Motor Vehicles

Motor Vehicles. The pioneer mechanical engineer Oliver Evans built a steam‐powered amphibious dredge in 1805, but the first significant American experiments with mechanized vehicles came in the 1820s. These heavy, smoky, and unreliable steam‐driven vehicles ran on rails, which were smoother than any pavement and guided the vehicles through turns, but sharply limited their utility.

Other inventors, notably J.K. Fisher and Richard Dudgeon, built smaller, more reliable vehicles around 1860, potential replacements for horses for at least some transportation functions, especially in cities where paved streets provided good surfaces. Urban residents, however, feared these “steamers,” worrying about accidents, smoke, and boiler explosions. Popular resistance, marked by occasional riots, led to municipal prohibitions on steamers.

In the 1880s European inventors such as Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, and Jean‐Joseph Lenoir built the first internal combustion cars, which a few wealthy Americans imported. The Chicago Times‐Herald organized a race in 1895 that generated enormous publicity for the new internal combustion technology. It inspired Charles and Frank Duryea, Elwood Haynes, Ransom E. Olds, and others to become the first American car producers. The public proved more willing to accept internal combustion than steam. Early carmakers merely strapped engines on carriages, a less‐threatening sight with lower speeds (rarely exceeding ten miles per hour [mph]) than the old steamers. Traffic congestion did not seem a problem since the high cost of prototype cars suggested that they would only be playthings for the wealthy. In any case, courts had overturned bans on other new mechanical vehicles, notably bicycles and trolleys, so cities could no longer contemplate outright prohibition.

Henry Ford forever changed the luxury status of cars by designing the Model T, a durable car reliable enough for poor rural roads. He then mass produced (a Ford‐coined word) them, setting up his first assembly‐line factory in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1913. By 1922, despite a high rate of inflation, he had cut Model T prices from $850 to $265 (under $2,000 in 1990 dollars). Ford sold over fifteen million Model Ts before 1927, putting America on wheels. By 1925 a majority of American families possessed cars.

The Ford Corporation fell from dominance in the mid‐1920s. Its nemesis was the General Motors Corporation (G.M.), founded in 1908 through the consolidation of several independent auto companies. Alfred P. Sloan, who became G.M.’s president in 1923, turned to aggressive marketing after he realized that G.M. could not compete in price. He extended customer credit through the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (1919), and offered a variety of brands marketed for different audiences, from the plebeian Chevrolet to the patrician Cadillac. Brand marketing and annual model changes—another Sloan innovation—relied on the styling genius of one‐time Hollywood car customizer Harley Earl, G.M.’s head designer. (Earl would later introduce the garish tailfins that characterized 1950s cars.) The stodgy Model T could not compete with such marketing, and its successor, the Model A, fared little better. Eventually Ford and the other major car company, Chrysler (founded in 1924 by Walter P. Chrysler [1875–1940]), adopted G.M.‐style marketing.

The automobile contributed to massive social changes between the two world wars. The 1920s saw a boom in suburban and resort housing, as cars made outlying areas near big cities more accessible. They helped end the isolation of rural Americans, allowing farmers access to markets and facilitating rural‐urban migration, including the well‐known movement of Dust Bowl farmers to California during the Great Depression. They allowed poor blacks and whites from impoverished rural areas to move to booming northern industrial cities. Providing private space, cars encouraged personal freedom. Blacks could escape the stigma of racial segregation enforced on southern railroads and buses. Courting adolescents could evade the social oversight of family and neighbors. Workers in milltowns could choose from workplaces spread over wider areas.

The auto increased access to consumer goods at, for example, the first self‐service grocery store, Piggly‐Wiggly (Memphis, 1916) and the first mall, Country Club Plaza (Kansas City, 1923). The drive‐in culture extended to movies (Camden, New Jersey, 1933), restaurants (Dallas, 1921), and banks (Ventura, California, 1931). The first “motel” (motor hotel) opened in San Luis Obispo, California, in 1926. The Rev. Robert Schuller even opened a drive‐in church in Garden Grove, California, in 1954, which he described as “a shopping center for Jesus Christ.” The first restaurant chains (White Tower and A&W Root Beer, 1924) catered to a motoring public looking for predictability in food and speed in service. The new roadside businesses borrowed a plastic architecture from amusement parks and ignored regional vernaculars. Shell‐shaped gas stations, milk bottle‐shaped ice cream stands, and duck‐shaped restaurants proliferated in the 1920s and 1930s.

The automobile also introduced hazards. By 1926 cars had become the fifth leading cause of fatalities, with most victims pedestrians or children. By the end of the twentieth century, cars had killed more than two million Americans. The big‐city traffic jam emerged by 1914. Cities lost one third of their street space to parked cars and by the 1930s were razing downtown buildings for parking lots. In 1914 Cleveland introduced the first traffic light and Detroit police sergeant Harry Jackson built the first octagonal stop sign. Using stop signs to create high‐speed boulevards and adding progressively timed lights briefly improved urban traffic flow. When traffic jams worsened in the 1920s, cities turned to highway building. Rural interests initially dominated road policy, however. At both the federal and state levels, governments funded farm‐to‐market roads that rarely served cities or suburbs. The 1920s federal highway system choked immediately with traffic generated by uncontrolled roadside businesses.

The limited access highway, rooted in traditional urban planning, provided a better long‐term solution to traffic‐flow problems. Well before the advent of the automobile, Frederick Law Olmsted had pioneered the grade separation of cross traffic in New York's Central Park (1857) and limited access to high‐speed carriage arteries such as Brooklyn's Eastern Parkway (1868). At the end of the nineteenth century, Boston's Charles River Speedway built slowdown exit lanes for speedy carriage drivers. The Bronx River Parkway (1922), a toll route, adapted these high‐speed design elements to automobile travel. New York highway builder Robert Moses (1888–1981) created a massive commuting road system on Long Island in the 1920s. New York City's West Side Highway, built in 1927, was the first elevated urban road. New Jersey added another element, constructing the first cloverleaf interchange (Woodbridge, 1929). Massachusetts engineer Franklin Pillsbury designed the first beltway (Route 128 outside Boston, planned in 1930, finished in 1949). Using Works Progress Administration funds, Connecticut built the first intercity parkway in 1937. Pennsylvania borrowed parkway techniques for its 1940 turnpike, the prototype for the state toll roads of the 1950s and for the interstate highway system begun in 1956.

As the automobile transformed American life, other motorized vehicles had profound effects as well. By 1940 growing fleets of buses were carrying passengers within cities and on longer trips, 4.1 million trucks were vying with the railroads for transporting freight, and the nation's 1.5 million tractors were revolutionizing U.S. agriculture. Motorcycles, while never a major form of motorized transport, proved popular with police and open‐air enthusiasts.

While World War II halted the production of automobiles for civilian use, the production of motor vehicles for the military surged. Major Detroit firms produced 49,000 tanks, 126,000 armored cars, and 2,600,000 trucks (as well as 27,000 airplanes and nearly 6 million guns) during the war. Moreover, confiscated Ford and G.M. overseas factories produced more than 70 percent of Germany's trucks. Ford faltered badly at wartime production, however, leading the U.S. government to force Henry Ford out in favor of his grandson, Henry Ford II.

By war's end the big three auto firms, G.M., Ford, and Chrysler, had become an oligopoly, since most smaller firms had failed in the Depression of the 1930s. Henry Kaiser, Preston Tucker, and other independent producers tried but failed to introduce new automobile brands after the war. The oligopoly concentrated on marketing and increasing engine power in the postwar decades, choking off European innovations like front‐wheel drive, radial tires, and disk brakes. Consumers could buy cars with 42‐inch tailfins, 58 pounds of chrome, and more than 500 horsepower. Germany began to export Volkswagens to the United States in 1958, controlling 8 percent of the American market with a compact car of the kind that Detroit refused to make. New (but short‐lived) compacts, like the Ford Falcon, blunted the Volkswagen threat.

The anti‐authority movements that characterized the 1960s affected the nation's car culture. Urban activists blocked the completion of many inner‐city interstate highways, just as the economic center of American metropolises was shifting from downtown to the beltway. Muckraking attorney Ralph Nader, noting how fatalities to automobile occupants had soared in the postwar decades, attacked the auto industry on safety grounds. Detroit was slow to install brakes adequate for high horsepower and resisted seat belts and air bags for nearly forty years. Quality control faltered and hazardous design became all too common. As Americans car guzzled more gasoline, smog became an urban health problem. Los Angeles biochemist Aarlie Hagen‐Smit demonstrated the relationship between auto emissions and smog in 1950. After much lobbying by environmentalists, Congress passed the Clean Air Act (1970), which banned leaded gasoline and required catalytic converters, significantly reducing some pollutants.

In the 1970s, the Detroit oligopoly faced the challenge of Japanese car makers, which began to export highly reliable, fuel‐efficient models to the United States in large numbers, capturing up to a third of the American market. In a decade of oil shortages, Detroit could not match the Japanese in cost, quality, or fuel efficiency. Chrysler escaped bankruptcy only by a government bailout and President Lee Iacocca's success at marketing.

Import taxes and quotas somewhat protected the battered domestic auto industry, and the 1980s brought a revival. Ford responded first, marketing the German‐designed, Japanese‐engined Escort and Taurus (also German engineered) in the mid‐1980s. Chrysler also rebounded in the 1980s, adopting Japanese design and production techniques. General Motors continued to falter through the 1980s, however, losing 25 percent of its domestic market and laying off 74,000 workers. Even when successful, the domestic industry's response to the Japanese import boom took its toll. Imported cars, Japanese style “lean production” techniques, and the outsourcing of work, especially to Mexico, turned much of the Middle West into a “rust belt.”

As the twentieth century ended, the United States remained the most auto‐(and petroleum‐)dependent nation. The economy was increasingly centered in auto dependent “edge cities.” By 1990 the two‐car family was the norm and annual mileage per car was up, increasing gasoline imports. The 1950s love of heavy cars returned, with four‐wheel‐drive cars, pickup trucks, and vans becoming popular. Traffic jams and air pollution worsened in major cities. In 1994, Seattle planners reported a 120 percent increase in traffic and Los Angeles commuters reported a doubling of travel time over the previous ten years. The statistics did reveal one bright spot, however: As auto safety standards grew more rigorous, seat belt use and airbags became more common, drunken drivers faced increasing social stigma, and the grim annual toll of traffic fatalities decreased.[See also Automobile Racing; Automotive Industry; Bicycles and Bicycling; Courtship and Dating; Energy Crisis of the 1970s; Environmentalism; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Global Economy, America and the; Labor Markets; Mass Marketing; Mass Production; Mobility; Petroleum Industry; Popular Culture; Roads and Turnpikes, Early; Shopping Centers and Malls; Steam Power; Suburbanization; Twenties, The; Urbanization.]

Bibliography

National Automobile Chamber of Commerce , Automobile Facts and Figures, 1921–present.
Michael Berger , The Devil Wagon in God's Country, 1971.
Robert A. Caro , The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, 1975.
Pierre Bardou,, Jean‐Jacques Chinaron,, Patrick M. Fridenson,, and and James M. Laux , The Automobile Revolution: The Impact of an Industry, 1982.
David Halberstam , The Reckoning, 1986.
U.S. Department of Transportation , Personal Travel in the U.S., 1986.
Jan Jennings, ed., Roadside America: The Car in Design and Culture, 1990.
Virginia Scharff , Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, 1991.
Clay McShane , Down the Asphalt Path: American Cities and the Automobile, 1995.

Clay McShane