Cars-Our Love Affair with the Automobile
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Cars – our love affair with the automobile. Will it last?
The colloquy is about cars, the second most expensive things most of us will ever buy, and how the world is now thoroughly inured to something that was invented less than 150 years ago. The colloquy will start with the history of cars — the first practical auto was invented in 1886, “when the German inventor Carl Benz patented his Benz Patent-Motorwagen,” Wikipedia says. From there we’ll get into how the industry grew, to the extent that we now have some 288 million vehicles on public roads in the U.S.. (Nearly 92 percent of American families have at least one car.) We’ll look at how the U.S. auto industry has done its best to ensure motor vehicles are the dominant mode of transportation – among other things, through the infamous 1940s General Motors conspiracy to replace streetcars with buses. We’ll also look at President Eisenhower’s spearheading of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s, a project that gave us more than 48,000 miles of superhighways on which to stretch our V8-fueled legs.
We’ll have a holistic look at car culture in American life — collector cars, romance, auto theft, cars in movies – as well as how cars fit into the overall U.S. economy and, more specifically, the average household. To that end, Bob Mitchell, a retired veteran of auto-dealer management, will give us the inside story on how cars are bought and sold in America these days. We’ll talk about which cars have a better reputation than others, why many buyers purchase a car for its relative prestige value. We’ll also talk about safety – more than 42,000 people died in U.S. motor vehicle accidents in 2022 – and what government agencies and the auto industry are doing (or not doing) to help mitigate this.
In the end, we’ll talk about the future of electric vehicles – will they eclipse the internal combustion engine (ICE), or will they simply go belly up, as happened with the General Motors EV1, a two-door coupe that was available for lease from 1996 to 1999, before GM abruptly pulled the cars in and crushed them.
Bob Mitchell is a veteran of 40 years in the automobile industry. During his career in sales and management, he bought and sold cars, variously, for Cadillac, Ford, Honda, Infiniti, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz and Subaru dealers.
Michael Taylor is a lifelong car buff who eventually got paid for writing about cars for a few years when he was a newspaper reporter.
Syllabus/Reading
A note on readings: there are thousands of books and millions of articles on the subject of the automobile. We’re not going to read them. My experience is that Wikipedia will usually have comprehensive articles on a given subject and if you want to drill down further, there are dozens of references at the bottom of the Wikipedia page. That’s why most of our reading suggestions will come from Wikipedia.
Session One:
Auto industry in the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy .
Session Two:
This is pretty freewheeling and will go into what cars are currently out there, the culture of cars, how they figure into our lives, why they are necessary in some areas (mostly rural) and arguably not necessary in big cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car ; a loose and rambling treatise on cars.
Session Three: how to buy a car. This will be mostly Bob Mitchell and is a rare opportunity for us civilians to understand how the carbiz works. We’ll also go into how cars got safer over the years, spurred by government action and the insurance industry.
https://www.iihs.org/ratings?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAgJa6BhCOARIsAMiL7V-6KL6EOryPd54HzEdbw3OEtSurdoVlqqmPmoDOGwht3-FNoAhM_1YaAj2fEALw_wcB The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety regularly crashes cars (under controlled conditions) to find out how safe they are.
https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/ a leader in worldwide auto sales information.
Session Four: electric vehicles. As of May 2024, electric vehicles (EV) accounted for 6.8 percent of the U.S. market, according to the auto site Edmunds.com. EV are here to stay – or at least, that’s what the industry believes. But it’s going to take a while to get to the point where there are more EVs than gas-driven vehicles.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/climate/electric-vehicle-sales-projections.html
A Google roundup, based on a search for “future of electric vehicles in US” ; this is simply a sampling, to give you an idea of what the future may hold.
Google Search on Future of Electric Vehicles
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