The late-1980s corpus reveals a striking split personality about personal transportation's future. On one side, you have the philosophical critique: James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games delivers one of the sharpest analyses of automobile culture ever written in speculative non-fiction, arguing that the car doesn't enable travel — it eliminates it. "We do not go somewhere in a car, but arrive somewhere in a car. Automobiles do not make travel possible, but make it possible for us to move locations without traveling." This is not a prediction about 2025; it's a diagnosis of something already true in 1986 that has only intensified. The autonomous vehicle, the ride-share bubble, the SUV as rolling living room — all of these are the logical completion of Carse's observation. We have spent forty years engineering the car into a more perfect instrument of non-travel.

On the other side, the fiction writers were threading a surprisingly accurate needle on automation. Don BelPatris's Coils depicts electric trucks running automated lanes on highways while still carrying a human driver as a union concession — the Teamsters having negotiated blocks of stock rather than outright opposition. Read that sentence again in 2025, when Tesla's semi-autonomous fleet is navigating exactly this political terrain, and when labor negotiations around autonomous trucking remain one of the genuinely unresolved questions of the logistics industry. BelPatris got the technology roughly right, got the political friction exactly right, and got the resolution wrong — we haven't reached the featherbedding equilibrium he imagined, we're still in the fight.

Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive adds a third data point: the hovercraft cab in what appears to be a near-future New York, with an invisible driver behind plastic armor, a surveillance camera instead of a face, and payment negotiated through currency fanned at a lens. This is Uber, rendered in cyberpunk. The driver's invisibility, the passenger's isolation, the transaction conducted through glass — Gibson had the social texture of the ride-share economy before the smartphone existed to enable it. What he missed was that the driver would still be human, still present, still struggling economically. His cab is more automated than ours; our cab is more exploitative than his.

Voinovich's Moscow 2042 offers the sharpest class-stratification vision: steam-powered and furnace-driven vehicles organized in strict hierarchical lanes, with the narrator's bus pulling to the ditch as a motorcade of Zil limousines screams past. The technology regressed in his satirical USSR, but the politics of road space — who gets priority, who pulls over — maps almost perfectly onto 2025's HOV lanes, emergency vehicle corridors, and the quiet class war of urban traffic management.

[Carse, Finite and Infinite Games, 1986] does the philosophical heavy lifting. His analysis of the automobile as a "veiling" technology — hiding inaction behind apparent action, neutralizing space rather than traversing it — is the conceptual key to everything that follows. The observation that "to be moved from our living room by an automobile whose upholstered seats differ scarcely at all from those in our living rooms... is to have left home without leaving home" reads in 2025 as a description of the Tesla Model S interior design philosophy. Carse wasn't predicting; he was identifying a structural tendency that technology would continue to fulfill.

[BelPatris, Coils, 1985] contributes the most technically specific vision. The automated highway lanes, the electric and hydrogen vehicle competition, the solar-powered charging infrastructure, and crucially the labor politics — the Teamsters taking equity stakes rather than fighting automation outright — form a remarkably coherent picture. The detail of the motorcycle being chosen because it doesn't appear in traffic data computers is a 1985 writer intuiting something about surveillance infrastructure that wouldn't become culturally legible for another twenty years.

[Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 1988] provides the social texture. The hovercraft cab scene isn't about the vehicle — it's about the transaction, the anonymity, the bribed dispatcher, the intimidated fares. Gibson understood that future transportation would be primarily about access negotiation rather than mechanical innovation. The camera-as-driver, the currency-as-authentication, the plastic armor as social boundary — these are the design decisions of the gig economy, arrived at through different technical means than Gibson imagined.

[Voinovich, Moscow 2042, 1987] and [Sagan, Contact, 1985] occupy the margins but usefully. Voinovich's hierarchical road system satirizes Soviet power but accidentally predicts the stratification of road access in any sufficiently unequal society. Sagan's Ellie driving a Thunderbird at 130 kph through the West Texas night — alone, fast, in control — is the last gasp of a transportation fantasy that was already fading: the American road as freedom, as solitude, as the driver in full sovereign possession of their machine.

What this corpus reveals is a 1985–1989 moment when writers were simultaneously completing the old transportation mythology (Sagan's highway solitude, the car as personal freedom) and beginning to dismantle it. Carse's philosophical deconstruction and Gibson's social realism point in the same direction: the car was already becoming something other than transportation. The arc runs from vehicle as freedom through vehicle as social negotiation toward vehicle as managed logistics — and the 2025 reality sits squarely in the middle of that trajectory, not at either end.

The inflection point the corpus couldn't fully see was the smartphone as the missing infrastructure. BelPatris imagined automated highways requiring physical lane modifications. Gibson imagined bribed dispatchers. Both were groping toward the idea that transportation coordination would be the real innovation — they just couldn't imagine it happening through a glass rectangle in everyone's pocket. The automation they predicted arrived, but through software rather than hardware, through the network rather than the road.

This corpus is almost entirely white, Western, and urban-or-suburban in its transportation imagination. The electric trucks run on Sunbelt highways; the cabs navigate Manhattan and London; the philosophical driver is implicitly propertied. What's missing entirely is the Global South's transportation reality in 2025 — the moto-taxi economies of Lagos and Nairobi, the informal transit networks that move more people than any automated system, the ways in which the "future of transportation" imagined in 1985–1989 was always already a future for a specific slice of humanity.

The corpus also has almost nothing on cycling as serious transportation infrastructure — the one area where 2025 has genuinely surprised the predictions, as cities from Amsterdam to Bogotá have built cycling networks that challenge automobile dominance in ways none of these writers anticipated. BelPatris's protagonist chooses a motorcycle specifically because it evades surveillance; the possibility that a bicycle might be chosen because it's simply better for urban movement doesn't appear. The blind spot is the human-scaled, non-automated, non-electric future that has quietly been built in parallel with the technological one.