Anyone browsing the museum website could easily overlook the DOWNLOADS tab on the home page. This could be a mistake! Bear with me, please let me explain why.

In 2008 the museum started to publish brief documentation on the website that supported on-going museum displays. One of the very first documents, in 2008, showed that even then, we felt that the rising levels of carbon dioxide emitted by cars was an impending problem and a museum display reflecting this situation was first launched in the same year. Here is one of the graphics that we used.

Since that time, other documents, including “The Impact of Motoring”, “Our Motoring World”, “Tell-Me-More”, “Email-Me-More” and “A History of Motoring in 10 Objects” have all been available to download from the website – albeit sometimes a bit tricky to locate within the site – and accompanying an associated museum display.

Twelve years later, whilst celebrating the magnificent contribution that the museum collection makes to the history of motoring, we continue to recognise that big changes have to occur if the damage inflicted on the planet by our addiction to fossil fuels is not to be catastrophically irreversible: that, of course, includes changes to the world of motoring.

Currently, we have two sets of documents behind the DOWNLOADS tab on the website. “The Direction of Travel – Motoring from The Past to The Future” is a set of five ebooks that, following a short introduction, look at the environmental, social and technological influences that have resulted from 130 years of the motor car and which concludes with a look to the future of motoring. Will hydrogen be the future or battery electric? Just how many vehicle manufacturers brands that we recognise today will still be around in even 10 years time or will new arrivals have disrupted the scene?

Our second, concise ebook addresses “The Impact of the Internal Combustion Engine over the last 130 years and its future in the 21st century”. It directly relates to an on-going display in the museum and tries to answer, at both a European level and a global level, questions that relate to our use of oil and the health and environmental impact of that consumption.

Oh, and that reference to plastic dinosaurs (made from oil)? Well, sorry, you will just have to click the DOWNLOADS tab to find out!