The corpus from 1962–1966 looking toward 2025 reveals something sharper than a failed prediction: it reveals a correct diagnosis with the wrong prognosis. These writers saw the automobile as a civilizational trap — Mumford calling it "monotransportation by private motor car" that converts cities into "disorderly parking lots" and countryside into "refuse dumps" — and they assumed the trap would eventually spring shut visibly enough that people would demand escape. Sixty years later, in 2025, the trap is still sprung, and the demand for escape has taken the form of more sophisticated cars, not fewer.

Mumford's 1964 passage is worth sitting with: he calls the automobile system "technologically primitive" and "devastating," and notes with barely concealed exasperation that people "strangely cling to their naive faith" in it despite two decades of obvious damage. He was right about the damage. He was wrong that the damage would be persuasive. What he couldn't see from 1964 was that the automobile would become so deeply infrastructurally embedded that alternatives wouldn't just be politically difficult — they'd be physically impossible in most of the American landscape he was describing. The vicious spiral he identified (highways bring more cars; more cars demand more highways) didn't stop; it completed itself.

Ellul adds a different layer. His analysis of how technique abstracts motion — reducing "a being in motion" to "a point, a trajectory in abstract space and time" — turns out to be a precise description of what GPS navigation and autonomous vehicle systems actually do to the driver. The distracted elderly pedestrian panicking in a Paris street, unable to perform "perfect motions," becomes in 2025 the human driver navigating a Tesla's lane-assist suggestions, their embodied judgment increasingly subordinated to algorithmic trajectories. Ellul framed this as philosophical horror. We implemented it as a premium feature.

What none of these writers anticipated was the electrification of the automobile as the primary response to its problems. The solution the 1960s could not imagine was: keep the private car, keep the infrastructure, keep the ideology of individual motorized mobility — just change the fuel. The "monotransportation" Mumford condemned survives intact in 2025; it just has a longer charging cable.

[Burke, The New Technology and Human Values, 1963] — This anthology does the most direct work, carrying Mumford's explicit attack on "monotransportation by private motor car" and the Riesman-adjacent observation that American extrapolative thinking makes it "almost impossible to cut down the growth of our autos in size and horsepower." That last detail stings in retrospect: in 2025, the best-selling vehicles in America are pickup trucks and SUVs that have grown continuously in both dimensions. The failure to imagine constraint wasn't a failure of analysis; it was a correct reading of a cultural immune system that would reject any intervention.

[Ellul, The Technological Society, 1964] — Contributes two distinct angles. First, the systemic argument: transport technique emerged not from human desire for mobility but from the requirements of commercial and financial systems needing "rapid, regular, and certain transport of merchandise." This reframes the car not as freedom-technology but as logistics-technology that was subsequently sold as freedom. Second, and more uncanny, the motion-abstraction argument: technique reduces personal movement to "a curve, a trajectory in abstract space and time," eliminating "everything that expresses human personality." This is an exact structural description of autonomous driving, route optimization, and traffic-management AI — technologies Ellul couldn't name but whose logic he fully grasped.

[Singh, Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics, 1966] — Provides the most technically precise anticipation. Singh uses the motor car as his central example of the gap between machine and true automation: a car draws energy from fuel but requires external information (ignition, accelerator, steering) from a human driver. He asks explicitly whether a vehicle could draw both energy and information from external sources — and calls this the condition for a genuinely self-moving vehicle. This is, almost word for word, the engineering definition of an autonomous vehicle. Singh saw the concept clearly in 1966 and treated it as an open theoretical question. In 2025, that question is commercially deployed, imperfectly, on public roads.

[Blish, The Day After Judgement, 1963] — The jump-suit passage is thin for this lens. Individual flight suits for infantry are not personal transportation in any meaningful civilian sense, and this text doesn't illuminate the broader pattern. Including it honestly: it doesn't add to the signal.

The 1962–1966 corpus shows two modes of engaging with personal transportation: the critical-sociological (Mumford, Ellul, Riesman via Burke) and the technical-anticipatory (Singh). These modes almost never talk to each other, and that gap is itself revealing. The critics diagnose the automobile as a social catastrophe and assume diagnosis will eventually produce cure. The technical thinkers see the automobile as an engineering problem with an engineering solution — full automation — and assume solving the engineering problem solves everything else.

By 2025, both have been proven partially right and comprehensively wrong together. The engineering problem Singh identified has been substantially solved: autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles exist. The social catastrophe Mumford identified has deepened, not resolved. What neither mode could see was that technical solutions to the automobile would be captured by the automobile system itself — that self-driving cars would become more cars, not a transition away from cars. Ellul's own framework predicts this: technique does not solve problems, it extends its own domain. But even Ellul, writing in the abstract, didn't apply this specifically to the scenario where the "solution" to car-dependence is a smarter car.

This corpus is almost entirely Western European and American male intellectual voices — Mumford, Ellul, Riesman, Singh — writing about transportation as a systemic or philosophical problem. What's entirely absent is the lived texture of car-dependence: the single mother in a suburb without transit access for whom the automobile is not a philosophical trap but a survival requirement; the communities of color whose neighborhoods were demolished by the highway construction Mumford lamented in the abstract; the Global South, where in 2025 the automobile adoption curve the 1960s West already climbed is now accelerating.

The corpus also has no fiction in the retrieved passages that does real work on personal transportation — Blish's jump-suits are a military curiosity, not an engagement with how people move through daily life. A different telescope configuration pulling from speculative fiction of the same period (Ballard's Crash, published just outside this window in 1973, or even the car-saturated American SF of the pulps) would surface a completely different set of anxieties: not the sociological critique of the automobile system, but the erotic and psychological attachment to the car that made Mumford's critique socially inert. The corpus can see that people irrationally love their cars. It cannot see why, and that's the question whose answer explains 2025.