CityReads│Was the Auto Age a Mistake?

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Was the Auto Age a Mistake?

The past, present, and driverless future of automobile.

Dan Albert, 2019. Are We There Yet?: The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless, Norton.

Nathan Heller，Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake? New Yorker, July 22, 2019.

Lee Vinsel, American adventure and autonomous cars: What will become of U.S. car culture in the age of self-driving vehicles? Science, Vol. 365, Issue 6449, pp.130-131.

Sources:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/was-the-automotive-era-a-terrible-mistake

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2019/07/10/are-we-there-yet/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/609958/are-we-there-yet-by-dan-albert/9780393292749

Robot-controlled cars have already logged millions of miles. These technological marvels promise cleaner air, smoother traffic, and tens of thousands of lives saved. But even if robots turn into responsible drivers, are we ready to transform from a nation of drivers to a nation of passengers?

In Are We There Yet?, Dan Albert combines historical scholarship with personal narrative to explore how car culture has suffused America’s DNA. The plain, old-fashioned, human-driven car built our economy, won our wars, and shaped our democratic creed as it moved us about. Dan Albert reveals how automobiles came to be seen as a technology of freedom in America and how the ability to experience the world became enmeshed with personal identity. Albert uses this history to reflect on the near future, when many predict that autonomous vehicles will wipe away “car culture.”

Albert is a car guy by passion and vocation, a former curator of vehicle collections at the Science Museum in London. Today, he identifies himself as “n+1’s carcritic,” an assignment that he clearly prosecutes with seriousness and pride. His book is interesting and idiosyncratic, occasionally at the same time, and tracks cars’ changing social and cultural position with an elegiac tone. “The road was once an open-ended adventure, full of wrong turns and serendipitous discoveries,” Albert writes. “Now the phone knows every mile and every minute before we leave the garage.”

Crusades against the automobile are nothing new. Its arrival sparked battles over street space, pitting the masses against the millionaires who terrorized pedestrians. When the masses got cars of their own, they learned to love driving too. During World War II, Washington nationalized Detroit and postwar Americans embraced car and country as if they were one. Then came 1960s environmentalism and the energy crises of the 1970s. Many predicted, even welcomed, the death of the automobile. But many more rose to its defense. They embraced trucker culture and took to Citizen Band radios, demanding enough gas to keep their big boats afloat. Since the 1980s, the car culture has triumphed and we now drive moremiles than ever before.

In America today, there are more cars than drivers. Yet our investment in these vehicles has yielded dubious returns. Since 1899, more than 3.6 million people have died in traffic accidents in the United States, and more than eighty million have been injured; pedestrian fatalities have risen in the past fewyears. The road has emerged as the setting for our most violent illustrations of systemic racism, combustion engines have helped create a climate crisis, and the quest for oil has led our soldiers into war.

Every technology has costs, but lately we’ve had reason to question even cars’putative benefits. Free men and women on the open road have turned out to be such disastrous drivers that carmakers are developing computers to replace them. When the people of the future look back at our century of auto life, will they regard it as a useful stage of forward motion or as a wrong turn? Is it possible that, a hundred years from now, the age of gassing up and driving will be seen as just a cul-de-sac in transportation history, a trip we never should have taken?

When the automobile industry first emerged in the 1890s in Europe and the United States, cars were playthings for the rich. In 1909, there were two million horse-drawn carriages manufactured in the United States and eighty thousand automobiles. By 1923, there were ten thousand carriages manufactured and fourmillion cars; by 1930, more than half the families in the United States were car owners, and the horses went to pasture. A key factor in the explosion ofthe market was the release of the Model T, created by Henry Ford, in 1908, which changed everything. Mass production of car flourished. Henry Ford envisioned acar for average people, and the talented and experienced men who worked underhim reorganized manufacturing, driving prices ever downward. General Motors,under the guidance of its president, Alfred P. Sloan, took Ford’s lessons even further by introducing consumer credit and perfecting body styling and annual model changes. The result, Albert writes, was an “American automobile that made each driver feel unique.”

In those days, cars were seen as environmentally friendly: unlike horses, they didn’t befoul the streets, and they carried passengers closer to the remote natural world than any other transportation did. In Albert’s telling, the versatile Model T further de-urbanized the automobile, turning it private, populist, and rural. At a moment when cities were building out their transit systems, the places between places in America filled up with middle-class cars.

In the book, Albert recounts the long history of attempts to control car culture’s dark sides, from the racist public safety campaigns that identified immigrants and African Americans as potentially unsafe drivers in the 1930s to the work of Ralph Nader and other safety advocates, who pushed for collision science in the1950s and 1960s.

Albert also shows that our emotional relationship with cars came not from consumer desire alone but was created by powerful actors, including automobile executives and government planners. In one of the book’s most original chapters, “The hidden history of the superhig hways that transformed America,” he provocatively shows that interstates “are not the product of Republican free-market ideology but of its opposite: statist central planning.” He locates the birth of the interstate highway vision squarely in the New Deal, when the designer Norman Bel Geddes and other pro-planning types attended a “no blacktie—very informal” stag dinner at Franklin Roosevelt’s White House to build support for an ambitious national highway system.

Whether revisiting 1950s visions of self-driving vehicles or 1970s fantasies of a post-automobile society, hardly any of the conversations we’re having today are specific to this moment. In this sense, the book’s title has another layer of meaning: technofuturists have been promising self-driving automobiles and the death of car culture since the mid-20th century.

Have we reached the end of the road this time? Fewer young people are learning to drive. Ride hailing is replacing car buying, and with electrification a long and noble tradition of amateur car repair will come to an end. When a robot takes over the driver’s seat, what’s to become of us?

Albert dedicates the book’s third and final part to exploring this question. Millennials appear to be less keen than previous generations to own cars or even get drivers’ licenses, “There has been a precipitous and steady drop in the percentage of young people getting their licenses,” Mr. Albert reports; “a drop by half for sixteen-year-olds, a third for seventeen, a quarter for eighteen, a fifth for nineteen.” Why? He suggests that young people have been stuffed into the back of cars since they were babies in car seats, preferring, as they grew older, watching seat-back videos to looking out the window. Now, as teens and young adults, they still ride in the back seat, only now they stare at their smartphone screens. “Maybe kids today . . . feel transported by their new mobile devices.” Driving itself is now a distraction from being connected.

Climate change also makes mass automobile use look downright irresponsible. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, transportation creates about 30% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, with most coming from cars and trucks.

Moreover, boosters of autonomous vehicles (AVs) promise that this technology is on the near horizon and that it will make cars much safer and likely decrease automobile ownership. Mr. Albert concludes, “safety is the ultimate excuse forthe driverless car.”

But his core concern seems to be what this will mean for the emotional landscape of automobiles. What will become of U.S. car culture in the age of self-driving vehicles? He writes, “When we embrace driverless cars, we will surrender our American automobile as an adventure machine, as a tool of self-expression, and the wellspring of our wealth and our defense.”

It is natural to think of innovation as a march of technical advances, each one finally paying the balance on a dream sold long before: the wheel, the cart, the carriage, the car. But the truth is that our technical capacities arrive too soon; from the imperial galleon to the atom bomb, it is hard to argue that the tools have struggled to keep up with us. A smarter futurism would focusless on pushing through advances and more on being sure we will use them wisely when they come. The coming age of robot vehicles should find us dreaming not oftheir role in this world but of their risk and potential in a future not yet made.

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