The date is the 14 April 2047. It’s 2am at a garage in downtown Los Angeles and I’m with a small group of eight men ranging in age from seventeen to seventy-five and we are all looking in awe at a 1949 Mercury Sedan. The vehicle is a museum piece but that’s not why everyone is here. The owner (we’ll call him Steve) is planning to do an illegal run up the highway running the car on petrol. These days petrol is pretty rare but you can still buy it from various illegal sources. The petrol for tonight’s run has come from a guy in outside San Francisco that has discovered how to extract gasoline from vintage plastic shopping bags dug up from a Mexican landfill. It’s pretty rough stuff but it will do the job, not least because the car’s engine is unrestricted (now illegal). If we’re caught using petrol we could face six-months on a prison island. Steve starts the car up with a key. The engine sounds unlike anything most of the assembled crowd have ever heard. You can buy software to make otherwise silent electric cars sound like old petrol engined sports cars from the last century but it immediately appears that these are pale imitations of the real thing. The exterior of the car is made of metal and is painted. Inside it smells of oil and leather.