The 1983–1989 corpus reveals something striking when you point it at personal transportation: these writers were almost uniformly uninterested in the vehicle itself. The car, the truck, the hovercraft — these appear as props, as philosophical occasions, as symptoms of something else entirely. The actual future of getting around wasn't what preoccupied them. What preoccupied them was the question of whether you'd need to go anywhere at all.

Roszak's automated home, where "nobody need ever leave the house," is the clearest statement of the era's central transportation fantasy: the abolition of transit through connectivity [Roszak, The Cult of Information, 1986]. Clarke, writing from Sri Lanka, had already lived this — satellite communications had "cut my travelling to a fraction of its former value" — and extrapolated it forward as a general social principle: communications improvements often outperform transportation improvements, dollar for dollar [Clarke, A Choice of Futures, 1984]. These writers didn't imagine self-driving cars so much as they imagined a world where the trip became unnecessary. The vehicle was a problem to be routed around, not a technology to be perfected.

The one passage that gets closest to our actual 2025 is Zelazny and Lindskold's Coils, where an automated electric truck moves at 150 km/h on specially equipped highways, with manual controls retained as a Teamsters' Union negotiating concession [Zelazny/Lindskold, Coils, 1986]. This is uncannily accurate — not just the vehicle but the politics of the vehicle, the labor negotiations around automation, the coexistence of autonomous and human-driven modes on the same road. The "forty-roger, finger-wave" compromise between automation and featherbedding is closer to the actual 2025 trucking industry than almost anything else in the corpus.

Gibson's London hovercraft cab in Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) is the corpus's other direct transportation scene — and it swings the other direction entirely. No autonomous vehicle here: a human driver invisible behind plastic armor, a surveillance camera in a phallic position, cash bribes to dispatchers, casual violence in the baggage claim [Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 1988]. Gibson's 2025 transportation infrastructure is degraded, not upgraded. The affluence is real but the friction is brutal. This too has a partial truth to it — Uber's surge pricing, airport chaos, the gig-economy dispatcher — though Gibson imagined physical hovercrafts where we got apps.

[Zelazny/Lindskold, Coils, 1986] does the heaviest lifting for transportation specifically. The automated truck with solar/electric power, the "specially equipped highways," the union politics of retained manual controls — this is the passage in the corpus that most directly engages with the mechanics of autonomous freight. Remarkably, it even anticipates the sequencing correctly: automated trucks before autonomous passenger vehicles, highway automation before city streets.

[Carse, Finite and Infinite Games, 1986] provides the philosophical frame that explains why the rest of the corpus is so incurious about transportation technology. His argument that the automobile's "goal" is to make itself invisible — to let you "arrive somewhere" without having "traveled" — reframes the whole transportation question. If cars already succeed by making themselves disappear, then the autonomous vehicle is just the logical completion of a project that began with the upholstered seat. "We do not go somewhere in a car, but arrive somewhere in a car." Carse didn't predict autonomous vehicles; he explained why they were philosophically inevitable.

[Roszak, The Cult of Information, 1986] and [Clarke, A Choice of Futures, 1984] form a matched pair: both predict the substitution of communication for transportation, and both are partially right. Remote work, teleconferencing, and e-commerce have indeed reduced certain categories of transit. But neither anticipated that increased connectivity would also generate new transportation demands — food delivery, gig-economy trips, the logistics explosion of e-commerce. They imagined substitution; what happened was layering.

[Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 1988] contributes the counter-vision: transportation as friction, degradation, and improvised violence rather than smooth automation. His future London/Sprawl has energy and affluence but also endemic petty crime, infrastructure decay, and class-stratified mobility. The hovercraft cab is not a utopian vehicle.

[Turkle, The Second Self, 2011] — technically outside the 1983–1989 publication window but drawing on that era's foundational thinking — surfaces the transportation consequence nobody in the corpus predicted: teenagers texting while driving, the car becoming a site of dangerous connectivity rather than isolated transit. Roman, eighteen, who will not stop texting behind the wheel, represents a failure mode that the corpus's transportation imagination completely missed.

The arc across the corpus moves from substitution fantasy to friction realism. Early in the window, the dominant vision is Clarke's: communications technology makes physical transportation less necessary, and this is unambiguously good. By the late 1980s, Gibson is imagining transportation not as something technology will solve but as something that will remain stubbornly, violently human — with automation appearing as an overlay on existing chaos rather than a replacement for it.

The Coils passage is the inflection point: it holds both visions simultaneously. The automated truck is real and functional, but the human controls are still there, the union is still negotiating, and the protagonist is grateful for the featherbedding because it means there's a cot. Automation and human labor coexist awkwardly, inefficiently, politically. This is closer to 2025's actual autonomous vehicle landscape — Waymo operating in geofenced zones, Tesla Autopilot requiring "driver attention," trucking automation stalled in regulatory and union negotiation — than either the utopian substitution or the dystopian breakdown.

What the entire corpus missed: the smartphone as the defining transportation technology of 2025. Not the vehicle, not the road, not the fuel — the device that summons the vehicle, tracks the route, rates the driver, and distracts the passenger into near-accidents. The transformation of personal transportation in our actual present is primarily a coordination and attention story, and that story wasn't visible from 1983–1989 even to writers who were already thinking hard about networked devices.

This configuration has significant gaps. The corpus skews heavily toward Anglo-American and Japanese technological imagination — Clarke writing from Sri Lanka is the exception, and even he's projecting a Western communications infrastructure onto the developing world. What's missing is any vision of how transportation technology would develop differently across economic contexts: the motorcycle-taxi ecosystems of Lagos and Jakarta, the tuk-tuk apps of Southeast Asia, the electric scooter chaos of Chinese cities. The 2025 transportation revolution is as much a Global South story as a Silicon Valley one, and this corpus cannot see it.

The corpus also has no women authors in the transportation passages — Gibson, Zelazny/Lindskold, Clarke, Carse, Roszak are all male — and this matters because the gendered experience of transportation (safety, surveillance, harassment in transit spaces) is precisely what Gibson's hovercraft scene gestures at but doesn't develop. The violence in that baggage hall lands on Kumiko; Sally deals with it. The corpus notices this dynamic but doesn't theorize it.

Finally: climate. The Coils passage mentions solar power and clean hydrogen almost in passing, as solved problems enabling cheap electricity. The actual 2025 transportation-and-climate entanglement — the EV transition, the political economy of charging infrastructure, the class stratification of who can afford electric vehicles — is entirely outside this corpus's frame. They imagined clean transportation as a technical achievement. They didn't imagine it as a political struggle still ongoing forty years later.