Here is an example which is much less blatant, and much less far-reaching, but the principle is the same; and I think we are not a million miles away from this being a reality. Straight out of the playbook of 1984.
Notice that we are slowly, slowly being nudged to move away from owning physical media such as DVDs, CDs, and even books: use kindles instead. Some people say proudly that they don't have a single DVD or CD, or book: they use Netflix, Spotify, and read everything on Kindle, while cheerfully paying their "subscriptions". We are encouraged to download or stream these instead. We are also being encouraged to store our computing data in "the cloud", instead of on our hard disks. Computer programs or "apps": you don't buy a CD in an oversized box like you used to. You download it, and you probably have to keep paying for it regularly, instead of buying it once and for all. This means that, in the future, we might not be able to actually own the media ourselves: it would be stored remotely. This also means that the government could, in theory, access it, read it, destroy it. If there's an ancient book that they don't like, they can cancel it, and at the flick of a switch, "it will never have existed". This could happen to the book 1984, if a future government decides that it's too informative, and they want to memory-hole it out of existence. See also Fahrenheit 451.
It is happening more and more that we rent things, instead of owning them, or we "subscribe" to them. That means that we have less control over them. And this shift is happening so gradually, we are not noticing it. Every step of the way, it is being sold as a "convenience". With the example of cars: yes, it might be that the only way to have a car for anyone who earns less than six figures is to "subscribe" to it, with the overarching controls from the government. You are given a certain amount of "free mileage" each year, with huge financial penalties for exceeding it, or, the car not starting.
You might think this is crazy now, but it may well become a reality, and then people would be scratching their heads wondering "how did we get here?". This is precisely why we must be vigilant (like Tony Blair and his mates told us to be when "terrorism" was the scary buzzword, so we wouldn't notice him awarding himself a 50% pay rise). This is why even small changes such as this are alarming. Individually, they are not much, but when you put them together, you notice a pattern.