities machines require is not nostalgia. It's a structural observation: when transportation systems optimize for throughput, they become hostile to imperfect, human-paced movement. [Ellul, The Technological Society, 1964] In 2025, this reads as a precise description of what urban planners call "pedestrian hostile design" — the 45-mph arterial road, the parking minimum, the intersection engineered for cars and merely tolerated for people.

Singh's offhand thought experiment about the car is the passage that most directly anticipates our present moment — and most clearly shows where 1964 imagination stopped. Discussing intelligence amplifiers, he describes a vehicle that draws both energy and information from external sources, and calls such a thing "really an automobile, that is, a self-moving and self-driven vehicle." [Singh, Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics, 1966] He's describing, conceptually, exactly what Tesla and Waymo are — vehicles that draw navigational information from external networks. But his framing is purely theoretical, a thought experiment about information flow, not a prediction about roads or markets or regulation. He couldn't see the product; he could see the principle.

[Ellul, The Technological Society, 1964] does the heaviest lifting. His analysis of motion-as-technique anticipates the fundamental tension of autonomous vehicles: that driving has always been a deeply personal, embodied act, and that optimizing it for efficiency requires precisely the abstraction he describes — reducing a human being in motion to a point on a trajectory. His observation that "our motions are no longer entitled to express our own personalities" could be the design brief for a level-5 autonomous vehicle. He got the logic right. He missed the technological form it would eventually take.

[Burke, The New Technology and Human Values, 1966, quoting Mumford] provides the political economy of car dependence. Mumford's "endless vicious spiral" — highways generating traffic generating more highways — is the induced demand problem that traffic engineers spent decades denying and urban economists only widely accepted in the 1990s. He saw it in 1964. The diagnosis was accurate; the political will to act on it still hasn't materialized in most of the United States, sixty years later.

[Singh, Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics, 1966] contributes the conceptual seed of autonomous transportation, embedded in a chapter about intelligence amplification rather than transportation futures. The vehicle that draws information from its environment is his illustration of a theoretical principle — which makes it more interesting, not less. He wasn't trying to imagine the future of cars; he stumbled onto it while thinking about something else entirely.

[Burke, quoting Riesman] adds a dimension the others miss: the cultural lock-in. The observation that "it seems almost impossible to cut down the growth of our autos in size and horsepower" points to something beyond engineering or economics — a quasi-religious attachment to the automobile that makes rational policy nearly impossible. In 2025, the American truck and SUV market has grown continuously for three decades, even as fuel economy standards tightened. Riesman named the cultural force that defeats the technical argument.

What this window reveals is a moment when the critique of automobile monoculture was fully formed — intellectually rigorous, empirically grounded, and essentially correct — and simultaneously politically inert. Mumford, Ellul, and the contributors Burke assembled weren't making predictions; they were issuing warnings. The warnings were heard, discussed in serious venues, published in university press volumes, and largely ignored by the systems they described.

The trajectory that emerges is one of critique without consequence. By 1966, the diagnosis of car dependence as "technologically primitive," ecologically destructive, and hostile to human-scale movement was available in print. What wasn't available — what none of these texts could see — was the specific technological form that would eventually challenge automobile monoculture from inside the logic of technique itself: the smartphone-enabled rideshare, the electric vehicle, the navigation algorithm. Ellul's technique begat the critique of technique's transportation failures, and then begat the technological responses to them. The circle is not broken; it's tighter.

This corpus is almost entirely a conversation among European and American male intellectuals writing about transportation as a system problem — urban planning, industrial organization, the sociology of leisure. What's absent is any attention to transportation as experienced from the margins: the domestic worker dependent on two buses and a transfer, the rural community whose train service was cancelled, the body that cannot conform to automobile infrastructure by reason of age or disability or poverty.

Ellul's "distracted and panicky elderly people" appear as evidence for his argument about abstracted motion — not as subjects with their own stakes in transportation equity. The corpus sees car dependence as a civilizational pathology affecting everyone, which flattens the reality that it affects some people catastrophically and others merely inconveniently.

There's also a complete absence of ecological framing in the specific sense we'd recognize now. Mumford calls car monoculture primitive and destructive; Ellul describes countryside converted to refuse dumps. But carbon, climate, and the thermodynamics of fossil fuel combustion at scale are not in the frame. The environmental critique of personal transportation in this window is aesthetic and social — not atmospheric. That's the period's most significant blind spot, and it wasn't filled until the next decade.