Moments later they were shooting down a curve-walled feeder ramp onto the Transcontinental Superhighway, where the turbocar tore along at velocities unheard of in the days when uncontrolled roads rampaged across America like axe-wielding marijuana addicts, slaughtering thousands of motorists per year. But on the safe freeways of 2009, every vehicle was remotely-controlled via radio-teleautomation by the Great Calculator. A flying car landed without a scratch between two behemoth landships. Electric microcars linked without slowing to form energy-efficient road trains. There were atomobiles fuelled by plutonium slugs, fibreglass flattops powered by solar energy, cars made from soybeans that ran on grain alcohol, and government monstrosities that ran on garbage. Semi-trailer trucks had cabins like insectoid monsters and the bodies of interstellar rocketships. There were Green cars like blue eggs and sports cars resembling ingots of obsidian glass. There were titanic rollers spinning around tiny pod cabins, family runabouts with built-in shopping trolleys, all-terrain rollagons with fat balloon tires, teardrop-shaped tri-wheelers, gyro-stabilized dual-wheelers, bubble-topped autoettes, monocycles, rotocycles, rocket cars, hovercars, dynocars, tilt-cars, straddlebusses, aero-convertibles, amphibivans, ground-effect skimmers and personal mobility suits.
The '30s dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal.
— William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum”
