The 1962–1966 corpus doesn't predict autonomous vehicles or electric cars. It does something more unsettling: it describes the trap we're still inside.

Mumford, writing in 1964, names it directly — "monotransportation by private motor car" — and calls it a "classic demonstration of destructive automation." The car system, he argues, is itself an automated loop: auto production requires auto consumption requires auto infrastructure requires more auto production. Cities become "disorderly parking lots," countryside becomes "refuse dump." What's striking from 2025 is how precisely this describes not a fear but a fait accompli that has since been deepened rather than resolved. The highways Mumford watched being built to carry more cars in "an endless vicious spiral" [Burke, The New Technology and Human Values, 1966] are now the highways being widened for the same reason, in the same cities, with the same justification.

Ellul's contribution is the phenomenological layer. His analysis of motion as something technique abstracts from lived experience — "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" — maps with eerie precision onto what GPS navigation has done to driving [Ellul, The Technological Society, 1964]. The driver who follows turn-by-turn instructions has surrendered exactly what Ellul identified: the personal, embodied, error-prone navigation that expressed something about individual relationship to space. Modern velocities, he warned, "render motion abstract and no longer tolerate imperfect motions just because they are human." The elderly pedestrian panicking in a Paris street is the same figure as the human driver whose judgment is now considered the weak link in a system optimizing toward autonomous operation.

Singh's passage on the self-driving car is the most startling find in this corpus — not because it's visionary, but because it's definitional. Writing in 1966, he describes a vehicle that "could draw from an external source the information-loaded signals that operated its ignition switch, accelerator, brake pedal, steering, and gears" and calls it "really an automobile, that is, a self-moving and self-driven vehicle" [Singh, Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics, 1966]. He frames autonomous driving not as a futurist fantasy but as the logical completion of what a car already is — the word "automobile" meaning self-mover, awaiting only the information channel to fulfill its name. Tesla and Waymo, sixty years later, are finishing Singh's sentence.

[Mumford via Burke, The New Technology and Human Values, 1966] carries the political-economic argument. His "monotransportation" critique identifies car dependency not as accident but as system — one that absorbs industrial production at the cost of urban livability. His insight that this is "destructive automation" — automation that creates more problems than it solves while appearing inevitable — is the frame through which 2025's traffic, sprawl, and car-centric infrastructure becomes legible. He was right about the spiral. He was wrong to think it was demonstrably self-defeating; it turns out systems can be demonstrably self-defeating and persist anyway.

[Ellul, The Technological Society, 1964] does the philosophical work. His argument that technique abstracts motion away from personal life — that the machine demands human movement approach "perfection" on the machine's terms — is the theoretical foundation for understanding why autonomous vehicles feel like a natural endpoint rather than a rupture. Ellul also notes that "only a small minority of people use airlines" while for the majority, space has undergone "an inverse evolution" — more crowded, less solitary, less free despite the rhetoric of mobility. This asymmetry (elite mobility vs. mass immobility) maps cleanly onto 2025's transportation inequality, where autonomous vehicle development is concentrated in tech corridors while transit deserts expand.

[Singh, Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics, 1966] provides the technical imagination. His thought experiment about a car drawing "information-loaded signals from an external source" to control its own operation is a clean description of networked autonomous driving — and he frames it as an intelligence amplification problem, not a transportation problem. This matters: the 1960s imagined self-driving as a cybernetics question before it became an AI question, which explains both why it seemed solvable and why it took so long.

These texts, taken together, reveal that the 1960s had two simultaneous and contradictory visions of personal transportation's future. The first was systemic critique: Mumford and the sociologists saw car culture as an already-failed experiment that rational societies would eventually correct — replaced by diversified public transit, reorganized cities, deliberate planning. This vision has largely not happened. The second was technical completion: Singh and the cybernetics thinkers saw the car as an information-processing problem awaiting solution — a vehicle that would eventually drive itself, fulfilling its etymological promise. This vision has happened, or is happening.

What neither vision anticipated was that the technical completion would be used to deepen the systemic failure — that autonomous vehicles would be deployed not to replace car dependency but to extend it, making solo automobile travel more comfortable and productive rather than less necessary. The 1960s couldn't imagine that the answer to "the car is destroying cities" would be "make cars better." They assumed the critique, once visible, would be actionable. It wasn't.

This corpus is almost entirely Western, male, and academic — and it shows. The transportation discussions center on American urban sprawl and French pedestrians. There's no vision of the Global South's relationship to motorization, which followed a different timeline and different logic. The voices missing here are urban planners, transit workers, the people who couldn't afford cars and lived inside the system's exclusions — the ones for whom "monotransportation by private motor car" was never actually available. Mumford critiques the car system from outside; nobody in this corpus speaks from inside the transit desert.

The corpus also has no women's voices on transportation — a significant gap, since the relationship between personal mobility and gender (who can safely move alone, when, by what means) is a distinct and largely unaddressed dimension of the personal transportation question. What these thinkers couldn't see wasn't just technical (electric motors, ride-sharing platforms) — it was social. The most important transportation story of the late 20th and early 21st century may be who gained access to independent mobility and under what conditions, and this corpus has almost nothing to say about it.