FOR SIX GENERATIONS (five, depending on your definition of what a generation is) we have venerated cars. We have given them the proportions of goddesses, the power of Atlas and spent the wealth of Croesus developing, designing and buying them. We don’t do this with other consumer goods.

A gas-fired cooker is, in its essentials, the same as a car (pressed steel and aluminium, some plastic trim, combustion chambers) but I’ve yet to see one with bodywork by Pininfarina. Likewise, no one has ever sold a successful glossy magazine called What Fridge and 400-million television viewers don’t tune in on a Sunday evening to Top Lamp.

As is the way of all things though, this too has passed, or is at least passing. The veneration of cars has ceased. Oh sure, a tight-knit cadre of worldwide car enthusiasts still cry glory at the sight of a new Ford, Ferrari or Fisker but the vast majority of the seven billion people out there now regard the car as, at best, a tool. At worst, a menace.

The basis for our desire is changing. Genuine demographic and societal shifts, combined with the carefully honed marketing machine that serves commerce itself, are slowly moving the goalposts through which our want passes. Until now, the desirability of a car has been based on its power, the noise that its doubtless massive engine creates, how low and curvaceous its bodywork is (never doubt the Freudian nature of our relationship with cars).

That won’t – can’t – last. Stephen Bayley is one of us. He’s a car nut, and has written countless articles and books devoted to the subject. But he’s also a designer, and he sees and recognises the natural wastefulness of current car design.

“I personally anticipate that in that minute part of the marketplace that’s devoted to excess, you’ll see ever more interesting developments in the petrol engine. But, metaphorically, you have to admit that we’re very, very close to the end of the road.

“I’ve got this personal belief that, in spite of the extraordinary illogicality of the dirty old petrol engine, with its pagan rhythms, its oiliness, its smokiness, its inefficiency and its abuse of the environment, [it’s] still managed to inspire the most extraordinary acts of creativity in the people who have made the clothes for [it]. The next generation of popular, democratic cars are going to be hybrids or full electrics, and then the excitement of cars will all be over. We can see that it’s already something from the past.”

That’s something of a bleak view, and developments such as BMW’s high-performance low-emissions petrol-hybrid i8 supercar may give at least the temporary lie to such assertions. Certainly, the car makers, with their multibillion euro investments in their products, will be fanning the embers of our desire with every effort they can expend. But the next generation of truly desirable car, according to Bayley, won’t be a mid-engined supercar.

“I’m pretty sceptical about the future of the personal car. While it won’t be over this year, or next year, people at some point in the not-too-distant future are going to regard it as completely ridiculous that a single human being used to travel around in a tonne and a half of metal.

“I think that the next leap forward isn’t going to be like the 1955 Citroën DS: it’s going to be something astonishingly economical. Someone, possibly even Citroën, is going to invent something like the original 1938 2CV, or even the 1980 Fiat Panda: something extraordinarily simple, no electronic gadgets, a small oil-burning engine, canvas seats. Something like that, in my view, would actually be tremendously exciting. It would get us back to that fundamentally gratifying thing of having a simple machine that is enjoyable to use.”

It’s a comforting and appealing notion that a truly useful, affordable new car could create the basis for a new desire for motoring, something that Ford’s Model T did more than 100 years ago, and something that BMC’s Mini did in 1959.

Don Norman, author of The Design of Future Things and a consultant to, among others, BMW, Toyota, Ford and GM, thinks the sheer expertise and inventiveness of the car companies will keep pushing our desire for cars forward. “Part of the answer to all this is that these new electric cars are fantastic to drive. They’ve got high torque at high speed and low speed, and, with the regenerative braking, it feels like you’re in second gear the whole time. It’s a fantastic feeling. I love it. Yet they’re very efficient and good for the economy.

“Now, all the car makers are doing this, already, whether it’s [with] electric cars or hybrids or fuel cell cars. So people are still experimenting with the mix.

“The Rolls-Royce, and the Bentley and the Lamborghini are such a small percentage of the overall car market that the truth is, it doesn’t matter, and they tend to be bought anyway by people who have multiple cars. So I don’t think that the world cares about these cars. Does a Rolls-Royce use an amazing amount of petrol for its performance? Yes, but the total number of Rolls-Royces in the world and the total distance they travel is miniscule.

“Look at the success of Tesla in the US, with a high-performance electric car. I see no reason why, say, Porsche couldn’t do the same.”

There’s no doubt that we stand, today, at a crossroads. Or at least close enough to one to start paying attention to the signs. Cars are not, nor ever have been, an entirely rational transport choice. Their innate capacity for speed, endeavour and recklessness has lifted them far apart from the sensible drudge of a bus, tram or train. But if cars, and the private car, are going to survive into the 22nd century, then they must change. Not necessarily out of all recognition, but they must become blameless. Ecologically insignificant. Congestion proof. Utterly safe.

In doing so, will they become also shorn of passion, of desire? Perhaps not. Volvos are incredibly safe, yet still desirable. A Mini Cooper diesel is pretty fuel efficient, yet still fun to drive. And a Toyota iQ, short on traffic-clogging footprint though it is, is hardly a bore to look at or drive. Any car that can combine these disparate elements may just be this generation’s new Model T.

In the not-too-distant future people are going to regard it as completely ridiculous that a single human being used to travel around in a tonne and a half of metal