"The Car
By Bryan Appleyard
(Pegasus, 305 pages, $28.95)
Celebrations of the utopia that will emerge with the demise of the combustion-engine automobile may be a bit premature. That's one of Bryan Appleyard's conclusions in "The Car: The Rise and Fall of the Machine That Made the Modern World," an encyclopedic retrospective of how the car came to be, how it has evolved over the past century and how, as the subtitle suggests, it has shaped the world we live in.
Mr. Appleyard, an award-winning British journalist, admits that the car as we know it is destined to change, but he's not so sure it will change in the way many are envisioning. There's certainly a strong case to be made for electric cars -- which some predict will dominate new-car sales by 2030 -- even though, as Mr. Appleyard points out, these vehicles account for only 0.3% of the cars in Europe today.
Then there's the issue of infrastructure. "Entire industrial and power-generating systems will have to be transformed," Mr. Appleyard writes, noting that if all the cars in London were electric, "the city would consume five times as much [electricity] as the London Underground." Here in the U.S., "California alone would need 50 per cent more electricity if all cars were electric."
Electric vehicles have oft-ignored production costs, such as batteries that rely on specialty metals found in some not-so-pleasant places like China, which could care less about its carbon footprint and uses its resources to shape global policy. The author cites a study by the International Energy Agency that suggests that an electric vehicle with a 250-mile range would have to be driven almost 40,000 miles "just to pay off its emissions debt."
Regardless of these shortcomings and viable alternatives, Mr. Appleyard feels the die is cast. "Hydrogen power . . . could still win in the end," he writes. "But, for the next decade, too much money has been spent by too many people for electric to fail."
Regardless of how cars are propelled 50 years from now, Mr. Appleyard thinks Henry Ford's Model T, Harley Earl's tail-finned land yachts and Ferdinand Porsche's Volkswagen Beetle should all be celebrated as the glorious, transformative inventions that they were. "In their brief ascendancy cars have dominated every aspect of public and private life," the author writes. "They have occupied the summit of consumer society as the ultimate objects of desire. They have also permanently changed our understanding of space, time and nature."
The bulk of the book focuses on these grand themes of change, speckled with pithy tidbits of automotive and engineering history. Mr. Appleyard reminds us that in 1900 London there were some 50,000 horses depositing about 500 tons of manure daily, which "formed banks along the pavements of even the most fashionable streets and when wet formed a 'pea soup' that would be flung up in sheets by passing carriages." There had to be a better way, and it was paved by the likes of Daimler, Benz and Olds. Mr. Appleyard also resurrects some names mostly lost to history, such as Samuel Brown, the Englishman who developed a gas-vacuum engine in 1826, and the Duryea brothers, Frank and Charles, of Springfield, Mass., credited in 1896 with "the first appearance of American cars in Europe."
Not even Mr. Appleyard is sure who should get the credit for the first automobile, but Henry Ford's production line and Model T are rightly acknowledged as transforming automobiles from the "toys of the rich" to something achievable for the masses. Interestingly, it wasn't the Model T's price that was the main selling point, but its ability to successfully navigate America's nearly nonexistent road system. The Model T was one of only two cars to complete the 1909 Ocean to Ocean Automobile Contest from New York to Seattle, arriving 17 hours ahead of a second-place Shawmut. The key, Mr. Appleyard tells us, was the Model T's suspension system. Fast-forward 20 years and the Model T was "eulogized and sung about. In a way never achieved before or since, the word 'car' meant this car."
As cars became more affordable -- and more ubiquitous -- they transformed our lives in ways we couldn't have imagined. They made post-World War II towns like Levittown, N.Y., possible. "The suburbs were sold as little paradises of middle-class gentility or pioneering realizations of the American dream," Mr. Appleyard reminds us. But there were unforeseen consequences, too. "Since these places also encouraged giving the car to the kids," in the car was where "the kids had sex, plotted against their parents and fomented revolutions."
Mr. Appleyard does a good job chronicling the 1950s and '60s heyday of American car culture, from GM designer Harley Earle's Cadillac Series 62, inspired by the P38 Lightning aircraft, to George Lucas's 1973 film "American Graffiti," an homage to the hot-rod culture of 1960s California. "This is not really, as it is often described, a teen or coming-of-age movie," Mr. Appleyard argues. "It is, in reality, a car movie. The cars -- most of them -- are drawn from the golden age of American automotive baroque." It was the hubris of this golden age that made American auto executives blind to the 1970s arrival of Japanese and Europe subcompacts, which would lead to a seismic shift in American car manufacturing and culture.
Is the move toward electric cars the next big thing? Mr. Appleyard isn't so sure. He puts Elon Musk on a pedestal next to Henry Ford, but seems to forget that Ford's goal was to make a car everyone could afford. Mr. Musk's objective has been to produce a car that vacuums up every government subsidy and tax credit available, affordability for the masses be damned. Even if we're browbeaten into a technology fraught with questions, Mr. Appleyard recognizes that it'll fall short of the broad and universal impact cars had on society in the early 20th century. "No matter how much Elon Musk and his successors might impress us in the future, it is unlikely they can compete with the shocking simplicity of a new machine that moved freely without rails, wind, human or animal power."
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Mr. Yost, a writer on Cape Cod, was the Detroit bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswires." [1]
1. Machine Dreams
Yost, Mark.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 09 Sep 2022: A.15.
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