How the World Got on a Roll --- Carmakers tried all sorts of tricks to make their vehicles more appealing; Carl Benz's first one looked like a birdcage

"The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car

By Witold Rybczynski

Norton, 256 pages, $29.99

Gore Vidal once observed that the best way to get a miscellaneous group of people talking enthusiastically together is to bring up the subject of movies. But there's another surefire conversation igniter, as long as the group is made up of Americans: cars.

We tend to take cars personally, or at least more personally than any of the other large machines in our lives -- dishwashers, say, or furnaces. Nobody ever thought a washer-dryer might be a reflection of its owner's inner emotions, but a car can support, encourage, soothe and occasionally infuriate. And now that autumn is beginning to breathe down from the north, aren't you glad you'll soon be driving along some leaf-sprinkled highway in golden weather?

In his preface to "The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car," Witold Rybczynski, a prolific chronicler of how design affects our lives, insists that he "wasn't one of those people who identified with their car; for me, it was more like a tool." But he certainly does feel affection for this tool, and this warms every page of his compact epic.

The author begins at the beginning -- of his own driving history. The opening chapter, which carries the deft title "Starting the Car," has him buying his first: "a Volkswagen beetle. The design was already thirty years old -- seven years older than I -- and production would continue for another thirty-six years, making it the world's longest-running automobile model. I bought mine in January 1967," by which time the little car had been promiscuously scattered across half the globe.

He got it in Hamburg (for $300: it was seven years old) and drove it through the Netherlands on his way to Paris. He collected some dirty looks there, "especially from older persons for whom the wartime German occupation was a living memory." And they weren't wrong to be suspicious: At the 1933 Berlin Motor Show, soon after being appointed Reich chancellor, Adolf Hitler "had announced a national policy to motorize Germany. . . . Hitler called on the auto industry to produce an affordable people's car, a volkswagen."

The VW's creator was Ferdinand Porsche, and as the author looks back through the automobile's history, his roster of early cars includes other automotive celebrity names, most notably Carl Benz, who in 1885 gave the world its first successful internal-combustion motorcar. This looked more like a birdcage than an automobile -- it was a tricycle with tall wire wheels, steered by a tiller. 

But in little more than a decade Benz's concept had evolved into something that still seems classy and familiar rather than quaint and rickety. Its hood covered a front-mounted engine that drove rear wheels through a sliding-mesh gearbox (a French contribution). This could push a car like Paul Daimler's Mercedes 35HP along at 50 miles an hour.

During these early years, two motive power sources competed for dominance. Gasoline took the firm lead before World War I, but recently the contest has begun afresh, with electricity a very strong contender. In 2035 it will become illegal to sell new gas-powered cars in California; New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey are working up to similar prohibitions.

The first automobiles were only for the rich, but that didn't last long. In America, Henry Ford put the nation on the road beginning in 1908 with his world-changing Model T, which he produced in staggering numbers on the assembly line he pioneered. Like Mr. Rybczynski, he saw his car chiefly as a good tool -- as a moral force, really, and it broke his heart when he was forced to gentle it down into the more sophisticated Model A.

The author uses the Model A to make a valuable point about the scale of car manufacture in America. A European corollary to the Model A was the 1931 Mercedes-Benz 170. Both cars had a 100-inch wheelbase; both had four-wheel drum brakes; both came in two- and four-door versions. But here mass production made the difference: During its five-year manufacturing run, the popular "small Mercedes" sold a little under 14,000 units. The Model A, made between 1928 and 1932, sold 5 million. The Ford cost $500; the Benz nearly twice as much, at about $950.

The men most responsible for tormenting Henry Ford into giving up his Model T were Alfred P. Sloan, head of General Motors, and his great designer Harley Earl. Both realized that the car was outgrowing its tool-hood to become an object of desire. Sloan introduced annual model changes; Earl worked to summon glamour by sculpting the machine's sheet-metal cladding: "My primary purpose for twenty-eight years," he wrote in the mid-1950s, "has been to lengthen and lower the American automobile, at times in reality and always at least in appearance."

This upended the industry in ways that extended far beyond how its products looked. "Previously," writes the author, "cars had been the purview of engineers, who designed the engine and chassis for stability and handling, the subsequent bodywork being governed chiefly by production efficiency. Now it was styling that set the pace: the body was designed first, and the mechanical components such as engines and transmissions were fitted in later."

Mr. Rybczynski shows us the changes through his own drawings of the cars whose history he retrieves; the sketches are spirited and eloquent and tell us all we really need to know to follow the narrative. That story, too, is spirited, and although there is a fair amount of technical explanation, all of it is brisk, lucid and enjoyable.

For instance, in a section that deals with the emergence of the sports car, the author mentions the influx of British examples that were exported to America in their tens of thousands by a cash-strapped postwar automotive industry. They all looked great; it's a pity their build quality was such that they tended to disintegrate in the rain. No matter: I bought one back in the 1960s, a Morgan that had taken such punishment that I paid not much more for it than Mr. Rybczynski did for his Volkswagen. I had picked up some automotive jargon from car magazines, and I liked to tell my friends with nonchalant expertise (while casually adjusting the leather strap that helped secure the long hood) that "she's got rack-and-pinion steering." It is only now, more than half a century later, that, thanks to the crisp explanation in "The Driving Machine," I have learned what that means.

But a reader doesn't have to want elucidation of mechanical points to enjoy this book, as it is full of good stories: the always-fascinating catastrophe of the Ford Edsel; the trim, surprisingly stylish Corvair, put to death by Ralph Nader for being lethal in his bestselling "Unsafe at Any Speed" but found innocent years later; America's longest-lived marque, the Chevrolet Suburban, which first sniffed the Detroit air in 1935; Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and his first car (a Nash Metropolitan); the immensely successful Corvette and its rival, the Thunderbird -- which, the moment it became a hit, ballooned to twice its original size.

"Cars, unlike buildings, have a relatively short life," writes Mr. Rybczynski. "In most states, a twenty-five-year-old vehicle is eligible for an antique license plate. Buildings, on the other hand, last for centuries. You can still walk into the lobby of the Chrysler Building on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, but you will not find a Chrysler Airflow parked on your street."

You will not, although you can find one in "The Driving Machine," along with a score of other cars you'll recognize. These kinetic sculptures that used to pass us on the street are, like it or not, woven into the fabric of our lives, and as the author writes, they "deserve the same serious attention that we give to great old buildings -- they are design achievements and an important part of our material past."

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Mr. Snow is the author of "I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford."" [1]

1. REVIEW --- Fall Books: How the World Got on a Roll --- Carmakers tried all sorts of tricks to make their vehicles more appealing; Carl Benz's first one looked like a birdcage. Snow, Richard.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 Oct 2024: C.5.