The Evolution of the Car

We love our wheels. We are seldom far from them; we commute in them, work out of them, use them for our recreation and often don’t even leave them to eat. But the car of today differs from cars of 30-40 years ago by much more than technology, assembly methods and materials. Really the domestic auto industry was never the same after the publication of Ralph Nadar’s “Unsafe at Any Speed”. This one book shredded some of Detroit’s most advanced engineering, put the auto industry on the defensive and resulted in the Feds forming NHTSA. That is both good and bad. Never before in our automotive history have we enjoyed cars and trucks (light and heavy) that have been safer, but at a cost.

I come from an automotive family. My sharecropping grandfather landed a job in GM’s Fisher Body division as a millwright just before the great depression. The job offer was the result of some appreciated carpentry work he had done for a GM production foreman who worked at that plant. Since that time family members have been in and around the car industry and the lore that follows it. 

My mom met dad at that same GM plant. Their early relationship included such flashy machinery as MG-TD’s and Austin Healey 100-4’s. Eventually they settled down and decided to look for a more practical car. They ended up buying a VW beetle but told me tales of test driving such oddballs as the Messerschmitt tandem car and the iconic BMW Isetta before making that choice.

I’m not sure how either of those tiny cars was practical, but I’m very sure neither would do well in today’s simulated crash tests.

More recently my oldest son came of driving age. He developed an infatuation for these same European contraptions as well as the new breed of Asian micro-cars and trucks, the kind frequently seen puttering around college campuses. He bemoans the fact that such cars can no longer be registered for street use here. He suggested that maybe we should have different classifications of cars, some legal only for urban commutes and others which could travel interstate, too. Though this is an idea that has some merit (think about the recent Nissan “Leaf” and the Smart car), we are still up against the reality of these smaller cars needing to cohabit with the 3-ton behemoths that many scoot around in today.

In short, we’ve regulated ourselves out of cars of this type:  vehicles that were designed with out-of-the-box thinking that resulted from Europe’s war-torn transportation needs and limited resources. We allowed our government to be our advocate, sort of outsourced our own responsibility, and then in some fit of irony found ways to circumvent these same regulations in the name of speed, power, handling and personal preference.

A recent Popular Science magazine speculated about the future of the car and what it would look like in years to come. There are so many options ahead of us, so many directions that we could turn, that it is virtually impossible to predict with any accuracy what the future of mechanized transportation looks like. About all we can be sure of is that whatever it is, there will be some 18 year-old kid trying to hotrod it, some technician trying to bolt tool-boxes to it and some federal bureaucrat trying to tax it.

I’m not sure I’d have it any other way.

© 2014 D.W. Williams. All rights reserved