essay about car culture

March 1, 2024

Changing Car Culture Can Benefit Our Health and Our Planet

We need to rethink the American love affair with the automobile and redesign cities to reduce car pollution

By The Editors

Thomas Fuchs

Anthropologist Daniel Miller has observed that an alien visiting Earth might well suppose that four-wheeled creatures run the planet. These rulers, he notes, are “served by a host of slaves who walk on legs and spend their whole lives serving them.” He meant this as a joke, but the punch line comes at the expense of American car culture. In the U.S., the costs of car dependency keep growing, far above the $12,000-per-year average expense of owning a new one.

Coast-to-coast, the cars and trucks we drive cause about 16 percent of greenhouse gas emissions . They cause significant air pollution , worsening asthma and heart disease rates, and contribute to a nationwide epidemic of obesity. About 69 percent of car trips in the U.S. are two miles or less . Motor vehicle collisions are a leading cause of death in people ages one to 44, the most bitter part of the mayhem accompanying some six million reported accidents per year. Since 2010 the number of pedestrians killed by cars has increased 77 percent , to about 7,500 a year, a growing fraction of all traffic deaths.

America's car culture —glamorized in advertisements, enforced by zoning laws and enabled by taxpayer subsidies —is a choice that now comes at too high a cost, both for ourselves and for the environment. After a century of its central place in our lives, we need to rethink our world into one not hitched to the automobile.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Automobile-first ideals dominate in the U.S. Our countryside is carved up by superhighways connecting bedroom suburbs with sprawling cities , with too many nowherevilles surrounded by parking lots and strip malls and ringed with sound barrier walls—all built to serve the sacred automobile. Atop former towns and neighborhoods, broad avenues are lined with drive-through hamburger stands and banks.

Across the country, the car is the only way to get around and not only in rural places. This reliance spawns an ever more disconnected nation of drivers suffering an epidemic of road rage. As Lancaster University sociologist John Urry wrote, “the car is immensely flexible and wholly coercive ,” promising freedom but trapping drivers into inhabiting their cars.

During the height of the pandemic, when office commutes and rush-hour traffic suddenly vanished, younger people turned to Uber for their transportation, and “peak car” seemed to apply. A glimpse of a life not spent in worship of the automotive golden calf comes with New York City unveiling congestion pricing starting at $15 (also on tap in other cities ). Cleveland is reviving its Public Square by turning empty office space into apartments and suburbs retrofitting themselves for walking . This trend accompanies moves across the country to build more bike lanes .

The turn toward online shopping and home delivery has lessened the need for a second car, double garages and massive parking lots. The cell phone has begun replacing the driver's license as de rigueur identification in the 21st century, hastening cutting the car cord.

As with so many of our problems today, solutions are obvious and right in front of us , ranging from sidewalks to subways. But they face inevitable obstruction by an obstreperous highway fund lobby , as well as politicians and talking heads spouting nonsense about better lives somehow being un-American . Voters outnumber these voices , however, and tell us they want less car-dependent lives.

We can start by reforming zoning laws to eliminate low-density and single-family residential home restrictions in new developments and to add flexibility for stores and enough homes to support them. Sidewalks and bike trails should receive the same priority as roads in our cities and close-in suburbs, instead of being afterthoughts. Unreasonable demands by mayors and employers that the masses get back behind the wheel and return to offices (where we are, in fact, less productive) need to stop. The average American commute is nearly 28 minutes of uncompensated labor each way. Let's make our cities less car-dependent instead.

Thinking more ambitiously, we can provide discounts to bicyclists who take the train, free taxis to twice-a-week commuters, incentives for e-bikes and other financial breaks to eschew second cars and the congestion they cause. (While we're at it, the EPA should end its designation of SUVs, minivans and vans as trucks that can be less fuel-efficient. We see this as a frankly cynical result of auto industry lobbying that crowds more efficient cars out of dealerships.) Behind plans like New York's congestion pricing is another reality—car parking is too cheap across much of the country, where variable on-street parking pricing can reset plans from hopping in the car during peak periods to taking the subway or the bus instead.

Like with any bad romance, none of these ideas will help end “America's supposed love affair with the automobile” without addressing the underlying psychology of dependence that makes reaching for the keys second nature. “As industry considers itself dependent on continued car sales, initiatives to reduce car attachment will be increasingly targeted by industry and its lobbying organizations, as well as politicians representing automotive interests,” writes transportation analyst Stefan Gössling in The Psychology of the Car, warning that “powerful campaigns already seek to strengthen bonds with the private car.”

Gaslit by car ads blaring outdoor scenes available in real life only to plutocrats with a ranch in Montana, we idle alone in traffic instead of living our off-road fantasies, lulled by heated seats, dashcams and surround sound, while we pollute the air.

In America, where advertising matters, public service announcements should make the case for ditching the car keys with positive messages. “No ridiculous car trips,” exhorted one ad campaign in Sweden, appealing to common sense and community spirit (bicycles were awarded to people with the most ridiculously short car commute s) to try pedaling to work. Commercials should extol biking short distances and note the time saved on public transport spent reading or answering e-mails, instead of time spent clutching the wheel worrying a fender bender will bump up our insurance premiums.

We need a call nationwide to end our car-centric lifestyle and stand on our own two feet or, better, two pedals. Otherwise, those aliens will have made the right call on who serves who, the cars—or the people.

The best of EcoWatch right in your inbox. Sign up for our email newsletter!

• About EcoWatch
• Contact EcoWatch
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Learn About Solar Energy

Car Culture: Everything You Need to Know

Founded in 2005 as an Ohio-based environmental newspaper, EcoWatch is a digital platform dedicated to publishing quality, science-based content on environmental issues, causes, and solutions.

Quick Key Facts

• Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez, authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on Our Lives , define car culture as “a society built around private modes of transportation, but with massive public investment in the infrastructure that allows those private uses.” 
• In the U.S. in 1900, more than a quarter of the 4,200 cars made that year were electric.
• The first law against “jaywalking” was passed in Los Angeles in 1925.
• The number of cars on the road in Mumbai increased from 320,000 in 1981 to more than three million in 2018.
• Road travel is responsible for 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. 
• If everyone on Earth drove at the rate of the U.S. population, there would be eight billion cars on the road and transportation emissions would go up by at least triple the current emissions of the entire worldwide economy. 
• Road collisions kill 1.35 million people every year worldwide. 
• The U.S. government spends about four times more on roads than on public transportation. 
• In 2020, new SUV sales canceled out the reduction in oil demand from increased EV sales. 
• A bike lane can carry six times as many people as a car lane, assuming 1.5 passengers per car.

What Is ‘Car Culture’?

When you Google, “America’s love affair with…” the first word the algorithm fills in is “the automobile.” The third is “cars.” (The second is, surprise, surprise, guns.) In the U.S. — and increasingly in other parts of the world too — cars and driving have a significant impact on our daily lives. They determine the use of our streets, shape the design of our cities and suburbs, define coming of age for many young people, and affect the quality of the air we breathe. From anthropomorphized vehicles like Herbie: The Love Bug and the cars of Cars , to road trip epics like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Thelma & Louise to bangers like “ Fast Car ” and “ Route 66, ” automotive travel has had an outsized impact on our imaginations. Yet despite the association between cars and freedom, the world built to accommodate them has actually become quite limiting. As journalist Daniel Knowles wrote in Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About it , “We have designed our cities so that having a car is not a luxury but a necessity.” 

Car culture is exactly this built-in necessity. As biking columnist Shannon Johnson puts it, “‘car culture’ refers to the specifically car-centric, car-dominant, car-prioritizing, and car-biased beliefs/habits/behaviors and policies that make up the typically unconscious accepted norms of our wider society.” Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez , authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives , further define it as “a society built around private modes of transportation, but with massive public investment in the infrastructure that allows those private uses.” Common infrastructure, in other words, encourages individual car use.

Well, what’s wrong with that? Isn’t any society going to prioritize its primary mode of transportation? Knowles argues that cars are one of the No. 1 causes of externalities — ”costs imposed on others by your decisions.” Those costs include traffic jams, vehicle collisions, common space given over to parking and highways, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to the climate crisis . With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning us that we must nearly halve carbon pollution this decade to avoid ever more extreme weather events and environmental impacts, imagining a world beyond car culture is more urgent than ever.

How Did ‘Car Culture’ Come to Be? 

If you remember a time before the dominance of the smartphone, then you have something of a sense of how the emergence of a new technology can fundamentally alter the texture of daily life. In the 1990s, the time and place of meetups with friends had to be set in advance and stuck to, people relied on physical maps to navigate new cities, and cellphone users were often portrayed in popular culture as exceptional workaholics. Today, smartphones are required for everything from banking to ordering in a restaurant to applying for asylum in the U.S. They have so enmeshed themselves in the infrastructure of living that their ascendence feels inevitable, but in fact it was the result of a series of technological and political choices and accidents. A similar thing happened with the car.

The First Cars

When the automobile was first invented in the second half of the 19th century, it was far from a sure thing that cars powered with internal combustion engines would come to rule the roads. At the time, the streets were primarily places for walking, playing and socializing. While pedestrians shared them with horse-pulled vehicles and streetcars, these did not move quickly enough to scare walkers to the sides. An onlooker described the streets of Washington, DC, at the time as “absolutely black with people.” Cars were expensive, and the few early drivers were characterized as upper class speed demons, such as Mr. Toad in Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 classic The Wind in the Willows . For distances that proved too far to walk, people relied on public transportation. There were approximately 22,000 miles of streetcar tracks in U.S. cities by 1902, with around five billion riders. 

Even if cars were to become the primary mode of transportation, there was no guarantee that it would be the gas-powered cars of today. The first commercially available combustion-engine vehicles were made by Carl Benz in Germany in 1886. But this model had two main competitors: steam- and electric-powered vehicles. In the U.S. in 1900, most of the estimated 8,000 cars on the roads used steam. Of the 4,200 cars made that year, more than a quarter were electric while a quarter used gas. Many people preferred electric vehicles for their lack of noise and pollution, but eventually the internal combustion engine won out due to its longer driving range and lack of need for bulky batteries. It was helped along by the emergence of Henry T. Ford’s Model T in 1908. Ford’s 1913 innovation of mass producing via assembly line and 1914 decision to pay workers $5 a day (a big raise at the time) significantly reduced the price of a car — from $825 when it debuted to $260 in 1925 — and allowed his workers to purchase their own. The Model T’s affordability allowed the U.S. middle classes to finally hit the roads. 

Whose Streets?

Even then, the rise of the car might have been stopped over safety concerns. As cars got faster, they became more dangerous for all the people sharing the road with them. Beginning in the 1920s, cars began to kill 30,000 people a year in the U.S., and that number has never gotten smaller. At first, when a driver struck and killed a child playing in the road, the driver would be blamed and often charged with manslaughter. Angry citizens protested. In 1922 in New York, 1,054 children marched in honor of the 1,054 children lost to cars the year before. In 1923, more than 10 percent of Cincinnati, Ohio, signed a petition to mandate that cars have an in-built speed limit of 25 miles per hour. The same year, sales of new cars fell off. 

In response, car markers, dealerships, auto-clubs and wealthy enthusiasts came together as “Motordom” and began a political and social lobbying campaign to claim the street for the car. They managed to shift the blame for pedestrian deaths from drivers to “jaywalkers” — from the earlier term “jay driving” for driving on the wrong side of the road. The first law against “jaywalking” was passed in Los Angeles in 1925, and the charge caught on. “It is now the fashion to ascribe from 70 to 90 percent of all accidents to jaywalking,” a New York traffic court magistrate wrote at the time. 

Automobiles managed to crowd the streetcars off city streets as well. In the 1920s, the majority of urbanites rode public transit to work. Today, the number of public-transit commuters hovers around five percent (falling to 2.5 percent in 2021), and not on streetcars. There’s a sort of conspiracy theory — made famous in Who Framed Roger Rabbit — that General Motors and Standard Oil purchased streetcars in the 1930s and 40s in several U.S. cities in order to intentionally run them into the ground. In fact, they didn’t really have to. Because most streetcars did not have the right-of-way as automobiles began to crowd city streets, they got stuck in traffic and became unreliable. At the same time, city contracts requiring streetcar companies to maintain the roads they used and keep fares at five cents proved too much of a burden once they were no longer the only game in town. So commuters turned to the car, but with different urban policy choices, it could have been otherwise. In Chicago, streetcars did keep the right-of-way and there they survived. 

The Suburb and the Freeway

While cars became a mass market product in the U.S. by the 1920s and took over urban streets, they facilitated an even more dramatic transformation of the country in the period after World War II. In 1950, there were 25 million cars on the road. That number more than doubled to 67 million by 1960 and by 1970 it had more than quadrupled to 118 million. The 1950s is probably the decade most associated with the rise of the car: 1950s American automobile culture has its own Wikipedia entry. This was facilitated by the nation’s biggest-ever construction project: The Federal-Aid Highway Act, which spent $25 billion — or a fifth of the nation’s gross domestic product — to build 60,000 miles of new roadways. This allowed cars and trucks to become the leading choice for long-distance travel and transport, overtaking trains. 

The car also fundamentally transformed U.S. cities. As they became more congested, developers began to build highways and move residential dwellings out to the expanding suburbs , where 55% of U.S. residents earning more than $10,000 lived by 1965. At the same time, the new highways would be built through urban neighborhoods, often majority Black. Many urban neighborhoods that weren’t bulldozed outright were cut off from the rest of the city or fell into decline as their tax base moved away and did their shopping in suburban malls. In total more than a million people were displaced . While racism was the ultimate cause of this new urban/ suburban segregation, “it was mass automobile ownership, and the construction of highways, that made white flight possible,” Knowles explains. 

Around the World

While the gas-powered car was first invented in Europe, it took until after World War II for it to become a mass-market product there. The industry faced similar early speed bumps across the Atlantic — such as concerns about road safety — but it took longer for it to accelerate, partly because the majority in Europe had a lower standard of living and less purchasing power, the overall market was smaller, and there were stricter taxes and tariffs. After the war, this changed, and major cities like London, Paris, Rome and Amsterdam built circular highways surrounding their centers in the 1950s and 60s. This made the cities harder to access without a car, and led to the decline in railways and other forms of urban public transportation. 

Worldwide, car production increased by nearly 10 times in the 35 years after the war, and the U.S. share of that production declined from around 80 percent to 20 percent. In addition to European countries, Japan emerged as a major player by the 1980s, and South Korea an important producer as well. China became the world’s No. 1 car maker at the start of the 21st century. At the same time, the rising middle classes in Global South cities like Mumbai or Nairobi all want to drive, and infrastructure is being built to accommodate them. In Mumbai, for example, the number of cars on the road increased from 320,000 in 1981 to more than three million in 2018. But the number of cars is increasing everywhere on Earth. Car culture has gone global. 

What Are the Problems With Car Culture? 

The rise of the car has had a profound impact on everything from urban design to the quality of the air we breathe, and many of those impacts are negative.

Climate Change

Perhaps the most urgent problem with cars is that they burn oil for fuel, and that process releases carbon dioxide out of the tailpipe and contributes to the escalating climate crisis. Cars emit 24 pounds of greenhouse gases per gallon, with around five of that coming from the process of acquiring the oil and more than 19 of that from direct emissions. 

In the U.S., transportation is responsible for more climate pollution than any other single sector, at around 29 percent of the country’s total emissions, and cars and light-duty trucks are responsible for 57.5 percent of those emissions. Worldwide, transportation is responsible for around a fifth of total emissions and a quarter of carbon dioxide emissions from energy. Road travel — cars, buses and trucks — contributes three-quarters of that, making it responsible for 15 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions. And this is with the current number of cars on the road — 1.4 billion in 2019. If the global number ballooned to match U.S. rates of car ownership, there would be eight billion cars in circulation and transportation emissions would increase by at least triple the current emissions of the entire worldwide economy. 

Other Pollution

Carbon dioxide isn’t the only pollutant that comes out of a tailpipe. Cars, trucks and buses also emit particulate matter, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds including the carcinogenic pollutants benzene , acetaldehyde and 1,3-butadiene . Nitrogen oxides and VOCs can interact with sunlight to form ground-level ozone, which is a major component of smog that causes respiratory distress. Particulate matter is the world’s leading public health threat, taking 2.2 years off the average human life, and it is primarily generated by the combustion of fossil fuels, including in vehicle engines.

The 1970 Clean Air Act in the U.S. has done a good job of ensuring cleaner vehicles, and therefore healthier air — most tailpipe emissions are down 98 to 99 percent since the 1960s. Yet cars are also getting bigger and heavier, and the new vehicular behemoths are releasing particulate matter from tire wear at a rate of nearly 2,000 times that of exhaust emissions. Further, after Global North governments like the U.S. and Europe pass regulations, they ship their older cars to the Global South, where cities like Delhi and Jakarta are now used to the hazy skies once normal in 1970s New York. A 2020 report that around 80 percent of used vehicles exported between 2015 and 2018 were shipped to poor or middle income countries. While air pollution is a greater health burden in poorer countries, 99% of people everywhere breathe unhealthy air based on World Health Organization standards. And, in recent years, smoke from climate-fueled wildfires has begun to reverse air quality gains in the U.S. West. While cars aren’t solely responsible for this, their exhaust is part of the greenhouse gas soup heating our atmosphere. 

Environmental Demands of EVs

In recent years, wealthy countries and car companies have begun to embrace electric vehicles (EVs) as the solution. The European Union is set to ban the sales of new gas and diesel engines by 2035, as are U.S. states like California , Oregon and Washington, and major carmakers are announcing more EVs in their lineup. EVs do not burn fossil fuels, so they mitigate two of the big problems with cars: carbon and air pollution. Even accounting for manufacturing the batteries and the source of the electricity used to charge the car, EVs generally have lower cradle-to-grave emissions and carbon footprints than conventional cars, and a new study has found a link between EV uptake in a zip code and decreased air pollution and asthma ER visits , though electric cars still emit particulate matter from tires. 

That said, there would be other serious environmental consequences if everyone who drove a gas-powered car swapped it for an EV, because EVs, and their batteries, require around six times the minerals that regular cars do. A recent study found that the U.S. alone would require three times the amount of lithium currently available if current EV adoption trends continue to 2050. This is a problem because lithium has to be mined, and mining is both extremely damaging to the environment and the sector most linked to violence against land defenders. Cobalt, also, is an important EV battery component. Around 70 percent of it is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there have been reports of human rights abuses and children working in mines that also contribute to deforestation in an important global carbon sink. So while driving EVs may be better for the atmosphere and air, they still demand the exploitation of vulnerable communities and ecosystems. What’s more, switching to EVs won’t do anything about the rest of the problems on this list.

Congestion and Space

One of Knowles’ major arguments against cars is that they require so much space to be useful — at least two parking spots as well as space to move between them without causing traffic jams. In the UK, cars take up more space than the Isle of Wight. Yet attempts to ease congestion by building new highways or adding another lane ends up isolating the neighborhoods they pass between or through and increasing the amount of car-based infrastructure between where people live and where they work or shop, forcing more people to drive and eventually raising traffic levels to what they were before the expansion.  

He gives two examples at opposite ends of the globe. The Kennedy and Eisenhower Expressways in Chicago were built in the 1950s and 60s to help an expanding number of drivers through the city, yet in 2020 the stretch of the Eisenhower leading up to where it intersects with the Kennedy ranked as the most congested in the world. In Nairobi, meanwhile, politicians respond to congestion on the Uhuru Highway by building more bypasses, yet developers then build near the new roads, attracting more drivers and restoring the traffic to the status quo. 

Public Safety

Worldwide, a total of 1.35 million people die every year in road crashes , and 42,795 U.S. residents died in motor vehicle collisions in 2022. More people now die in crashes than from HIV/AIDS, and they are the No. 1 cause of death for people aged five to 29. As Knowles points out, the use of the word “accident” to describe car crashes is a good example of car culture, since it encourages us to take these deaths for granted as an inevitable fact of life. But studying the history of public anger surrounding early car-crash deaths helps us to rethink the issue. It would be more accurate to describe traffic accidents as car killings. Of the nearly 3,700 people killed daily in collisions involving cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians, more than half of them were walking or riding a bike or motorcycle. 

As with air pollution, traffic safety is a much greater problem in less wealthy countries, where the death rate is more than three times higher than in wealthy ones. While people in low- and middle-income countries drive 60 percent of the world’s registered vehicles, they suffer 90% of its crash deaths. However, that doesn’t mean the wealthy world is unaffected. In 2016, when U.S. traffic deaths stood at 37,461, Edward Humes noted that more U.S. residents died in car crashes annually than in any year of fighting in the American Revolution , the War of 1812, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan. “If U.S. roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered,” he wrote.

Public Health

Beyond air pollution and car crashes, car culture harms health in other ways. Post-war U.S. car culture is intimately linked to the rise of fast food , as restaurant owners streamlined their kitchens to meet the demand of drivers along the new highway system. The first ever drive-thru restaurant was opened in 1947 in Springfield, Missouri, along Route 66. Fast food has risen alongside, and often encourages, industrial agriculture ; it is high in calories , sugar, trans fats, sodium and chemical preservatives; low in essential nutrients; and linked to negative health impacts on essentially every bodily system.

While cars encourage people to put unhealthy food in their bodies, they also make it more difficult to burn it off. Driving tends to encourage a sedentary lifestyle , as people only walk between their homes and their cars and their cars and their destinations. Relying on a car means you are less likely to get incidental exercise during your day — physicians recommend 10,000 steps daily, and walking just back and forth from a car uses only around 1,000 — and the time spent commuting gives you less time for intentional exercise. Extended periods of sitting every day increase the risk of heart disease and other chronic ailments , and every extra 30 minutes in a car ups the risk of obesity by three percent.

Social Justice

As the example of U.S.highway construction and white flight illustrates, cars tend to exacerbate existing inequalities. Black people in the U.S. are around 25% more likely to be killed in car crashes than white people and also more likely to be pulled over by police while driving and then either ticketed or arrested. While women are responsible for fewer car crashes, they are 73 percent more likely to be seriously injured in one than men and 17 percent more likely to be killed. Globally, the poor are less likely to own cars but must still breathe the air they pollute and navigate the streets they make more dangerous — not to mention contend with the climate impacts that vehicle emissions contribute to.

Designing cities and suburbs for cars also encourages inequality. What historian Margaret Walsh wrote of the 1950s is still true today: “To be without a car in the United States…[is] to be almost in exile.” Yet the U.S. government spends about four times more on roads than public transit . This forces low-income individuals to either struggle to afford a car — the poorest 10 percent of U.S. households spend 7.5 times as much on vehicle-related costs as the richest — or go without. Sixty-one percent of the poorest fifth of U.S. households have a car, compared with 90 percent of the richest. There is racial disparity too, with a little more than two-thirds of Black households owning cars compared to 86 percent of white households. And then there are those, like the blind and low vision, whose disabilities prevent them from driving. While 91.7 percent of U.S. residents drive, only 60.4 percent of those with disabilities do. 

Bigger Isn’t Better

Despite growing awareness of the environmental cost of private vehicles, in many ways the vehicles on the road are getting more dangerous, not less, especially in the U.S. That’s because more and more people are buying larger sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and pickup trucks instead of smaller sedans, and those larger vehicles are themselves getting larger. SUVs sold at twice the rate of sedans in the U.S. in 2019, and — together with light trucks — accounted for 72 percent of sales. The number of SUVs worldwide has gone up by more than five times from 50 million in 2010 to 280 million in 2022, when they accounted for nearly half of global car sales .

The problem with this trend is that heavier cars are more dangerous both for the road and for the planet. Taller SUVs and trucks have larger front blind zones , which can be dangerous for pedestrians, especially children. Between 2016 and 2020, 744 U.S. children died after being hit by a vehicle driving forward, and in most cases that vehicle was a truck or SUV. Larger, heavier rides also require more gasoline and emit more carbon pollution. In 2020, the International Energy Agency calculated that SUV sales canceled out the reduced oil demand of EV sales. In 2022, the agency found, they emitted nearly a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. While there is a growing market for electric SUVs, these require larger batteries and therefore more of the minerals that put a strain on the EV transition. 

Is There Anything Good About Car Culture?

So if car culture is so bad, why do so many people seem to love cars and driving? Certainly necessity and advertising play a role, but it would be foolish to discount the sense of accomplishment a young person feels after tuning up their first car or the sense of adventure a family experiences when loading up for a road trip. Because, especially in wealthy countries, cars have influenced so much of people’s daily lives, the time spent in them or working on them has inevitably taken on profound meaning. While cars can exacerbate inequalities, their greater affordability has also helped oppressed groups find greater freedom. For example, cars allowed Black Americans to escape segregated public transit during the Jim Crow era, as Gretchen Sorin documents in Driving While Black . Certainly, within a world built for cars, owning one can make it much easier to commute to work, run errands and visit loved ones if none of those things fall along a convenient public transit route. The question is, if we build the world differently, could we construct a better one?

What Could Be Done to Reduce Reliance on Cars?

Reducing car dependence is a major component of a just transition to a climate-friendly world. The same study finding that business-as-usual EV use would require three times current lithium supplies also found that that number could be slashed by 90% by a combination of reducing EV size, improving battery recycling and shifting transportation away from one-person-one car. So how do we make this happen?

Improving Public Transportation

One major solution for reducing dependence on cars is to invest more in public transportation and make it more reliable and accessible. This can be done in part through something called “ transit-oriented development ” in which homes and businesses are built near train and bus stops to make them more convenient to ride. This is what railway companies did in Tokyo, for example, where only 12 percent of trips take place by car. Increasing the share of commuters who don’t rely on private vehicles has many benefits. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions because even if a bus or train uses fossil fuels, it still carries many more people per gallon and is much easier to electrify and switch to renewable energy. Increasing public transit use can also reduce air pollution, traffic, and income inequality . 

Low Emission / Congestion Charging Zones

Another way to encourage public transit use in a city is to either limit the highly polluting cars entering certain areas ( low emissions zones ) or limit the total number of cars in an area (congestion charging zones). London, for example, has just won the right in court to expand its Ultra Low Emission Zone , which charges dirtier vehicles to enter most of Greater London. A study of both policies in cities in Asia and Europe found that they were linked to improved heart health in city residents.  

Car-Free Streets

Another way to reclaim city streets is simply to close them to cars, either permanently or for certain hours in the day. Many cities began experimenting with this during the initial response to the Covid-19 pandemic to increase outdoor public space so that people could socialize safely. In many places, residents liked the experiment so much, they kept it up. For example, John F. Kennedy Drive in San Francisco, which used to be closed to cars only on Sundays, is now permanently blocked to them. New York City began its Open Streets program, closing certain streets to cars for social activities, and now it is a summer tradition. An early pioneer of street closures was Paris, which began transforming its Voie Georges-Pompidou into a beach during the summers in 2002 and finally closed to all vehicles but scooters in 2017. Paris Isn’t stopping there — it plans to ban all private cars from its center in 2024.

Adding Bike Lanes  

The reason Paris has been able to get away with shuttering roads to cars, according to Knowles, is that it has made it easier to bike. During the pandemic, when public transportation was closed down, the city built 60 kilometers (approximately 37 miles) of new bike lanes and started giving people 500 euro subsidies to buy electric bikes. Even before then, the road closures had increased cycling rates by 30 percent between 2010 and 2018. Another example is Copenhagen, which built bike lanes in response to the oil crisis in the 1970s and, in 2016, the number of cars in its center dipped below bikes for the first time since the 1950s. Adding bike lanes brings several advantages: They are much cheaper and easier to install than new public transit, they can transport commuters door-to-door, they encourage exercise and boost health and they can move six times as many people as a car lane, assuming each car ferries 1.5 people.

15-Minute Cities

The term 15-minute-city was coined by French urbanist Carlos Moreno. “In a nutshell, the idea is that cities should be designed or redesigned so that within the distance of a 15-minute walk or bike ride, people should be able to live the essence of what constitutes the urban experience,” he explained in a TED talk. That means they should be able to live, work, eat, shop and access green space and entertainment. The 15-minute-city concept has been at the center of Paris’ redesign, and the C40 network of mayors taking climate action embraced it as part of their plan for a “green and just” recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. 

Rural Solutions

Most of these solutions have focused on cities, where people are more densely packed and tend to head to similar central locations for work or shopping. One might reasonably assume that, in rural areas , where people live farther apart from each other and from stores or businesses, that cars would still be necessary. However, people in rural areas tend to live clustered around smaller towns, and more than half of the U.S. counties in which 10 percent or more of the population doesn’t drive are rural. One thing that can help rural residents access their downtowns without cars is by making their main drags — many of which double as highways — safer for pedestrians, as Hillsboro, Virginia , did with Route 9.

Vehicle Sharing

Sometimes, like when you are ferrying large amounts of boxes during a move or heading out to a truly remote campsite, you do need something larger than a bike to get you from departure to arrival. But do you need to actually own the car you drive? In recent years, car sharing companies like Zipcar, Getaround and Turo allow people to pay to use shared cars just for a specific task or trip. Research has found that people who car share end up being more intentional about the kind of transportation they use overall, instead of defaulting to cars. BloombergNEF calculates that there will be more than 70 million shared cars — including taxis and ride-sharing apps — on the roads by 2040.

Takeaway 

Today we live in a world driven by the car, but becoming aware of that fact can help us reclaim control over the steering wheel and steer the car into the garage. Inner cities did not have to be gutted to make freeways snaking out to suburbs; getting hit by speeding chunks of metal didn’t have to be normalized as an “accident;” the price of moving around an urban area didn’t have to be the ability to safely breathe its air. As the world seeks to transform itself to limit global warming and stave off ever worsening climate impacts, it can reimagine modes of transportation that are healthier for human communities, bodies and the planet.

Subscribe to get exclusive updates in our daily newsletter!

By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from EcoWatch Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content.

Latest Articles

• Just Stop Oil Activists Sentenced to Record 4 and 5 Years for Planning to Block M25 London Roadway by Cristen Hemingway Jaynes July 20, 2024
• Hawaiian Electric and Other Defendants Reach Tentative $4 Billion Maui Wildfire Settlement by Cristen Hemingway Jaynes July 19, 2024
• California Officials Praise Renewables, Battery Storage for Grid Resilience Amid Heat Wave by Paige Bennett July 19, 2024
• California’s Devastating Wildfire Season: First Fatality Reported, Already 5x More Acres Burned Than Average by Michael Riojas July 19, 2024
• North Atlantic Right Whale Spotted Off Irish Coast for First Time in More Than a Century by Cristen Hemingway Jaynes July 18, 2024
• Alaska Federal Court Overturns Oil Lease Sale in Critical Beluga Whale Habitat by Cristen Hemingway Jaynes July 18, 2024
• High Levels of Fiberglass Detected in Oysters and Mussels by Paige Bennett July 18, 2024
• New Images Show Largest Uncontacted Indigenous Tribe on Earth Dangerously Close to Loggers in Peruvian Amazon by Cristen Hemingway Jaynes July 17, 2024

Advertiser Disclosure

Our editorial team is committed to creating independent and objective content focused on helping our readers make informed decisions. To help support these efforts we receive compensation from companies that advertise with us.

The compensation we receive from these companies may impact how and where products appear on this site. This compensation does not influence the recommendations or advice our editorial team provides within our content. We do not include all companies, products or offers that may be available.

How the Automobile Changed the World, for Better or Worse

New MoMA exhibition explores artists’ responses to the beauty, brutality and environmental devastation of cars and car culture

Nora McGreevy

Correspondent

In the early 20th century, cars roared into society and revolutionized modern life. Automobiles and their attendant culture molded labor practices , the fight for civil rights , cities, the arts, social life and the environment in radical—and dangerous—ways.

Artists who observed these changes responded with a range of emotions, from fervent admiration to horror. Now, “ Automania ”—a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City—takes readers on a ride through some of these responses, from an Andy Warhol silkscreen to Robert Frank photographs and a car hood painted by Judy Chicago.

As Lawrence Ulrich reports for the New York Times , the show takes its title from “ Automania 2000 ,” an Oscar-nominated 1963 short animated by married British artists Joy Batchelor and John Halas . In the film, which art enthusiasts can watch online , a consumer craze for automobiles leads scientists to develop “40-foot supercars” that house families consigned to eating petroleum-based foods and ceaselessly watching television. Eventually, the crush of vehicles clogs roads, and the cars themselves spin out of control.

The bulk of the exhibition takes place on MoMA’s third floor. But viewers can also wander downstairs to the outdoor sculpture garden and peer into the windows of several exceptional car designs. Per a statement , nine cars from the museum’s permanent collection are stationed throughout the show, including a famed mint-green “ Beetle ” and a rare Cisitalia 202 , a cherry-red 1946 racing car that owes it curved, seamless appearance to Italian workers who hammered its metal frame by hand.

Brett Berk of Vanity Fair notes that MoMA was among the first museums to treat cars as design objects, hosting the exhibition “ 8 Automobiles ” in 1951. In the show’s catalog , then-curator Arthur Drexler made the (intentionally) provocative claim that automobiles were a kind of “hollow, rolling sculpture,” according to the Times .

Some artists found themselves enamored with the form and power of these new machines. In Italian futurist Giacomo Balla’s Speeding Automobile (1912), shards of white, black, red and green seem to explode out of the canvas in an abstract composition evocative of the energy of a race car.

Other artists reckoned with cars’ deadly potential. Today, crash injuries are estimated to be the eighth leading cause of death for people of all ages around the world. Pop artist Andy Warhol probed the routine horror of fatal crashes and their coverage in the media in Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963), which reproduced the same newspaper image of a deadly collision on an enormous 9- by 14-foot canvas, as Peter Saenger reports for the Wall Street Journal .

Beyond the immediate bodily harm posed by vehicles, artists have also reckoned with their vast environmental cost. In a series of photocollages from the late 1960s, Venezuelan architect Jorge Rigamonti captured the dystopian industrial landscape of his home country, which is one of the biggest exporters of oil in the world. Pollutants also appear in an 1898 lithograph by French post-Impressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, which shows a male motorist speeding ahead, spewing a cloud of thick smoke over a nearby woman and dog.

Visitors unable to explore the exhibition in person can listen to online audio tours adapted for both adults and children . In one recording, Chicago—the groundbreaking artist who created The Dinner Party (1979) and ushered in a new wave of American feminist art —explains that her work in the exhibition, Flight Hood , was inspired by her time as the only woman in a 250-person auto body school. In 2011, she painted this car hood with a “nascent butterfly” form that references her first husband, who died in an automobile crash.

Cars and car culture have long been tied to Western notions of manliness and rugged individuality . By using a piece of metal so often associated with masculinity as her canvas, Chicago subverted expectations.

“This work is based on a series of paintings that my painting instructors hated,” she recalls in the clip. “… I understood, intuitively, that this imagery that my male painting teachers had rejected because it was so female centered, that there was something subversive about mounting it on the most masculine of forms—a car hood.”

Lead curator Juliet Kinchin , who organized the exhibition with Paul Galloway and Andrew Gardner, also sought to emphasize women’s contributions to the male-dominated auto design industry. Relevant artifacts include textile artist Anni Albers’ upholstery materials and designer Lilly Reich’s 1930 sketches for a folding car seat .

“Women have actually been featured in these stories from the beginning,” Kinchin tells Vanity Fair . “That was something we wanted to tease out.”

All told, Galloway says that he hopes the exhibition pushes museumgoers to reconsider their relationships with their vehicles.

“This is absolutely a moment when we’re rethinking our history with things that we used to love and cherish,” he tells Vanity Fair , “and acknowledging that some of those things maybe were poisonous, or bad ideas, or death traps.”

“ Automania ” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City through January 2, 2022.

Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Nora McGreevy | | READ MORE

Nora McGreevy is a former daily correspondent for Smithsonian . She is also a freelance journalist based in Chicago whose work has appeared in Wired , Washingtonian , the Boston Globe , South Bend Tribune , the New York Times and more.

 / 

Traffic in downtown Los Angeles, April 4, 2022. Mario Tama / Getty Images

Wrong Turn: America’s Car Culture and the Road Not Taken

With its highways and suburbs, modern America was built around the automobile and powered by fossil fuels. The oil crises of the 1970s provided an opportunity to change course and move to renewable energy, but any momentum achieved then proved to be very short-lived.

By Bill McKibben • June 9, 2022

If you lived in the suburbs in the 1970s, you can see it in your mind’s eye: driveway after driveway filled with Country Squires and Pontiac Safaris and Buick Estate Wagons. The Silvermans, for instance, with whom we shared a double-driveway in the Boston suburb of Lexington (“birthplace of American liberty”) and who, on a warm summer evening, would pile all the kids in back and all the adults in front and drive off two or three miles to Buttrick’s ice cream stand. When I say the kids piled in the back, I mean we crammed into the back cargo area — and, if memory serves correctly, on the back roads Mr. Silverman would actually lower the tailgate and let us dangle our legs over the back. Needless to say all of this would now get you arrested for child endangerment, but we loved it. Loved it without thinking about it, because the car was the absolute unquestioned reality of our lives.

Americans had, of course, been buying cars in big numbers since Henry Ford started up his assembly line in 1913, but until the end of World War II the numbers were not that big: in 1950 there were only 25 million cars registered in the country. That summer, over Lexington, a fleet of seven skywriting planes puffed out a gasoline advertisement in the sky: “New Blue Sunoco,” it said, day after day.

The message took — all such messages took. U.S. factories produced 8 million new cars that year, and by the end of the decade there were 67 million cars on the roads of America. Those roads stretched everywhere, since the 1950s also saw the construction of the interstate highway system, the largest public works program in American history. I’d never left the continent till well past college, but I’d seen an awful lot of the United States: vacation meant piling into the car and driving, covering ground along the route that someone in the AAA office had highlighted in our TravelGuide, until about 5 in the afternoon when it was time to search for a motel (the TravelGuide symbol for a swimming pool was an absolute requirement.)

By 1970, there were 118 million cars on the road in the U.S. — more than quadruple the number 20 years before.

It took no time — a decade — for America to construct itself around the car. That’s what the suburb was, a reflection in concrete and wood and brick of the logic of the automobile, designed for its dimensions, its turning radius. Lexington was an older and more compact suburb, so it was theoretically possible to negotiate it without a car — but not really. We shopped at the mall one town over, and as far as I know no one had ever approached it on foot; why would you? And the further out you went, the more car-centric the suburbs became, just a series of branching roads that eventually turned into driveways.

More than three-quarters of Americans drove to work, and most of them drove by themselves. As Meg Jacobs wrote in her history of the period, by 1970, Americans consumed a third of the world’s energy — more than the Soviet Union, Britain, West Germany and Japan combined. And mostly because of the car. By then there were 118 million cars and trucks on the American road — more than quadruple the number 20 years before. The cars were big: 20 percent bigger than they’d been just five years before. Three-quarters of them now came with air conditioning (up from 20 percent in 1960), which subtracted about two and a half miles a gallon from the fuel efficiency, not that that was a thing anyone even thought about in 1970, because gas was 36 cents a gallon.

I got my learner’s permit the day I turned 15 and a half, and of course I sat through driver’s ed, with its interminable film strips about kids who took a bewildering variety of drugs and subsequently crashed their vehicles. We practiced on a driving simulator, and then on the road with a baseball coach supplementing his pay — he directed me to merge on to the highway at 70 miles per hour four minutes into my driving career. I loved it, and not just because cars meant sex. (We literally called it ‘parking.’) Because it meant economic freedom: you could work, in order to get money to buy gas.

Cars fill a drive-in theater, 1950s. New York Times Co. / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

But my work was as a very cub reporter for the local chain of suburban weekly newspapers, and the story that I covered more than any other was: the sudden, violent collision between that car culture and world geopolitics. I was too young to really pay much attention to the first oil shock in 1973, though I was aware that there were suddenly long lines at Al’s Gulf. But by all accounts it was bad: at one Texaco station in town, the owner reported “they’ve broken my pump handles and smashed the glass on the pumps, and tried to start fights when we close.” Nixon ordered a ban on holiday lights — and even when he scaled back the order, businesses could only put up about a fifth of the ordinary spectacle. The Daytona 500 was cut to 450 miles; one White House official traded in his chauffeured limousine for a chauffeured Ford Pinto. But in March of 1974 Saudi Arabia lifted the embargo that had triggered the first oil crisis; prices stayed high, but life resumed: the momentum of suburbanization hadn’t been broken, though at least for a while cars downsized — we never had anything quite as long-nosed as that Plymouth Fury again.

I was entirely conscious, however, when the second oil shock hit, this time in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution led to sharp drop in the oil supply. The gas lines returned, and I was 18 and covering them for the local paper, making endless rounds of calls to local filling stations to see when they’d be open and for how long, so we could print the schedules on the front page. “Everyone is near 75 percent allocation, which means one out of four people is not going to get gas, and no one wants to be that one,” the owner of the Shell station told me. “I open at 7 a.m., and I’m pumped out by 11 a.m.” He was pleasant, anyway. “Hours? We have no hours,” someone answering the phone at Dom’s Amoco snapped. “I pump gas when I feel like it.” One of my responsibilities was the police log, normally a fairly dry affair but now suddenly filled with reports of people arrested for siphoning gas out of cars parked in driveways. I interviewed school officials, who were busy repairing boilers (“we are stretching a gallon of fuel oil to its limits,” the head custodian explained) and car dealers (“big cars are dead,” one VW dealer said).

“Nobody can embargo sunlight,” President Carter said. “No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out.”

Along with gas station owners, I also got to interview the number three official in the country’s energy department. John Deutch was an MIT professor, and in between Washington stints he lived in Lexington, so I talked with him the week before his boss, President Jimmy Carter, was to give a nationwide address on energy conservation. Deutch — barefoot and in jeans on his back porch — was sounding appropriately sober. “If you’re a person in a situation where there is too little oil, you would look for easy solutions and for scapegoats,” he said. “But there is no quick fix. There is no question about the fact that until the American people understand that there is not as much oil as they want at prices they want, there will be problems.”

Carter had been striking the same note all along: in his first address as president he’d said “we have learned that more is not necessarily better; that even our great nation has its recognized limits.” The energy crisis, he said, was a reminder that “ours is the most wasteful nation on Earth.” As the gas lines grew longer, his sobriety deepened. “All the legislation in the world can’t fix what is wrong with America,” he said. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” he said, sounding different than any president had ever sounded. We should change — we should learn “that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning, that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

Cars line up at a gas station in Darien, Connecticut during the 1979 oil crisis. Bob Riha, Jr. / Getty Images

If that sounded like an attack on suburbia, well — it kind of was. Or, if not an attack, then an invitation to think a little differently. And an invitation that might, actually, have been answered. The 1970s had begun with the publication of a book called Limits to Growth , an argument that we were reaching ecological boundaries that became one of the bestselling nonfiction volumes ever. A year later E.F. Schumacher had produced Small is Beautiful — a book so powerful that when its German-British author came to America, Carter hosted him at the White House. The sociologist Amitai Etzioni was a senior policy advisor in that White House, and he brought the president polling data to show how up in the air the nation really was; the data showed 30 percent of Americans were “pro-growth,” 31 percent were “anti-growth,” and 39 percent were “highly uncertain.” That kind of ambivalence, he told the president, was “too stressful for societies to endure,” and he was right — which explains, I think, the fateful 1980 election when we turned to Reagan and his markets-solve-all fundamentalism and thus began the path toward our current state of overheated dysfunction.

What might we have done differently in the 1970s, even before we really understood the danger that carbon dioxide was posing? It turns out that, in those oil shock years, the Carter administration fixed on one key solution: massive government support for developing solar power. “A strong solar message and program,” the president’s domestic policy advisor Stuart Eizenstat told him, “will be important in trying to counter the hopelessness which polls are showing the public feels about energy.” Carter agreed to the plan — indeed, he said a fifth of the country’s energy should come from solar power by 2000. He called for spending a billion dollars in fiscal year 1980 to create a Solar Bank to fund research and to provide homeowners with loans for putting up panels. He officially declared May 3, 1978 as Sun Day and observed this first solar holiday by traveling to a mountaintop in Golden, Colorado, home to a federal solar research facility: “The question is no longer whether solar energy works,” he told a crowd. “We know it works. The only question is how to cut costs so that solar power can be used more widely and set a cap on rising oil prices. In many places, solar heating is as economical today as power from nonrenewable sources.” He added, “Nobody can embargo sunlight. No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute our air or poison our waters. It is free from stench and smog. The sun’s power needs only to be collected, stored, and used.”

In 1986 the Reagan administration took the solar panels down from the White House roof and stored them in a warehouse.

And then a year later he did something even more important: on June 20, 1979, he invited dignitaries and reporters onto the roof of the White House to watch the installation of 32 solar hot-water heating panels. “A generation from now,” he said, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”

In truth, it took much less than a generation to deliver the verdict: literal museum piece. Shortly after taking office, Reagan cut the renewable energy research budget by 85 percent and let the tax credits for solar panels expire; he did away with assistance for weatherizing homes, and ended energy efficiency requirements for appliances. Instead, Reagan pushed hard for increased oil drilling in the U.S. and for making sure that no pesky regulations got in the way. “First, we must decide that ‘less’ is not enough,” he said. “Next, we must remove government obstacles to energy production. Putting the market system to work for these objectives is an essential first step for their achievement.”

And so in 1986 the Reagan administration took the panels down from the White House roof and stored them away in a Virginia warehouse. A top White House official thought the equipment was a “joke.” An official spokesman said “putting them back up would be very unwise, based on cost.”

As it happens, I know a little about those panels. They were rescued from that Virginia warehouse by a faculty member at Unity College, a small school in a rural corner of Maine, where for years they sat on the roof of the cafeteria, heating the water used in the kitchen. They gave away or sold a few of them: I learned about them in 2008 when I visited the Sun Moon Mansion, the headquarters of China’s largest solar hot water company. Huang Ming, who’d founded the company, kept one of Carter’s panels in a place of honor in a small museum of renewable energy just off his executive offices. The panels, he said, had helped inspire him to create a business that was currently heating the water for a quarter billion of his countrymen — some Chinese cities, viewed from the air, look as if every single building has a solar hot water heater on top.

President Jimmy Carter in front of solar panels on the roof of the White House, June 20, 1979. Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Anyway, Unity officials agreed to hand me a couple more of the historic panels, and so in 2010 I rented a van, hitched a trailer behind it, and began dragging them south toward the White House. It was a fun road trip — three students and a professor from Unity were along. We hosted rallies in Boston, New York, and Baltimore — we’d pour a gallon of water in the top of the heater, point it at the sun, and eight or nine minutes later steam would be churning out: 31 years later these things worked as well as the day they went up. Our hope, of course, was that Barack Obama (whom we all had worked to elect) might symbolically reinstall one, up top of his new house. We thought it made sense: when the first lady had planted the White House garden a year before, seed sales had gone up 30 percent. We thought that the gift might help the administration restart solar history after three decades.

But no. Arriving in Washington, we were directed by administration officials to a side door at the Executive Office Building — the five of us were ushered by an intern in a blue blazer into the wood-paneled room where, once, the UN Charter had been drafted. This day, a trio of what The New York Times called “midlevel White House” officials met with us, in the single most frustrating example of bureaucratic obstruction I’ve ever gotten to witness close up. First they filibustered — long boilerplate explanations of how the administration was “building a bigger, better, smarter electric grid, all while creating new sustainable jobs.” I sat back and let the three students respond, and they were magnificent. “Thank you for your good work,” they said politely, over and over. “But no one really knows about it — certainly not our friends, who voted for Obama but are increasingly disillusioned. What better way to spread the word about what you’re up to than the high-profile move of putting solar panels back on the roof?”

No, said the officials, but they refused to say why. Literally refused. The students asked, again and again, and the woman who was leading the conversation kept repeating the same phrase: “If reporters call and ask us, we will provide our rationale.” But they wouldn’t provide it to us, and they wouldn’t pose for a picture with the students, and they wouldn’t accept the old panel even to put in storage.

Jean Altomare and Jesse Pyles of Unity College demonstrate one the original water-heating solar panels installed on the Carter White House. 350.org via Flickr

Eventually we were back on the sidewalk, and the three college students were talking to reporters. They were in tears — of disappointment, but also I think of genuine perplexity. Amanda Nelson: “I didn’t expect I’d get to shake President Obama’s hand, but it was really shocking to me to find out that they really didn’t seem to care.” Elliott Altomare: “We went in without any doubt about the importance of this. They handed us a pamphlet.” Measured the way activists measure things, it was entirely worth it: three stories in the Times , plenty of other coverage. We’d moved the needle a little further along. But I felt a little guilty about disillusioning these students: they’d seen early on some of the cowardice and moral compromise inherent in holding power. And — for all my advanced years — I felt a little disillusioned too. It certainly made it easier to come back to the White House the next year and help organize the protests against the Keystone XL pipeline that led to the mass arrests of demonstrators. In time we won that battle: we forced Obama to block KXL, the first loss of that kind Big Oil had ever suffered. And in time — safely into his second term — Obama did indeed put solar panels up on the White House roof. “The project, which helps demonstrate that historic buildings can incorporate solar energy and energy efficiency upgrades, is estimated to pay for itself in energy savings over the next eight years,” a spokesman said.

In retrospect, it was pretty clear why Obama wanted nothing to do with those solar panels: they were tainted by their association with Carter. The 1980 election, 30 years later, still dominated our politics. We’d made a choice then, and that choice still held sway, even in the administration of our first Black president, a man who on the eve of his nomination had said that future generations would look back on that time as “the the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” But he calculated that we hadn’t yet reached the moment when we could move past that earlier moment in our political history. Here’s how Obama put it recently: “Through how I thought about these issues when I first came into office, I think there was a residual willingness to accept the political constraints that we’d inherited from the post-Reagan era,” he said. “Probably there was an embrace of market solutions to a whole host of problems that wasn’t entirely justified.” Probably.

This article is adapted from Bill McKibben’s new book, The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon .

Related Articles

On gulf coast, an activist rallies her community against gas exports.

By Jocelyn C. Zuckerman

Can a California Oilfield Be Retrofitted to Store Solar Energy?

By Stephen Robert Miller

In a Dammed and Diked Mekong, a Push to Restore the Flow

By Stefan Lovgren

More From E360

As world warms, global heat deaths are grossly undercounted, biodiversity, the ‘internet of animals’ could transform what we know about wildlife, grim dilemma: should we kill one owl species to save another, with co2 levels rising, world’s drylands are turning green, as world’s springs vanish, ripple effects alter ecosystems, the race to save glacial ice records before they melt away, turning brownfields to blooming meadows, with the help of fungi, to foil a deadly pest, scientists aim for a beetle-resistant ash tree, could the global boom in greenhouses help cool the planet, in north macedonia, an ancient lake faces modern threats, how a ‘citizen map’ is helping brazil prepare for next big flood.

The Effect of Car Culture on Our Lives

America's car culture is well documented and, these days, often bemoaned. But where does that culture actually come from and how does it affect...

When we asked people, "Why do you think we drive as much as we do as Americans?" we were surprised how many people came back with, "We have no choice. I have no choice but to drive as much as I do, because of the way the country is laid out." People feel trapped by the built environment, but then they also don't recognize how many choices they're making from day-to-day.

Scientists stunned after discovering gigantic missing blob of water in the Atlantic Ocean

Try the world's shortest IQ test that has just 3 questions and reveals how intelligent you are

People can't tell if a horse is walking backwards or forwards in tricky optical illusion

Mysterious 'golden orb' found at the bottom of ocean baffles scientists

Medieval sleep routine could be the answer to people who struggle to sleep at night

The All-New BMW M5: A Stunning Leap into the Future

The bugatti tourbillon: a timeless and spectacular automotive marvel, world premiere: zf annotate leverages ai for adas and autonomous systems development, the new bmw x3: a comprehensive overview, the new audi e-tron gt: an electrifying masterpiece.

• Aftermarket

Car Culture. Exploring the Cultural Significance of Cars: Complete From Pop Culture Icons to Environmental Impact

Discover the rich history and cultural significance of cars in our society with our exploration of car culture. From the role of cars in popular culture to their impact on the environment, learn how new technologies are shaping the future of transportation. Join us as we delve into the fascinating world of cars and their evolving place in our culture and society.

Table of Contents

A modern icon

The automobile has become an indispensable part of modern society, playing a significant role in popular culture while having a profound impact on society and the environment . Cars have not only revolutionized transportation but have also been instrumental in shaping our culture, from their role in music and movies to their association with status and wealth.

The Evolution of Cars: A Brief History

The first automobiles were steam-powered and were slow, heavy, and expensive. In 1886, Karl Benz invented the first gasoline-powered car , which was a significant improvement over the steam-powered cars of the time. The Model T, introduced by Henry Ford in 1908, revolutionized the automobile industry by making cars affordable for the average person.

The Model T was designed to be simple, reliable, and easy to maintain, and it was so successful that by the time it was discontinued in 1927, Ford had produced over 15 million of them.

The 1970s and 1980s saw a shift towards smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, in response to the energy crisis. This shift was led by Japanese car manufacturers, who focused on building smaller, more efficient cars. Today, cars come in all shapes and sizes, from gas-guzzling SUVs to electric vehicles that run on renewable energy.

The Role of Cars in Popular Culture

Cars have played a significant role in popular culture , reflecting and shaping our values, aspirations, and desires. Cars are often portrayed as symbols of freedom, independence, and masculinity. The iconic American road trip, immortalized in movies like Easy Rider and Thelma and Louise, is a testament to the cultural significance of cars.

Cars are also associated with status and wealth, as evidenced by the popularity of luxury car brands like BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

In music, cars have been a popular theme for decades. From the Beach Boys’ “Little Deuce Coupe” to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” cars have inspired countless songs. Cars have also been the subject of many movies and TV shows, from the high-speed action of The Fast and the Furious to the retro cool of Mad Men.

Cars and Society: The Pros and Cons

While cars have brought many benefits to society, they have also had some negative impacts. On the positive side, cars have given us unprecedented freedom and mobility. They have made it possible to travel long distances quickly and easily, and they have allowed us to live further away from our workplaces and schools.

However, cars also have some negative impacts. One of the biggest is traffic congestion . As more and more people buy cars, our roads become more crowded, leading to longer commute times and increased air pollution. Cars also contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change.

Traffic congestion not only has a negative impact on our environment but also on our economy. In the US, traffic congestion costs an estimated $305 billion each year in lost time and wasted fuel. As a result, many cities have implemented measures to reduce traffic congestion, such as building more public transportation systems, introducing congestion charges, and promoting carpooling.

The Environmental Impact of Cars

The environmental impact of cars is a growing concern. Cars are a major contributor to air pollution, which can have serious health consequences , including respiratory illnesses, heart disease, and even cancer. In addition, cars emit greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, which contribute to climate change.

To address these concerns, car manufacturers have been working to develop more environmentally friendly cars. One of the most promising developments is the electric car . Electric cars run on rechargeable batteries and produce zero emissions, making them much cleaner than traditional gasoline-powered cars.

As battery technology continues to improve, electric cars are becoming more affordable and more efficient, and they are increasingly seen as a viable alternative to traditional cars.

In addition to electric and self-driving cars, there is also growing interest in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. These cars run on hydrogen, which produces zero emissions when burned. While still in the early stages of development, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have the potential to be a game-changer in the fight against climate change.

Culture and Cars: The Future

As we look to the future, it is clear that cars will continue to play a significant role in our culture and society. However, the way we think about cars is changing. Today, many people are increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of cars on the environment and are looking for alternative modes of transportation.

In response to these concerns, car manufacturers are developing new technologies and investing in renewable energy. Some companies are even working on developing flying cars, which could revolutionize transportation in urban areas.

Car Culture: Conclusion

In conclusion, cars have had a profound impact on our culture and society, shaping the way we live, work, and play. While cars have brought many benefits, they have also had negative impacts, including traffic congestion and pollution. As we look to the future, it is clear that cars will continue to evolve and change, with new technologies and innovations emerging to address these concerns.

Whether it is through electric cars, self-driving cars, or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, the future of transportation is exciting and full of possibilities. By embracing these new technologies and working together to reduce our impact on the environment, we can build a more sustainable future for ourselves and for future generations.

Related Article

The Evolution of Electric Luxury and Range: the 2024 Lucid Air Grand Touring Increased Range

2025 Honda CR-V e:FCEV: Pioneering America’s Exciting Plug-in Hydrogen Future

An Exciting Glimpse into the Future: Lincoln Model L100 Concept

Introducing the Exciting Audi Q6 e-tron: A New Era of Electric Mobility

Bugatti Bolide and Brembo: Redefining the Limits of Stopping Energy

Preserving the Roar: Jaguar F TYPE V8’s Exciting Legacy Ensured in the British Library

Unveiling of the New Aston Martin Vantage: A Tribute to Driving Excellence

Shifting Dynamics in the Automotive Industry: An Illuminating Research into Emerging Technologies and Market Evolution

The Mercedes-Benz Museum: An Exciting Journey Through Time and Innovation

Car Engine Systems: An Exciting Deep Dive into Power, Performance, and Potential

Recent posts.

Privacy Overview

Login access is disabled

Car Cultures

• American Anthropologist 105(1)

• Indiana University Bloomington

Discover the world's research

• 25+ million members
• 160+ million publication pages
• 2.3+ billion citations

• Amahl Bishara

• GEOGR ANN B

• Phillip Vannini

• Recruit researchers
• Join for free
• Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up

Explore our publications and services.

University of michigan press.

Publishes award-winning books that advance humanities and social science fields, as well as English language teaching and regional resources.

Michigan Publishing Services

Assists the U-M community of faculty, staff, and students in achieving their publishing ambitions.

Deep Blue Repositories

Share and access research data, articles, chapters, dissertations and more produced by the U-M community.

A community-based, open source publishing platform that helps publishers present the full richness of their authors' research outputs in a durable, discoverable, accessible and flexible form. Developed by Michigan Publishing and University of Michigan Library.

• shopping_cart Cart

Browse Our Books

• See All Books
• Distributed Clients

Feature Selections

• New Releases
• Forthcoming
• Bestsellers
• Great Lakes

English Language Teaching

• Companion Websites
• Subject Index
• Resources for Teachers and Students

By Skill Area

• Academic Skills/EAP
• Teacher Training

For Authors

Prospective authors.

• Why Publish with Michigan?
• Open Access
• Our Publishing Program
• Submission Guidelines

Author's Guide

• Introduction
• Final Manuscript Preparation
• Production Process
• Marketing and Sales
• Guidelines for Indexing

For Instructors

• Exam Copies
• Desk Copies

For Librarians and Booksellers

• Our Ebook Collection
• Ordering Information for Booksellers
• Review Copies

Background and Contacts

• About the Press
• Customer Service
• Staff Directory

News and Information

• Conferences and Events

Policies and Requests

• Rights and Permissions
• Accessibility

The Automobile and American Culture

Looks at the impact of the automobile on American folkways

Look Inside

I. The First Decade Why Michigan? by John B. Rae     1 My Seven Years of Automotive Servitude by Charles Madison     10 The Automobile and the City by Mark S. Foster     24 The Early Automobile and the American Farmer by Reynold M. Wilk     37 The Automobile and American Fashion, 1900-1930 by Helen Frye     48 The Great White Hope on Wheels by Michael L. Berger     59 Images of the Early Car     71 Vanishing Americana by William S. Doxey     79

II. The Transformation of America The Road to Autopia: The Automobile and the Spatial Transformation of American Culture by Joseph Interrante     89 Commercialized Nostalgia: The Origins of the Roadside Strip by Warren Belasco     105 Sex and the Automobile: From Rumble Seats to Rockin' Vans by David L. Lewis     123 Something of Love by Robley Wilson, Jr.     134 "Woman's Place" in American Car Culture by Charles L. Sanford     137 Not from the Back Seat by Lydia Simmons     153 Moving Backward by Robert M. Lienert     159 The Automobile and the Transformation of the American House, 1910-1935 by Folke T. Kihlstedt     160 The True Mall by John Hildebidle     176

III. The Mirror of Art A Runaway Match: The Automobile in the American Film, 1900-1920 by Julian Smith     179 Cars and Films in American Culture, 1929-1959 by Kenneth Hey     193 The Image of the Automobile in American Art by Gerald D. Silk     206 Joyce Carol Oates     22 The Automobile and American Poetry by Laurence Goldstein     224 Versions of Eden: The Automobile and the American Novel by David Laird     244 CB: An Inquiry into a Novel State of Communication by Jon T. Powell     257 Motivatin' with Chuck Berry and Frederick Jackson Turner by Warren Belasco     262

IV. Dream Machines or American Nightmare? Bel Air: The Automobile as Art Object by Daniel L. Guillory     280 As Animals by Kathleen Spivack     290 Love at Second Sight by William E. Giles     292 Sweet Chariot by Steven Dimeo     295 The Heydey of the Car Culture     307 Cruising with Donny on the San Leandro Strip by Fred Setterberg     315 Rock and Roll by Sibyl James     324 GM Tech Center by John R. Reed     326 Crashworthiness as a Cultural Ideal by Paul W. Gikas     327 Death of a Commuter by Michael Beres     340 Our Off-Road Fantasy by Peter Steinhart     346

V. The Future Our Romance with the Auto Is Over by Michael Barone     353 The Automobile Industry's Future Role in the Domestic and World Economy by David E. Cole and Lawrence T. Harbeck     356 The Obsolescent Auto by Catherine Marshall     371 Energy, Automobiles, and the Quality of Life by Stephen W. White     375 Notes from the Plague Planet by Sam Abrams     379 Filling Station by Edward Mortin     382 Star Wars Style and American Automobiles by Daniel L. Guillory     383

VI. Historiography Some Milestones of Automotive Literature by Robert C. Ackerson     394 The Car Culture revisited: Some Comments on the Recent Historiography of Automotive History by James J. Flink     405 Contributors     419 

Description

The Automobile and American Culture is the most comprehensive study of its subject ever published. Integrating scholarly and popular approaches, this anthology of essays, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and graphics describes the impact of one of this century's most fascinating inventions on American folkways. Now in its revised and expanded form, The Automobile and American Culture provides an even closer look at the past, present, and future of this country's automobile revolution. Here is described, among other subjects, the impact of the automobile on the city, the farm, the house, the arts, fashions, sex, youth and age, men and women---in sum, the modern psyche and modern society.

• < Previous

Home > CMC > CMC_STUDENT > CMC_THESES > 1271

CMC Senior Theses

A vehicle of expression.

Cristian Garcia , Claremont McKenna College Follow

Graduation Year

Date of submission, document type.

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

American Studies

Tamara Venit-Shelton

Rights Information

© 2015 Cristian Garcia

This senior thesis studies the evolution and ideals of several populations in Los Angeles through the lens of car culture. The automobile is a symbol of expression and upon analyzing it, a great deal can be revealed about its owner. Los Angeles is home to the hot rodding, lowriding, and import tuning car movements. All three major car cultures were born from a marginalized youth population. The three movements shed light on the sentiments and assimilation process of the various ethnic communities that created the car culture. This essay will show how each movement not only influenced one another, but also the car industry as a whole. Additionally, this essay examines how advancements in technology have led the current millennial generation to form a mass youth culture. The mass youth culture of the present day is much different than the young populations of past time periods, and that is reflected when analyzing modern day car culture.

Recommended Citation

Garcia, Cristian, "A Vehicle of Expression" (2016). CMC Senior Theses . 1271. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1271

Since December 23, 2015

Included in

American Studies Commons

Advanced Search

• Notify me via email or RSS
• Colleges, Universities, and Library
• Schools, Programs, and Departments
• Disciplines

Author Corner

• Faculty Submission
• Student Submission
• Policies and Guidelines

Useful Links

• Claremont Colleges Library
• Claremont Colleges Digital Library

Home | About | FAQ | My Account | Accessibility Statement

Privacy Copyright

To read this content please select one of the options below:

Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, the impact of “car culture” on our urban landscape: how shoppers have literally been driven off the british high street.

Housing, Care and Support

ISSN : 1460-8790

Article publication date: 9 September 2013

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the impact of the arrival of the motor car on streets, communities, life styles and health. It documents the environmental, economic and social sacrifices that societies have made, in order to accommodate car traffic; and suggests some of the early signs of the dynamics of resistance.

Design/methodology/approach

In style this is an opinion piece, although based upon and backed by extensive research, some of it cited here. Historical and cultural changes are mapped out with ironic references also to architectural fashions, and contemporary film culture in the sub-headings.

Prioritising pedestrians in urban areas and encouraging walking would have beneficial impacts in terms of public health and environmental quality and deliver economic savings.

Originality/value

With increasing focus on public and preventive health, and concerns to develop, for example, more age- and/or “dementia-friendly” environments, the paper suggests that new-build housing, in-fill and redevelopment will need to consider the streets between our homes as a key aspect of neighbourhoods and housing policy.

• Public health
• Public realm
• Street furniture
• Urban envrionment

Phenton, J. (2013), "The impact of “car culture” on our urban landscape: how shoppers have literally been driven off the British high street", Housing, Care and Support , Vol. 16 No. 3/4, pp. 161-166. https://doi.org/10.1108/HCS-08-2013-0014

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Related articles

All feedback is valuable.

Please share your general feedback

Report an issue or find answers to frequently asked questions

Contact Customer Support

In conclusion, what are we to make of these three books on "car cultures"? While reams of drivel have to date been generated, on and off Madison Avenue, regarding America's putative "love affair" with the automobile, very little of critical substance has been produced analyzing the car as a vehicle (pun intended) of cultural formation and transformation. James J. Flink's The Automobile Age —a revision of his 1975 volume The Car Culture —is the only book I know of that addresses the topic with any depth or rigor. This work is still in print and well worth seeking out; a single-author historical survey, it has obvious advantages, in terms of focus and comprehensiveness, over the volumes under review here. Still, all three books I have discussed contain their shares of valuable and insightful material and can be recommended to readers, both scholarly and popular, interested in studies of this ubiquitous, complex, and vexing machine.

Subcultures

Histories of the car industry, examples of academic books on car culture, car cultures.

While Autopia is basically a coffee-table tome, geared for a popular audience and thus filled with brief and largely undemanding material, Daniel Miller's anthology Car Cultures is precisely the opposite: academic in tone and orientation, it offers ten substantial scholarly essays examining the sociological and anthropological aspects of the automobile. Unlike Autopia , its illustrations are sparse, though it does contain something of a "photo essay": Jojada Verrips and Birgit Meyer's "Kwaku's Car," which chronicles the piecemeal restoration of a Ghanian taxi-driver's jalopy. Another key difference between the volumes is Car Cultures ' welcome provision of a synoptic editorial introduction: Miller's "Driven Societies," which, in its review of methodological debates and issues in the field, is so meaty that it constitutes a freestanding essay in its own right. According to Miller, the main "problem for the study of car cultures, as of culture more generally, is to retain the link between the micro-history and ethnography of experience and an appreciation of the way these are shot through with the effects and constraints of acts of commerce and the state" (17). In other words, the critic must strike a balance between an alertness to the overarching power relations inscribed in the automobile and an assessment of the diverse local uses to which this commodity may be put by differently situated communities. While individual chapters tend to come down on one side or another of this systemic divide between capital and consumers, the book as a whole achieves an admirably dialectical perspective. For Miller, such a perspective must acknowledge, above all, the "evident humanity of the car," considered not only as "a vehicle for class oppression, racism and violence" but also as a mechanism for "objectifying personal and social systems of value" (2). His title, "car cultures," thus refers to these large-scale entailments of norms and practices emanating from the motorcar as a complex and mutable material object. Such a viewpoint differs radically from both capitalist histories of the automobile industry and vulgar-marxist critiques of the same since, according to Miller, these approaches share a reductionist functionalism that privileges the immanent values of commodity production and exchange over and against the more "intimate relationship between cars and people" (16). What the essays in his book strive for, then, is a perspective that "relate(s) the car to its wider context in political economy . . . but in such a manner that this sheds light upon, rather than being opposed to, the more personal and involved relationship between values of particular groups of drivers or passengers and their cars" (17). If at times the result threatens to tip over into uncritically descriptive celebrations of consumer "resistance" to commodified power, this is a risk worth taking in order to combat the draconian pessimism of most critical evaluations of the culture of automobility. I must admit, however, that the chapters I found most congenial were those whose tone was colored by this prevailing negativity. Paul Gilroy's "Driving While Black," for example, strives to connect "the uniquely intense association of cars and freedom in black culture" (82) with African-Americans' "distinctive history of propertylessness and material deprivation" (84). While the consumption of luxury cars might seem to confer social status on an otherwise economically disenfranchised minority, this communal self-assertion must be understood in the larger context of "the tacit enforcement of segregated space that is a growing feature of metropolitan life" (85)—a spatial apartheid defined, in no small part, by the forces of suburban privatization enabled by widespread car ownership and use. At the same time, Gilroy reminds us that, while the car tends to endorse "radically individualistic solutions" to entrenched social problems (86), it has also featured prominently in the articulation of black communal aspirations, especially as expressed through popular music, from soul through R&B to rap. Yet a critical appreciation for these positive valences must ultimately be "secondary to our grasp of the destructive and corrosive consequences of automotivity and motorization" for minority communities (87). This essay—the best in the book, in my view—establishes an ethical-political benchmark against which the more positive readings of "car culture" must be judged. Generally speaking, these affirmative treatments manage to escape some of the more stinging strictures of Gilroy's analysis by focusing on car cultures outside the United States, where the hegemonic character of American-style automobility is tempered by local forms of appropriation. Two essays focus on Scandinavia—Tom O'Dell on "Modernity and Hybridity in Sweden" and Pauline Garvey on "Driving, Drinking and Daring in Norway"—while others focus on non-Western cultures: Ghana, in the aforementioned piece by Verrips and Meyer, and two Australian aboriginal groups, in essays by Diana Young and Gertrude Stotz. Ruptures as well as continuities with U.S. models of car maintenance and utilization are consistently stressed, generating a nuanced sense of the global diversity of the automotive ethos. Garvey, for example, analyzes the James-Deanesque "exercises in transgressive daring" (136) that have come to inform Norwegian youth-cultural driving practices, but she also argues for "the socially embedded nature of drunkenness" (137), which makes for nationally specific inflections of speed racing and joyriding. Similarly, Stotz shows how the Nguru Abos of Northern Australia tend, like many Americans, to see the car as metaphorically male, but this perception is rooted in the "Warlpiri exchange system . . . based on a gendered relationship of rights and obligations" (223), not in a Western model of patriarchal technocracy. Perhaps the most fascinating discussion of ethnic adaptation is Young's treatment of the lifecycle of the car among the Anangu of Southern Australia, where she argues convincingly that motor vehicles reinforce, through their incorporation into religious gatherings and magical practices, a "spiritual connection with the land" (52)—which is a far cry from the West's longstanding (and much lamented) technological alienation. The remaining essays focus on particular topics—Mike Michael on road rage, Michael Bull on the car as a mobile audio system, and Simon Maxwell on the ethics of automobile ownership—that facilitate pointed comments on the interplay of domination and resistance in "car culture." Michael's discussion, while acknowledging the institutionalized violence cross-culturally immanent in driving, also shows how feelings of anger and frustration are channeled into ethnically unique forms of expression in different European countries. Bull's essay, which analyzes how drivers construct individualized musical "soundscapes," concedes that these "aural privatized experiences" are implicated in the "industrialized soundworld" of the culture industries (188), yet he rejects Adorno's "totalitarian" construction of this relationship (191) in favor of a "more dialectical process in which drivers actively construct their experience(s)" (200). I find the latent utopianism of Bull's argument unconvincing, but he deserves credit for shedding light on an undeniably popular function of the car—as a mobile concert venue—that has received scant attention in the critical literature. Perhaps the most fully dialectical treatment in this group of essays is Maxwell's, which analyzes how consumers "reduce anxiety and guilt" (206) regarding "the social and environmental consequences of increasing levels of collective car ownership and use" (220) through a negotiated ethics that stresses individual thrift and altruistic concern for others. Maxwell's model accommodates both the negative dimensions of car culture—its misuse of natural resources and privatizing deformations of social space—alongside its more affirmative possibilities: the "positive social frames of meaning of car use associated with care and love for immediate others, as well as care for others within wider social networks" (217-218). Unfortunately, his method seems to me unsound—a psychoanalytically-inspired ethnography that expatiates rather too ambitiously from a limited sample of banal observations. What Car Cultures shares with Autopia , above all, is a concern to balance the utopian and dystopian trajectories immanent in the ongoing globalization of automobility. Given that driving provides one of the most intimate and intense technological experiences available in everyday life, it is not surprising that attitudes towards the car—both scholarly and popular—should have come to reflect our general ambivalence about the powerful machines that define and structure our world.

Back to Contents

The car and British Society

The motor car and popular culture in the 20th century, the car and the city, drive on a social history of the motor car.

In his editor's introduction to Autopia , a collection of essays on the cultural history of the automobile, Peter Wollen echoes British author J. G. Ballard in posing a critical choice between "Autopia," an enthusiastic embrace of the freedom and autonomy allegedly conferred by car ownership, and "Autogeddon," an anxious acknowledgement of "the automobile's dark side—car crashes, road rage, congestion, environmental damage, oil slicks, urban sprawl, car bombs and many other scourges" (10). To this list of scattered complaints he might well have added the following, more systemic indictments: the unchecked growth of powerful industries (big oil, big steel) at the expense of public transportation, the ongoing atrophy of communal space, and the increasing privatization of social experience—trends initially centered in the West but now global in their scope and implications. If not the essential cause of these massive changes, the automobile was most certainly their key agent, thus suggesting that a study of the motorcar might provide a unique platform from which to assess an entire century of cultural transformation. While the goal of Autopia is indeed, as Wollen asserts, "to understand the complex ways in which the car has transformed our everyday life and the environment in which we operate," an analysis that also involves "assessing the pros and cons of the automobile as a social and cultural force" (11), the book's composite structure—an anthology of 36 new and reprinted pieces, some full-fledged essays, some excerpted fragments—undermines this impulse to comprehension. A wide-ranging mosaic of perspectives, the book suffers from the typical shortcomings of any such assemblage: lack of integration, unevenness of coverage, and questionable apportionment of space (flaws also evinced by the other two volumes under review here). Autopia is further hobbled by its specific format: designed as a coffee-table compendium, with glossy pages and an impressive array of illustrations, it clearly assumes a popular audience whose level of education and attention span mitigate against specialized vocabularies and lengthy analyses. The need to appeal to such a readership likely also explains the book's title, which plumps for the sunnier side of Ballard's dichotomy, though there are enough dire portents of imminent Autogeddon in its pages to satisfy the gloomiest of cultural pessimists. What is missing is a methodical examination of how the phenomenon of automobility has restructured social relationships; instead, readers must be satisfied with arresting and colorful snapshots that capture the forces of change at particular moments and in specific contexts. These snapshots are sorted into four broad categories: "Cars in Culture," seven chapters covering automobiles in art, literature, film, and popular music; "Cars and Capital," eleven chapters studying automobiles in different national cultures; "Motor Spaces," twelve chapters canvassing public sites and private spaces defined or engendered by the presence of cars; and "Myths and Motors," six chapters treating the automobile's iconic and ideological aspects. The rationale for this general structure is sketchy, and the editors make no attempt to explain it. The section on "Cars and Capital," for example, does not focus on the political economy of the automobile, though the range of global coverage suggests a general contrast between capitalist and socialist economies, while the section on "Motor Spaces" provides a hodgepodge of materials on topics ranging from the geopolitics of expressway design to the pleasures of long-distance driving to the frustrations and mystifications of traffic. At times, an item grouped into one category seems more appropriate to another: Michael Bracewell's essay "Fade to Grey: Motorways and Monotony," a penetrating discussion of the techno band Kraftwerk, is included in the "Motor Spaces" section presumably because it references the German autobahn system, when it would probably have fit better into the section on "Cars in Culture." Some items struggle to fulfill the expectations of their categorical assignments: Patrick Keiller's "Sexual Ambiguity and Automotive Engineering," included in the "Myths and Motors" section, makes a few vague stabs at an analysis of the gender ideology of car design, when what it really offers is a detailed production history of various European makes and models. Considering the fact that two-thirds of the volume's contents are newly commissioned pieces, one would have liked to know the basic vision of the project communicated to the contributors by the editors; absent a sense of these overarching assumptions, the chapters come to seem even more diffuse and impressionistic than they probably are. Despite these organizational problems, however, the materials the book assembles are in the main valuable and interesting, and the text itself is certainly attractively packaged. The chapters in the "Cars and Culture" section include both broad surveys—e.g., co-editor Wollen's essay on "Automobiles and Art," which canvasses avant-garde appropriations of car iconography from Futurism to Pop—as well as more focused pieces, the strongest of which is A. L. Rees's "Moving Spaces," which provocatively analyzes how automotive travel, as represented in film, functions as a topographic allegory of narrative movement. Unfortunately, some of these chapters display the sort of vague, breezy generalizations one might expect from a coffee-table tome: for example, E. L. Widmer's "Crossroads: The Automobile, Rock and Roll and Democracy," which treats popular music's response to the motorcar, offers a superficial tour rather than an in-depth investigation. And the pictorial orientation of the volume also likely explains why literature receives such short shrift in favor of film and visual art; only a single, short chapter, Allen Samuels's "Accidents: The Car and Literature," covers the topic, and it is rather too eccentric and elitist—Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby providing more of a touchstone than Stephen King's Christine —to supply a reliable guide. But there is an upside to the picture-book format: in addition to the abundant illustrations gracing the individual chapters, each section includes what might be called a "visual essay" consisting of several pages of strikingly vibrant images; in the "Cars and Culture" section, this consists of eleven reproductions of car-inspired paintings and art installations by Francis Picabia, Diego Riviera, Robert Longo, Edward Kienholz, and others. Sections two and three focus on "car culture" not as imaginative expression but as lived experience. While obscurely conceived, the "Cars and Capital" section contains some compelling material, such as co-editor Joe Kerr's concise history of automobile production in Detroit, which highlights links between economic conditions and city geography, and the excerpt from Dirk Leach's philosophical memoir of his stint as a laborer on the Mercedes-Benz assembly line, Technik . Yet while these pieces might lead one to assume that capital-labor relations are indeed a focus of this section, thus justifying its general title, the rest of the chapters are given over to treatments of national car cultures—Japan, the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Romania, India, and South Africa—without any special emphasis on political-economic concerns. (Indeed, Kerr's and Leach's contributions may be seen as conforming with this geographical focus in their coverage of the American and German car industries.) Happily, several of these essays are quite strong—especially Ziauddin Sardar's "The Ambassador from India," which defends the eponymous vehicle as an emblem of Indian modernity, and Viviana Narotzky's "Our Cars in Havana," which ponders the pervasive presence of "vintage" U.S. vehicles in post-revolutionary Cuba. The latter chapter, along with those on the U.S.S.R., China, and Romania (by Michael R. Leaman, Geremie R. Barmé, and Adrian Otoiu, respectively), suggests that the automobile, a quintessential icon of Western capitalism, bears with it certain social and spatial relations—most centrally, a tendency towards privatization that expresses itself in the growth of suburban enclaves—that prove intractable even when imported into socialist terrain. But this judgment must be gleaned from insights scattered throughout the essays; there is no sustained attention to such systemic, structural questions, despite the section's putative topic. The "Motor Spaces" section is, as noted above, even more chaotically arranged, though it too contains its share of small gems. These include excerpts from such classic works of cultural criticism as Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity dealing with the impact of the automobile on the urban environment. This section, in fact, features the highest proportion of reprinted pieces—seven out of the twelve chapters—which perhaps explains its more rambling feel, though a counterpoint between utopian and dystopian perspectives provides something of an integrating link. On the positive side, Andrew Cross limns the "indelible romantic tone" of the long-distance road trip (250), while Sandy McCreery counter-intuitively argues that traffic congestion "can be a beautiful thing" (311); more downbeat pieces are Ian Parker's meditation on the fears and loathings of London gridlock and the excerpt from Jay Holtz Kay's Asphalt Nation , which chronicles the geographical and aesthetic "maiming of America" accomplished by the interstate highway system (273). But these tepid effusions and morose ruminations seem shallow beside the more balanced assessments, such as Jacobs's analysis of how the habits of pedestrians in cities have adapted to accommodate the flow of cars or the aforementioned, brilliant essay by Michael Bracewell, which—like its inspiration, Kraftwerk—celebrates the paradoxical "transaction . . . between irony and nostalgia" (291) that affords pleasure even in the robotic repetitions of driving. For all its scattershot quality, this section offers an engagingly diverse collection of views. Not so the final section. While it is ostensibly a more cohesive unit, focusing on the symbolic meanings of the automobile, "Myths and Motors" offers a series of curiously uninspired chapters. Exceptions to this stricture are Roland Barthes's scintillant memo on the Citroën, culled from his 1957 classic Mythologies , and a brief excerpt from Ilya Ehrenberg's neglected 1929 masterpiece The Life of the Automobile ; but these two pieces make up only five of the section's forty-plus pages. By contrast, Keiller's essay, mentioned above, is a dull overview of European engineering techniques spiced up with occasional pseudo-Freudian asides; Grace Lees-Maffei's "Men, Motors, Markets and Women" is a fairly standard comm-studies analysis of automobile advertisements geared for female consumers; and Karal Ann Marling's "America's Love Affair with the Automobile in the Television Age" is as vacuous as its title implies (e.g., "after the privations of the Great Depression, after the hardships and shortages of the war, victorious Americans deserved nothing but the best" [354], etcetera ad nauseam). The treatment of gender ideology in these three chapters never rises above the platitudinous—though Lees-Maffei has the excuse that her analysis is actually centered on cultural stereotypes. The concluding essay by Martin Pawley, a study of the Dymaxion car designed by Buckminster Fuller, is more substantive but seems out of place, not offering much in the way of an iconological appraisal.

Car Crash Cultures

The third book under review here, Mikita Brottman's anthology Car Crash Culture , pushes this ambivalence to the very limit: like J. G. Ballard's notorious 1973 novel Crash which has so clearly inspired it, the book tackles the theme of automotive accidents in a manner that is at once cautionary and celebratory. From Kenneth Anger's "Kar Krash Karma," the gleefully trashy exposé on celebrity deaths that opens the book, to Gregory L. Ulmer's "Traffic of the Spheres," the playfully postmodern proposal for a public "MEmorial" to car-crash victims that closes it, the volume manages to sustain a paradoxical attitude towards its central subject, critically arraigning the inherent hazards of automobility while at the same time reveling in the breathtaking power—even the quasi-sexual ecstasy—of the crash. As a result, it is an altogether more shocking—and entertaining—book than either Autopia or Car Cultures could hope to be. It is also more imaginatively organized, with 28 chapters of new and reprinted material divided into five broad sections: "Car Crash Contemplations," six meditations inspired by specific wrecks, both famous and obscure; "Car Crash Crimes," six pieces canvassing the gruesome forensics of accident injuries; "Car Crash Conspiracies," four essays spinning elaborate intrigues out of literal or figurative automotive deaths; "Car Crash Cinema," five studies of narrative and documentary films dealing with collisions; and "The Death Drive," seven probings of the public culture—the mythic and political aspects—of the crash. The book opens with Brottman's long and fascinating introduction, which begins with an anecdote relating her own car accident, when she was a graduate student vacationing in Cyprus, and exfoliates into a searching examination of the psychosocial desires and repressions—hedged around with or shading into "rumors, gossip, voyeuristic fantasies, private nightmares, conspiracy theories, and allegations of cryptic skullduggery" (xxiii)—informing the phenomenon of the crash in Western culture. This autobiographical framing of the issue gives the volume a personal charge lacking in the other two books; while it does at times gesture towards a scholarly purpose, including footnotes and other displays of erudition, Car Crash Culture is, like Autopia , clearly designed as a popular work—though with its sometimes uncouth tone and its provision of gross-out imagery (squeamish readers be warned), it is essentially the campy Gen-X cousin of Wollen and Kerr's more soberly yuppified tome. In her editorial conception of the car crash, Brottman casts a wide net, engaging not only literal automotive accidents but all manner of vehicular deaths, from John F. Kennedy's assassination (covered in Pamela McElwain-Brown's "SS-100-X," a study of the Presidential limousine), to a suicide who leapt from the Empire State Building and landed atop a shiny sedan (topic of A. Loudermilk's "Clutching Pearls: Speculations on a Twentieth-Century Suicide"), to the frequent use of a "death car" by serial killers to kidnap and transport their victims (treated in Michael Newton's "Highway to Hell: The Story of California's Freeway Killer"). A central thread in the book's coverage—taking a page, once again, from Ballard's Crash —follows our culture's peculiar obsession with collisions involving celebrities, stunning events that loom as "instant constellation(s) of tragedy, sacrifice, mass fantasy, and monumental comeuppance" (xv), according to Brottman. Aside from Anger's leering overview of the subject, individual chapters consider the deaths of Albert Camus (Derek Parker Royal's "Rebel with a Cause"), Jackson Pollock (Steven Jay Schneider's "Death as Art/The Car Crash as Statement"), and Princess Diana (Philip L. Simpson's "Car Crash Cover-ups"), as well as the near-death of Pope John Paul II (David Kerekes's "Papal Conveyance") and the imaginary death of Paul McCartney (Jerry Golver's "Why Don't We Make Believe It Happened in the Road?"). Royal's and Schneider's essays are particularly valuable in that they speculate convincingly on how the public reputations of Camus and Pollock were transformed by their violent demises. References to James Dean and Jayne Mansfield are, predictably, pervasive; Howard Lake, for example, offers a potent meditation on these (and other) celebrity crash deaths in his "Jump on In, You're in Safe Hands: Flash-Frames from the Automobile Cargo Bay Experience," which adopts the point-of-view of the passenger in order to meditate on issues of social agency. Some of the best—and, alas, worst—essays in the book attempt, as does Lake, to extrapolate the crash into wide-ranging theoretical or cultural allegories. On the positive side, Eric Laurier, explicitly deploying Walter Benjamin's work on allegory, envisions accident sites as technocultural "ruins" in his essay "This Wreckless Landscape," while Ulmer's "Traffic of the Spheres" conscripts Georges Bataille to evoke the crash as a "sacrifice" that exceeds "the conventional capitalist understanding of profit, productivity, expansion, accumulation" (330). Less compelling are Julian Darius's half-baked reading of the crash as a Christian allegory in "Car Crash Crucifixion Culture" and Christopher Sharrett's hysterical polemic on the latent violence of the capitalist system, "Crash Culture and American Blood Ritual." In contrast to these large-scale allegorical arguments, which use the car crash to generate abstract models, other essays deal with the brute facticity of specific wrecks, in registers that vary from the painfully commemorative (e.g., William Luhr's "Stranger in the Night: A Memory") to the calmly dissective (e.g., the autopsy reports included in the "Car Crash Crimes" section). Indeed, Brottman should be commended for how effectively she constructs a consistent counterpoint between sweeping position statements and narrowly particular case studies. That said, it must also be acknowledged that Car Crash Cultures , like Autopia , is something of a scattershot inquiry into its subject. Four of the book's five sections, while imaginatively conceived, lack cohesion—the exception being "Car Crash Cinema," which focuses on a specific medium and a shared set of canonical texts, especially David Cronenberg's 1996 film of Ballard's novel Crash . A pair of essays address this movie, and while Harvey Roy Greenberg's "Machine Dreams" and Brottman and Sharrett's "The End of the Road" differ in their judgments—the former seeing the film as an affirmative working-through of pathological desires, the latter as a dire prediction of social apocalypse—both are animated by the homophobic assumption that anal sex, metaphorized as rear-end collision, is a sign of cultural decadence and death. A pair of pedestrian (no pun intended) essays—by Tony Williams and David Sterritt, respectively—examine the accidents that feature at the cores of Jonathan Kaplan's Heart Like a Wheel and Jean-Luc Goddard's Contempt , while Brottman concludes the section with an energetic deconstruction of the morbid excesses of highway safety films of the 1950s and `60s, in particular the gory classic Signal 30 . (These kitschy horrorshows seem to be enjoying something of a renaissance these days, as witnesses Bret Wood's recent documentary, Hell's Highways: The True Story of Highway Safety Films .) Alas, this collection of essays on film, the most integrally organized part of the book, is also, I feel, its weakest; in fact, the more jumbled and wandering sections provide greater readerly pleasures, perhaps because disorientation and chaos are major aspects of the car crash experience itself.

The Automobile Age

Examples of academic books on car technologies, driving lessons: exploring systems that make traffic safer, fatal exit: the automotive black box debate.

"For instance, today's high-end vehicles may have more than 4 kilometers of wiring -- compared to 45 meters in vehicles manufactured in 1955. In July 1969, Apollo 11 employed a little more than 150 Kbytes to go to the moon and back. Just 30 years later, a family car might use 500 Kbytes to keep the CD player from skipping tracks" (p. 375).

Traffic Psychology Today

ABS = anti-blocking system CC = Cruise Control (Constant) ACC = Adaptive Cruise Control CAS = Crash-Avoidance System

Related Academic Works

The cybercities reader, sounding out the city, doing cultural studies: the story of the sony walkman, the auditory culture reader, technospaces.

The difference between Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age and Sally Munt’s Technospaces: Inside the New Media becomes at once plain. Munt’s book, part of the Critical Research in Material Culture series, for which Munt is the series editor, is a collection of essays by a variety of contribu-tors who are, by and large, theoreticians. Thus Technospaces: Inside the New Media engenders a different kind of readerly engagement from Le Grice’s book. Yet there are some important similarities between the two volumes. Plainly enough, the contributors to Munt’s book explore themes connected with space – one axis of Le Grice’s investigative equation. Yet Munt’s organization of the book, and her own critical engagement with such theoretical voices as those of Henri Bergson and Michel Foucault, also allows the other axis, that of time, to be heralded. Munt opens with her ‘Series Foreword’, quoting historian E.P. Thompson to support the import-ance of examining ‘real, material human lives’ (2001: xi). Chapters follow-ing are as wide ranging as Per Persson’s ‘Cinema and Computers: Spatial Practices within Emergent Visual Technologies’, Radhika Gajjala’s ‘Studying Feminist E-Spaces: Introducing Transnational/Post-Colonial Concerns’ and Michael Bull’s ‘Personal Stereos and the Aural Reconfigura-tion of Representational Space’. This, from David Sanford Horner’s ‘Cyborgs and Cyberspace: Personal Identity and Moral Agency’, is indicative of the kind of analytical statement you will find in Munt’s book: ‘The creation of new technologies of the virtual holds out the promise of deliverance from the limitations of existence in physical space. The ontology of this virtual space is an ontology without bodies’ (2001: 71). As the book’s aim is to ‘explore the implications and contingencies’ raised by technologically induced new spatial practices, it naturally travels some intellectual distance. French Marxist Henri Lefebvre is, however, of some ‘navigational’ importance, his work on space appearing notably in Munt’s introductory chapter ‘Technospaces: Inside the New Media’ and in others such as Peter Dallow’s ‘The Space of Information: Digital Media as a Simu-lation of the Analogical Mind’, a chapter in which Lefebvre’s comment that each phase of history is ‘marked by a particular logic of visualization’ is highlighted. Yet the book does not begin and end at referencing Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991). Judith Roof’s chapter, ‘Depth Technologies’, looks at the idea of ‘depth’, at the effect of new technologies on the nature of our response to it. Rose Ainley’s ‘Keeping an Eye on Them: Control and the Visual’ takes a close look at CCTV. Paula E. Geyh considers postmodern landscape, real and fictional, in ‘The Fortress and the Polis: From the Postmodern City to Cyberspace and Back’. And Matthew Hills gives well-argued close attention to the ‘virtual fan community’ in ‘Virtually Out There: Strategies, Tactics and Affective Spaces in On-line Fandom’. Other chapters include Aylish Woods on ‘information technologies’ and the video feature Fresh Kill (1994), Kathleen LeBesco on the resignification of fat in cyberspace, Duncan Sanderson and Andrée Fortin on geographi-cal communities and their interaction with that ‘cyberspace’, the Sussex Technology Group on mobile phones, and Kate O’Riordan on computer games and that ‘virtual’ tomb raider, Lara Croft. If Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age and Technospaces: Inside the New Media share one final similarity, alongside their ‘personal’ and ‘communal’ interest in the effect of digital technology on our ideas of space and time, it is their enthusiasm for the cultural relevance of these very effects.

Telecommunications and the City

Other books, the car and its future.

Preface   One out of every two Americans owns a car. For the approximately 1.8 million households in the United States, there are 1.9 million automobiles; a mere 8 percent of households do not own cars. The United States is the largest market of automobile consumers in the world. It is safe to say that Americans love their cars. They like what they have now, they’re excited about upcoming models, and they wait breathlessly for the cars of the future, hoping that they will get incredible mileage, produce no emissions, and, ultimately, fly like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.   To a certain extent, Americans’ infatuation with cars makes sense. In a country as large as the United States, cars are often a veritable necessity. Many people, provided they do not live in one of the few American cities with extensive public transportation, need cars for their daily commutes and their vacations. Cars allow people to travel from the suburbs to the city and back again, to navigate the ever spreading urban sprawl. However, there is more to this love affair with cars than simple practicality. Cars are the stuff of fantasy; for proof, look at the litany of films and music that reference, even idealize vehicles. Disney’s Herbie, the Love Bug starred a Volkswagen Beetle with personality. Michael J. Fox relied on a DeLorean, complete with gull wings and mythical flux capacitor, to take him Back to the Future. And such films as Grease and American Graffiti sparked a resurgence in interest in 1950s car culture and the phenomenon of cruising. Such songs as the Beach Boys’ "Little Deuce Coupe" and Prince’s "Little Red Corvette" only furthered the obsession.   Without a doubt, the United States is a car culture, and Americans want it all: safety, glamour, mileage, and that elusive "coolness factor." Today’s autos can accelerate to illegal speeds, and suburbanites who use their vehicles only for errands own sport utility vehicles (SUVs) with off-road capabilities. Admittedly, sometimes a driver’s wants are frivolous, but not always. There is an increasingly persuasive drive toward eco-conscious vehicles that run on alternative fuels like hydrogen fuel cells, diesel, and electricity. Hybrids, or cars with both gasoline engines and electric motors, are the new big thing; whether or not they have staying power remains to be seen. Also popular are tiny autos like the Smart Car and the BMW Mini Cooper, both of which tend to be inexpensive and get good mileage.   Another trend is toward light trucks and SUVs. The Hummer, popularized by actor-turned–California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is the paragon of the bigger-is-better trend. While such vehicles get notoriously poor mileage per gallon, many drivers feel safer wrapped in tons of steel and reassured by four-wheel drive.   So, which vehicle will win the war, the massive SUV or the minuscule car? Maybe neither, since there has been an upsurge in the popularity of sports cars, too. Since the global market for cars continues to grow (especially gaining speed in China), perhaps there is room for all these cars. If vehicles are engaged in a large-scale popularity contest, then Generation Y may very well have the power to decide the winner. Carmakers and insurance companies are actively gearing their products to Generation Y, a force approximately 63 million strong, even though many of them cannot even drive yet. Known for not wanting to feel as if they are being marketed to, members of Generation Y present an elusive market to be cracked. Automakers and insurers are targeting them through teen-oriented print ads, television commercials, and Web sites; whether such tactics work will be seen only after Generation Y comes into its own buying power. When we consider car production rather than purchasing power, in some respects Europe and the United States have become passé. Asia is taking over the market, not only with plants in such countries as Japan and Korea but with Asian-owned factories in North America. Honda and Toyota are two companies at the forefront of hybrid production; they are responsible for the Civic and Insight and the Prius, respectively.   The Car and Its Future considers automobiles and automotive technologies from a variety of angles. The book’s first chapter examines how people feel about and use their cars, including how they drive, methods of car shopping, and purchasing habits. The next chapter looks at the psychology of vehicle design, the effects of manufacturing techniques on quality, and the high technology that goes into our cars. The following chapter considers safety issues, including accident rates, driving techniques that compromise the safety of all drivers, the issue of child safety, and the psychology of driving. The auto insurance industry is the topic of the next chapter, which looks at the best way to obtain reasonably priced insurance as well as at the relationships between insurers and repair shops. Another chapter covers the automotive industry from a global perspective, including foreign car manufacturing in the United States, the effects of America’s foreign policy on gas prices and the auto industry, and the state of car manufacturing in Europe and Asia. The final chapter considers vehicles that use alternative fuels, including hybrid cars and those that run on hydrogen, electricity, and diesel, exploring how environmentally friendly they are and how soon they can be successfully mass-marketed. We would like to thank the many periodical publishers who have so generously granted permission to reprint their articles in these pages. We also must express our gratitude to those at the H. W. Wilson Company who helped to produce and research this book, especially Sandra Watson and Jennifer Peloso, as well as Michael A. Messina, who graciously donated his photographs. Thanks also to Gray Young, Rich Stein, Norris Smith, and Clifford Thompson.   Kaitlen Jay Exum Lynn M. Messina October 2004    

Contents Preface ix I. Life Behind the Wheel 1 Editors’ Introduction 3 1) Going Through the Emotions. Jim Mueller. Chicago Tribune 5 2) Lease/Buy? Auto Deals Not So Easy. Julie Blacklidge. Fort Worth Business Press 9 3) Online Car Sales Gaining Speed After Slow Start. Bob Keefe. Palm Beach Post (Florida) 13 4) Go for a Sedan for Teen’s First Car, Experts Say. Amanda Rogers. Fort Worth Star-Telegram 17 5) Just Taking a Spin. Jaquetta White. The Times-Picayune (New Orleans) 19 6) R.I.P. SUVs? Peter Roff and Jillian Jonas. United Press International 22 7) Drivers Stick with Light Trucks Despite Heavy Fuel Prices. Gregory Cancelada. St. Louis-Post Dispatch 25 II. Marketing and Design 29 Editors’ Introduction 31 1) Car-nal Knowledge. Vicki Haddock. San Francisco Chronicle 33 2) Survival Demands Automakers Race to Bring New Models to Market Faster. Bill Vlasic. The Detroit News 38 3) Global Mood Affects Vehicle Design. William Diem. Detroit Free Press 43 4) Smart Lesson in Quality. Anthony Lewis. Automotive Industries 45 5) Car Makers Zooming in on Youth. Matt Nauman. San Jose Mercury News 49 6) Lost? Let the Car Be Your Guide. T. Edward Phillips. The New York Sun 52 III. Traffic and Safety 55 Editors’ Introduction 57 1) Safety First. Daniel A. Thomas. Planning 59 2) As Technology Advances, So Do Privacy Concerns. Diane Katz. The Detroit News 65 3) States Cracking Down on Driving and Phoning. Diane Cadrain. HR Magazine 70 4) In-Car Electronics Can Distract, Imperil. Jeff Bennett. Detroit Free Press 72 5) Blind Spots, Backover Dangers Gain Attention. Ann Job. MSN Autos 74 6) A Parent’s Lapse Can Be Fatal in the Summer Heat. Jeanne Wright. Los Angeles Times 78 7) SUV Capable, But What About Driver? Richard Rubin. Charlotte Observer (North Carolina) 81 8) National Survey of Drinking and Driving Attitudes and Behaviors, 2001. U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Traffic Tech 83 9) The Zen Commuter. Jessie Milligan. Fort Worth Star-Telegram 87 IV. Insurance and Auto Repair 91 Editors’ Introduction 93 1) Consumer Guide: Auto Insurance. Jocelyn Parker. Detroit Free Press 95 2) Gearing Up. Lynna Goch. Best’s Review 99 3) DRPs: Deciding What’s Legal, What’s Not. Tina Grady. Automotive Body Repair News 105 4) Crooks Like Saturn SL; Asian Cars Closing In. John Porretto. Newsday 113 5) Brake Applied to Recall Cover. Carolyn Aldred. Business Insurance 115 V. The Auto Industry: A Global Perspective 121 Editors’ Introduction 123 1) Foreign Cars Aren’t Quite So Foreign These Days. Jim Fuquay. Akron Beacon Journal 125 2) Smug No More. Jerry Flint. Forbes 128 3) Japan’s Design Practices Get Credit for Its Reliable Cars. Charles J. Murray. Electronic Engineering Times 130 4) China Goes Car Crazy. Clay Chandler. Fortune 133 5) Oil Erupts as Issue in Presidential Campaign. Robert Collier. San Francisco Chronicle 135 VI. Alternative Fuels 141 Editors’ Introduction 143 1) The Lowdown on Hybrids. Eric Minton. GEICO Direct 145 2) Waving Yellow Flag on "Green" Hybrid Vehicles. John O’Dell. Los Angeles Times 150 3) The Hydrogen Highway: Hype or a Happening? Larry E. Hall. MSN Autos 154 4) The Electric-Car Slide. Greg Schneider. The Washington Post 159 5) The Diesel. Dennis Simanaitis. Road & Track 164 Bibliography 171 Books 173 Web Sites 175 Additional Periodical Articles with Abstracts 177

The Car of the Future in Western Europe

The report is divided into eight chapters. The first two examine the broad principles of car design in Europe (Chapter 1) and body shapes (Chapter 2). The next four are concerned with the development of electronics in cars. Chapter 3 provides teh background, and is followd by a more detailed analysis of the position with regard to drivetrain control systems (Chapter 4), driver information systems (Chapter 5) and braking and suspension equipment (Chapter 6). Chapter 7 provides an account of trends in the use of materials, covering such aspects as recent developments, current usage, factors affecting future usage, and the impact of change on material suppliers. Finally, Chapter 8 contains a brief look at the likely cars of the 1990s.

The Car of the Future: New Technology and its Impact on the World Motor Industry

It is generally accepted that the world's motor industry is currently undergoing major chanegs resulting from the adoption of high technology. The aim of this report is to survey all the main areas of high technology with a view to assessing which technical developments have had, and are likely to have, the greatest impact on the motor industry and its products, and in what way. The scope of this report is limited to that part of the industry whic produces passenger cars and light commercial vehicles. The products of the heavier commercial sector are subject to different constraints, demands and legal requirements -- for example, the very much greater use of diesel, and the imposition of widely differing weight limits in different markets -- which lead to a fundamentally different analysis.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Cars — The Fascinating History of Cars

The Fascinating History of Cars

• Categories: Cars Self-Driving Cars

About this sample

Words: 583 |

Published: Jan 31, 2024

Words: 583 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, invention and early development of cars, mass production and accessibility of cars, technological advancements in automobiles, cultural impact of cars.

• Beauregard, R., & Parkhurst, H. (2017). The Impact of Automobiles on American Society: Introduction. Journal of Urban History, 43(3), 348-356.
• Cho, S., & Lee, H. (2019). The invention of the automobile and its effects on society and culture. Applied Sciences, 9(2), 389.
• Gross, D. (2018). A brief history of the pace-changing technology. The Washington Post.
• Pacheco, G., Rossi, E., & Vajk, T. (2019). Autonomous and electric vehicles: A review on digitalisation and sustainable development. Journal of Cleaner Production, 235, 508-522.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof. Kifaru

Verified writer

• Expert in: Life Science

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 772 words

4 pages / 1878 words

6 pages / 2951 words

2 pages / 1006 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Cars

Is there ever a time that business should have precedent over the environment? Businesses of different types have been around since man’s beginning, and they have proven to be beneficial and profitable and at other times harmful [...]

The car of my dreams is a vehicle of the new generation that embodies ease of operation, power, safety, and impressive aesthetics. One of the most pressing concerns today is environmental friendliness, and I strongly share this [...]

The advent of driverless cars, or autonomous vehicles, represents a significant leap in modern transportation technology. These vehicles, designed to navigate without human intervention, utilize an amalgamation of sensors, [...]

The 1920s was a transformative decade for automobile technology and culture in the United States. The era saw a rapid increase in the popularity and availability of cars, as well as significant advancements in automotive [...]

We’ve all seen flying cars in plethora of science fiction movies and always wondered when would we be able to fly in those three-dimensional transport vehicles. Recently, accelerated technological advancement is turning many [...]

The topic I picked is future cars, like air and flying cars this car doesn’t run off oil like the cars we have now and plus the oil is getting in the air it’s unhealthy to breathe in you don’t have to spend money on gas no more [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

1950’s Consumerism and Car Culture Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

The car is the most important object in the twentieth century where it is viewed as freedom for movement and escapes from troubles. Since the introduction of automobiles, artists and wealthy individuals have used it as a subject and object used to perpetuate modern myths. This is also through the past stories of winged horse Pegasus which helped finish various dangerous aims but it lost at the end because of warriors’ excess ego; this also applies directly to the human race. Cars then pose a lot of dangers to a beautiful future.

Consumerism is a word or a term that is used to illustrate and describe the end results of equating personal happiness with the power of purchasing material possessions and their usage. Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen were among the first to criticize consumption even though it started with human civilizations. Car culture is the idea behind current skepticism and the direct rejection of the automobile as a metaphoric savior.

After the Second World War, the economies of the western world developed and boomed. This led to the birth of consumer-based economies that seemed endless. The idea of having a car developed as early as 1920, but the great depression and World War II made it difficult and expensive to own a car. The factors that led to this include government reducing the speed limit from 40 miles per hour to 35. This was to reduce the gas used and take care of the car tires. (Lee, 2000) This changed the consumers’ minds and they started using trains and buses.

During these periods consumers worked hard to be able to purchase cars when normalcy returned and also to provide for their basic needs. After World War II the boom period of cars developed because there was a change when military car manufactures decided to switch to private cars. Then, these new automobiles (private cars) became the most used for movement. This for the government side led to the development of more roads and also rules and laws were passed for the control of these automobiles. (Fox and Jackson, 1983)

During this period after World War II, men have perceived as breadwinners and most of them used their private cars to commute to work or to nearby trains and bus stops so as to enable them to continue their journeys to offices or factories. On the other side, the women used these cars after dropping their husbands to at work to take the kids to school and pick them up later in the evenings and also they used them for shopping.

Teenagers were not left behind, the automobile to them was freedom and credibility of the status to their peers whether they were going to colleges or using them for leisure. The era of race cars also motivated the manufactures and the buyers, that is, after a car won a race the consumers could order the car and this boosted its manufacturing. (Aaker and George, 1994)

During this car consumerism period, the power of owning a car mostly was viewed as a certain social class privilege and also to some was a demand. In this period some consumers owned more than one car. Also, the compensation that the soldiers and people obtained during and after World War II gave them enough money to purchase these cars.

Aaker, David A., and George S. Day, eds. Consumerism: Search for the Consumer Interest , New York: The Free Press, 1994.

Fox, Richard Wightman, and T. J. Jackson Lears, Eds. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 , New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.

Lee, Martyn J., Ed. The Consumer Society Reader, Malden Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

• Traditional vs. Online Shopping
• Country of Origin: Stereotypes
• Metaphoric Theme of Slavery in "Indiana" by George Sand
• T. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class
• Concept of the Ancient Artwork: Seated Goddess with a Child and the Winged Deity
• Community Development: Malls vs Street Front Shopping
• McDonald's: Public Space Interpretation
• Consumer Behavior: Factors Influencing Consumption
• Geographic Information System Report Response
• Analysis of Consumer Behavior Regarding Peapod and the Online Grocery Shopping
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, October 11). 1950’s Consumerism and Car Culture. https://ivypanda.com/essays/1950s-consumerism-and-car-culture/

"1950’s Consumerism and Car Culture." IvyPanda , 11 Oct. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/1950s-consumerism-and-car-culture/.

IvyPanda . (2021) '1950’s Consumerism and Car Culture'. 11 October.

IvyPanda . 2021. "1950’s Consumerism and Car Culture." October 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/1950s-consumerism-and-car-culture/.

1. IvyPanda . "1950’s Consumerism and Car Culture." October 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/1950s-consumerism-and-car-culture/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "1950’s Consumerism and Car Culture." October 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/1950s-consumerism-and-car-culture/.

Essay on Car

Students are often asked to write an essay on Car in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Car

The importance of cars.

Cars are a crucial part of our daily life. They help us travel long distances quickly and comfortably. Without cars, it would be tough to commute to school, work, or other places.

Parts of a Car

A car is made up of many parts, like the engine, wheels, and seats. The engine provides power, the wheels help it move, and the seats offer comfort.

Types of Cars

There are different types of cars such as sedans, SUVs, and sports cars. Each type serves a different purpose and is designed to meet specific needs.

Cars are equipped with safety features like seat belts and airbags to protect passengers during accidents. It’s essential to always use these for safety.

250 Words Essay on Car

Introduction.

Cars, an integral part of modern life, have evolved significantly since their invention in the late 19th century. They are not just a mode of transportation but also a symbol of technological advancement and societal status.

Historical Evolution

The journey of cars began with the invention of a steam-powered vehicle by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot in 1769. However, it was Karl Benz’s petrol-powered car in 1885 that laid the foundation for modern automobiles. The introduction of assembly lines by Henry Ford revolutionized car production, making them more affordable and accessible.

Technological Advancements

The 21st century has ushered in a new era of technological advancements in cars. Electric vehicles (EVs) are gaining popularity due to their eco-friendly nature. Autonomous driving technology, powered by artificial intelligence, is also on the horizon, promising a future of self-driving cars.

Societal Impact

Cars have significantly impacted society. They have reshaped urban landscapes, influenced economic structures, and even defined cultural identities. However, they also contribute to environmental degradation and traffic congestion.

Future Prospects

The future of cars lies in sustainability and smart technology. With rising environmental concerns, the demand for fuel-efficient and zero-emission vehicles is increasing. Simultaneously, advancements in AI and machine learning are paving the way for autonomous vehicles.

500 Words Essay on Car

Cars, the epitome of human ingenuity, have revolutionized the way we travel. They embody the intersection of design, technology, and functionality, providing a tangible measure of societal progress. This essay explores the evolution of cars, their impact on society, and the future of automotive technology.

Evolution of Cars

The first automobile, powered by an internal combustion engine, was invented by Karl Benz in 1885. This marked a significant turning point in human history. Over the years, cars have evolved from basic transportation devices to complex machines embodying luxury, speed, and comfort. Technological advancements have led to improvements in fuel efficiency, power, safety features, and aesthetic appeal.

Impact on Society

However, cars also have a downside. They are major contributors to environmental pollution, emitting greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Traffic congestion and road accidents are other negative externalities associated with cars.

The Future of Cars

However, these technological advancements also pose challenges. Electric cars require extensive charging infrastructure, and their batteries pose disposal issues. Autonomous vehicles raise ethical and legal questions, such as who is responsible in case of an accident.

Cars are more than just a mode of transportation; they are a testament to human innovation and creativity. While they have reshaped society and the economy, they also pose challenges that need to be addressed. The future of cars lies in sustainable and intelligent technology, but it is equally important to navigate the associated challenges responsibly. As we stand on the brink of a new era in automotive technology, the car continues to be a symbol of progress, embodying the potential of human ingenuity.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Review of "Car Cultures" edited by Danny Miller

It is significant that the idea for a book on cars and culture did not come from the collection’s editor or any of the authors, but from Kathryn Earle, an editor at Berg Publishers. It seemed obvious to her that anthropology and cultural studies must have interesting things to say about this supreme example of industrial material culture. She asked Daniel Miller to put the collection together, thinking that there would already be a good deal of research to draw upon. But, as Miller tells us, even though cars are laden with cultural meaning and social significance, anthropology has really had little to say about them. Fortunately, this odd blindness towards the modern mundane is fading as a new generation of anthropological studies of modern material culture and technology emerges.

Related Papers

Oxford Handbooks Online

Pierre LEMONNIER

Cameron Gordon

Instead of a debate about whether the automobile is good or bad, this article will argue that it is more useful to carefully consider how the automobile should live in its natural environment in a way that is compatible with human development. We should, I will argue, now develop a framework to civilize the automobile. Civilization is probably harder to define in a positive sense than in a negative one; i.e. what goes against civilization is generally easier to agree upon that what advances it. Thus, I offer the concept of 'carbarism'. This is not meant to be a blanket epithet but a rubric for identifying social and economic applications of the automobile that could be said to be 'barbaric' in the sense of degrading human civilization, and hence to be avoided. Technology is never neutral with respect to society. Its contribution to civilization can just as easily be negative as positive. Any technology should to be introduced into the wild (so to speak) in a way that ensures that civilization is advanced along with technical progress. The automobile thus far has been simultaneously social advancer and destroyer but it is not too late to begin to civilize the automobile. Some of this involves undoing, slowly, design and institutional mistakes of the past. Some of this involves progressing technological advancement of automobility in a way different from that of the past. But whatever moves may be made the advance of civilization in a broad sense and the avoidance of barbaric uses of the car (carbarism) should be kept front and centre.

Journal of Economic Psychology

Wolfgang Sachs

Matteo Rossetti

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy

Douglas Brownlie

New Engineer Journal

Patrick Moriarty

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] Someone famous—I forget who—once said that ‘People can be relied upon to do the right thing –after all other avenues have been explored.’ Keep this thought firmly in mind as we look at the feasibility or otherwise of ‘changing the car culture’ in Melbourne and other Australian cities.

Sarah Redshaw

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Mimi Sheller

Lindsey Green-Simms

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

olivia brooks

Michael G. Renner

Cultural Studies Review

Alexis Gregory

The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, edited by Karin Bijsterveld/Trevor Pinch (2012). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 79–101

Stefan Krebs

Olga Kravets

Enterprise and Society

John Heitmann

Glen Fuller

Origin of car enthusiasm and alternative paths in history

Kaspar Maase

Dmitriy Doronin

Peter Martin

Alexandre Rigal

Damien Delorme

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

Chris Lezotte

siavash asadi

Agata Stanisz , Waldemar Kuligowski

Mobility Humanities

James Miller

Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life Ethnographic Approaches N Y Peter Lang Publishing

Journal of Youth Studies

Andrew Bengry-howell , Christine Griffin

Transfers, Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies

Fabian Kröger , Jutta Weber

Deena Rymhs

Theory, Culture & Society

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Improving writing skills since 2002

(855) 4-ESSAYS

Type a new keyword(s) and press Enter to search

Car culture.

• Word Count: 1001
• Approx Pages: 4
• View my Saved Essays
• Downloads: 25
• Grade level: High School
• Problems? Flag this paper!

                          Even though the automobile provides convenience and unprecedented mobility, "motor vehicles have many destructive effects on people and the environment"(1). Each year, motor vehicles kill 40,000 to 50,000 people in the U.S., Americans spend $200 million a day for building and rebuilding nation's roads, and motor vehicles have much things to do with land loss, air pollution, global warming and ozone depletion (2). To solve this U.S. car culture problem, I have searched for solutions as follows. First, I will explain basic causes of environmental impacts. Second, I will examine constructive actions practiced by individual, environmental groups or grassroots groups. Finally I will think about some basic solutions that we can practice individually.              [Basic causes of environmental impacts].              I think that U.S. car culture is a result that several potential basic causes of environmental stress have interacted. However, among these stresses I assume ignorance and misinformation, corporate capitalism, and attitude are the most responsible stresses. Motor vehicles" corporations give public misinformation for their short-term profits and they do not take these problems seriously. Also we should not overlook politicians who get a bribes to protect their business. In Western culture, auto vehicles are symbol of power, sex, excitement, or success.              [Activities by Grassroots Groups, Environment Organization, or Persons].              Greenpeace has tried to reduce the devastating effects of the car culture. They provide information and knowledge thorough Internet, and also have rebuilt a car to reduce air pollution caused by the car culture. "Greenpeace has had a Renault Twingo redesigned so that the car consumes only half as much petrol as the original" (3). In this way, it is possible to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of car traffic. They said, "halving the petrol consumption is feasible as a first step for all cars.

• Page 1 of 4

Essays Related to car culture

The automobile has changed the lives, culture, and economy of the people and nations that manufacture and demand them. ... Automotive engineers then develop each part of the car, and mock-up builders create those indigenous parts of the new car. ... GM then would go on to begin producing the car. ... The more the price for cars goes up, the less people buy cars. ... This means that American cars to foreign nations are more expensive, and foreign cars to Americans are cheaper. ...

• Word Count: 2120
• Approx Pages: 8
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

2. Organizational Structure of G&M Cars

The current organizational structure shows the G&M Cars has a very tall hierarchal structure. ... First of all, with a narrow span of control, G&M Cars is able to communicate more quickly between smaller teams of employees. ... So, it is obvious that the current structure is not fit for a small business like G&M Cars, a flatter structure is needed. ... Also, project teams allow a culture of team working and collaboration which is always a good thing to have in an organisation. ... The use of project teams also allow for great career opportunities for the team members, making work at G&M Cars...

• Word Count: 851
• Approx Pages: 3

3. Chinese Car Market

The Chinese car market is also subject to a very substantial growth. ... In fact privately owned cars tripled in quantity between 2000 and 2001. ... (tdctrade.com) At present the ratio of cars to people is very low, only 16 million cars compared to 1.3 billion people. ... (news.bbc.co.uk) Legal There are several legal issues that can affect foreign car manufacturers entering the Chinese car market. ... By June 2006 tariffs shall be cut to 25% for cars while tariffs for car accessories will have to be cut to 10% by the same time. ...

• Word Count: 5026
• Approx Pages: 20
• Grade Level: High School

Due to this method of production, the automobile became a part of American culture, not only a toy for the rich. ... These early luxury cars were the symbol for who you were in the social world. Everyone in town knew who drove what car. Eventually, the car became each person's token of identity. ... Owning a car meant increased freedom. ...

• Word Count: 794

5. India and America - The Culture Gap

No two cultures are the same. All cultures vary. ... While the culture of America is a mixture of different cultures, the Indian culture is unique and has its own values. ... In India the roads can hold animals, bikes, cars, etc., and American streets are only allowed to have cars on them (Prabhat). ... Ten percent of global car crashes happen in India. ...

• Word Count: 492
• Approx Pages: 2

6. The Rising SUV

It is not a car; it is a vehicle. ... Electric cars are much cleaner than even the most efficient and environmentally friendly gasoline-powered car. The price of an electric car can be the only drawback. Rather new on the market, electric cars seem pretty pricey to most consumers, but the benefits of the car make the money worth it. ... The situation becomes most disturbing when looked at in the context of American culture. ...

• Word Count: 1349
• Approx Pages: 5

7. my car adventure

My car is my own personal space. ... The next thing I wish to do to my car is make it my fantasy car. I have often gone to different car shows and seen the outrageous things that have been done to cars. ... The import tuner sensation had taken over me and made me want to be part of their little culture. ... I want people to see my car and be in awe and know that I take car of it and I put a lot of time and energy into making my car unique because it is unique to me. ...

• Word Count: 453

8. Westernization and Traditional Cultures

In China KFC is the most popular food franchise and Buick is the most selling car line. ... In the first place, fortunately or unfortunately it is a fact that many cultures are submerged with western culture. ... Due to these steaming developments many cultures around the globe have felt the impact of westernization, where the influence of the western beliefs and values drastically has faded theses culture's language and tradition. ... According to The Influence of American Popular Culture in the Global Media by Rebecca L. ... In respect to China, the new generation of Chinese youths se...

• Word Count: 626

Are we selling our culture? ... Sure, we have sold out in many areas of our culture. Case and point, how many people have dream catchers in their cars? ... The question shouldn't be are we selling our culture, but rather how far have we sold out? ... We need to keep our culture alive by not forgetting it. ...

• Word Count: 486