Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Cars were also now increasingly easy to drive and did not need to be handled by a strongman to get the best out of them. In the US, automatic transmission became widespread after the launch of Chevrolet’s twospeed Powerglide system in 1950, while power steering, introduced into top of the range Chryslers and Cadillacs in 1951, had become common for more expensive models by 1955. American family car engines topped 5 litres; although the ability to brake quickly, which became increasingly problematic as wheels got bigger and bigger, got correspondingly worse. Tubeless tyres first appeared in 1948 and were customary by 1956. The use of an ignition key to start the engine electronically – far easier and safer than hand-cranking or the old ‘pedomatic’ system (manufacturers could never agree on which pedal to use) – was first applied on the Chryslers of 1949 and was widespread by the mid-fifties. Foot-operated parking brakes had reached GM’s Buicks and Oldsmobiles by 1953. Powered hoods on convertibles were introduced back in 1942. Lincolns and Cadillacs had power windows by 1946; while GM’s top of the range Cadillacs received power seats in 1950, screen washers in 1953 and a power-operated boot lid in 1955. Car radios were less of a novelty by 1955, while some American luxury cars even added record players (not intended to be driver-operated while the car was in motion) to their list of optional extras.

  Marques and models became worldwide brands in the manner of Coca-Cola and Heinz. As historian Michael Sedgwick has written, this was ‘the age of the stylist, of the “intelligent buyer”, and of global thinking’. Cars also began to be associated with national characteristics. American autos were seen as brash, large and loud; Italian as racy and flashy; British as well built and sedate. Never before had car manufacturers become so readily associated with the nation’s economic health and technological aspirations. GM’s Charles Wilson famously told the Senate armed forces committee: ‘What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.’ Twenty years later, in a more cynical and pragmatic age, few would take such pious corporate sentiments seriously.

  By the 1950s it was clear that motoring had effected significant cultural and social change, and had forever altered conventions of travel and leisure. Between 1945 and 1954, nine million Americans moved to the suburbs, and by 1976 more Americans lived in suburbs than in downtown or rural areas, seeking the space, safety, autonomy, greenery and cleanliness that suburban life promised. The first planned out-of-town shopping centre opened in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1949; the first enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall appeared in Minneapolis in 1956; and by 1980 there were over twenty thousand major suburban shopping centres across the US.

  Postwar, as the car plants got bigger, they moved to green-field sites at the edges of the expanding cities. In Detroit, the opening in 1956 of Eero Saarinen’s soaring new GM Technical Centre in the suburb of Warren (which soon became the fastest-growing city in the state of Michigan) merely accelerated the ‘white flight’ of the inner-city population to the more spacious suburbs. Between 1955 and 1960 the city of Detroit lost as much as 25 per cent of its population to the outlying conurbations. The old city was left with a problem that just grew worse: a poor, predominantly black, residual population, with insufficient tax dollars to afford basic civic amenities. By 2010 what remained of the old city was 81.6 per cent African-American.

  As the car liberated vast new travel and leisure opportunities, there was a corresponding growth in franchised motel chains. By 1960 Travelodge alone had 110 branches and the business had doubled in value during the past decade. In 1956 Memphis, Tennessee, witnessed the opening of the first Holiday Inn, a family-friendly, upmarket motel-cum-hotel which offered every facility for tired drivers and crotchety kids. Already, there were 160 Holiday Inns across America in 1960.

  The car also engendered a revolution in eating, and is primarily responsible for ushering in the era of fast food. In 1948 the McDonald brothers introduced a drive-in retail method (the ‘Speedee Service System’), based on the car assembly line, and a severely reduced menu at their restaurant in San Bernardino, California. But it was not until 1954 that, in association with milkshake-machine salesman Ray Kroc, they opened the first drive-in McDonald’s outlet, in a Chicago suburb. Kroc forced the McDonald brothers out of the business, listed the company on the stock exchange, and made a fortune. Eating out was never to be the same again.

  In America, by 1960 you could see a movie, buy your lunch and even attend church services in your car. Cars did not weaken church-going habits, as many clerics had feared; they actually strengthened them, as families found they could go to the church of their choice by car. Also by 1960, 90 per cent of American families took their holidays by car; and 95 per cent of visitors to America’s national parks came by car.1

  The vast increase in car use in the US also prompted a massive expansion in the road network. The building of the Los Angeles freeway system started in earnest in 1947 – the oil, car and tyre manufacturers having previously bought up and wound down the city’s excellent suburban transit network. In 1949 work began on the New Jersey Turnpike, ‘tomorrow’s highway built today’, the construction of which across miles of precious countryside would save motorists a grand one hour and ten minutes on their cross-state journeys. In the event, the superhighway’s existence merely encouraged more driving: once opened, the Turnpike quickly became the busiest toll road in the world. And it hardly bore out state governor Alfred E. Driscoll’s claim that it would ‘permit New Jersey to emerge from behind the billboards, the hot-dog stands and the junkyards’. As one critic wrote at the time: ‘It’s difficult to obscure the major features of the landscape altogether, but the Turnpike manages it.’

  In 1956 America began to build its interstate highways, funded from taxes on gasoline.1 President Eisenhower told the American people that there was no choice but to embark on such an ambitious road-building programme if Americans wished to keep their nation great: ‘Its impact on the American economy – the jobs it would produce in manufacturing and construction, the rural areas it would open up – is beyond calculation.’ More ominously, Eisenhower warned that a vastly enlarged superhighway network was crucial if America was to ‘meet the demands of catastrophe or defence, should an atomic war come’. The American Way of Life was equated with the car and the highway: fast new roads were essential to maintain ‘the personal safety, the general prosperity, the national security of the American people’.

  Eisenhower was hugely proud of his interstate programme, which he later counted as one of his administration’s major achievements. As he was delighted to point out in 1956: ‘The total pavement of the system would make a parking lot big enough to hold two thirds of all the automobiles of the United States. The amount of concrete poured to form these roadways would build eighty Hoover Dams or six sidewalks to the moon. To build them, bulldozers and shovels would move enough dirt and rock to bury all of Connecticut two feet deep. More than any single action by the government since the end of the war, this will change the face of America.’

  Time later called the scheme ‘the biggest public works program since the Pharaohs piled up the pyramids’. By 1965 twenty thousand miles of new interstate had opened, at an average cost per mile of $1,141,000. (Some difficult sections cost as much as $50 million per mile to build.) In 1996 the total cost so far of the new interstate system was estimated at $329 billion.

  Service areas, rest areas and bridge restaurants were already a feature of American, German and Italian superhighways by 1960. Italian service areas were run by the major oil companies, German Raststätte by local business concerns, while in America small roadside settlements grew up by intersection retail areas. Even the British began belatedly to follow suit; on 2 November 1959 Britain’s first motorway, the M1, and its first motorway service station, the romantically named Watford Gap services, were formally opened.

  The private car was, inevitably, fast displacing public transport. This was particularly true in America where Detroit’s car maker
s had given fate a little helping hand. In 1936, for example, GM had teamed up with Standard Oil of California and Firestone tyres to launch National City Lines, a bus network, using a fleet of GM buses, which aimed to convert electric train and tram lines to bus operation all over California. By 1955 NCL had largely succeeded and one of the world’s best transit systems was no more. Meanwhile, GM had built Yellow Coach, later renamed Greyhound, into the nation’s largest long-distance bus operator – and in the process made itself the world’s largest manufacturer of buses. GM then used Greyhound to undercut the longer rail routes.

  The ‘motorization’ of rail and streetcar lines was common in America’s cities by 1950. By 1960 the final streetcar and local railway lines were ripped up in Los Angeles; Pacific Electric’s last suburban railway, to Long Beach, was closed in April 1961; and the city’s last streetcar lines axed in 1963. Detroit, too, was robbed of its fine transit system, and by the end of the 1960s was completely dependent on roads.

  One thing had not changed, though: the automobile world was still very much a male preserve. By 1960 women were still noticeably absent from any senior role in the car industry – as they still are today. However, women were increasingly targeted by car makers’ marketing departments as a growing and important customer base. And women were being targeted by male drivers, too: the wide bench seats of American cars of the 1950s meant that in-car sex was now not only feasible, but positively encouraged.

  In 1945 America’s Big Three, in contrast to their war-damaged rivals across the Atlantic, were able to slide effortlessly into full-scale production of civilian automobiles. At Ford, after ‘a generation of gross mismanagement’, in the words of historian James J. Flink, and at a time when the company was losing about $10 million a month, Henry Ford II finally seized the reins of management from his ailing, senile grandfather. Young Henry had never been a star scholar, and had spent much of his early life driving fast cars,1 and picking up fast women. His family connections got him into Yale, but he struggled academically; his only major achievement in New Haven was to meet and marry a stylish Long Island beauty, Anne McDonnell. But Henry II surprised most observers, and many in his own family, by rising impressively to the challenge. The departing Harry Bennett had told him: ‘You are taking over a billion dollar organization here that you haven’t contributed a thing to!’ But Henry II knew enough to begin clearing out his grandfather’s antiquated management team and substituting his own. Having sacked Bennett and closed his iniquitous Service Department, he ostentatiously brought in a clutch of six eager young Harvard Business School-trained executives from the USAAF’s Office of Statistical Control. The business press soon dubbed the six the ‘Whiz Kids’, after the University of Illinois’ highly successful Whiz Kids basketball team and the popular NBC radio show Quiz Kids. Two of these men, Robert McNamara and Arjay Miller, eventually became presidents of the Ford Motor Company, and subsequently McNamara was the nation’s Secretary of Defense for much of the 1960s.

  Henry II’s other new recruit, Ernie Breech, was no Whiz Kid; he was a 49-year-old accountant and born-again Baptist who had been in the car business for twenty years. But Henry hired him as vice president to overhaul the firm’s appallingly antiquated and often simply non-existent financial systems. Breech later recalled his horror at finding that Ford’s ‘financial statements [were] like a country grocery store’; in one department ‘they figured their costs by weighing the pile of invoices on a scale’. Thanks to Breech’s painstaking professionalism, and the Whiz Kids’ energy and new ideas, the decrepit auto behemoth was completely turned around. Ford sales doubled between 1948 and 1950, as the Ford Motor Company retook second place from Chrysler in the Big Three’s pecking order. By 1954 the firm had carved out a 30.83 per cent share of the US market – the best performance since the Model T years of the 1910s. That year Ford also sold its loss-making French operation to Simca, retaining a 15.2 per cent stake, which it later sold at a sizeable profit to Chrysler.

  Henry II was, at least at this stage of life, a good listener, and did not interfere in Ford’s day-to-day operations. Overnight, the lazy student seemed to have been transformed, like Shakespeare’s dissolute Prince Hal, into a hard-working and serious leader. He seized on Walter Reuther’s felicitous phrase, that ‘human engineering is just as important as mechanical engineering’, and tried to make the Ford factories happier and more productive places in which to work. In his first major speech, in 1946, Henry II declared that ‘labour unions are here to stay’, and Ford’s well-earned reputation for union-bashing was now a thing of the past.

  Henry II also oversaw a renaissance in product development. His Lincoln Continental of 1948, Ford’s first world-class luxury car, looked good and looked fast (though it wasn’t: even 90 mph was a strain). It boasted power windows, power seats, leather trim, blue-painted dials and an unusual palette of body colours, including a lurid ‘pace car yellow’, derived from the Continental’s role as a racetrack pace car at Indianapolis. Seven years later, Henry II startled the entire motor industry when he unveiled Ford’s new twoseater. Impressively styled by Frank Hershey and William T. Boyer, the Ford Thunderbird of 1955 was devised by Henry II and his chief engineer, Lewis Crusoe, as a ‘personal car’ and not a family transport or sports car. With its straight lines and large tail lights it looked like a Ford; but no Ford had ever been packaged like this. It looked rakish and sporty, yet never pretended to be a sports model. In America sports cars were invariably imported from Italy or, more usually, Britain. The Thunderbird was priced below these prestigious imports, initially selling at $2,695 when a Jaguar XK140 cost $3,213. It was given a gutsy V-8 engine, but also provided with the wallowing suspension typical of American family cars of the period. As historian Paul Wilson has commented: ‘The complacency with which Thunderbird owners accepted handling comparable to a 1935 Packard certainly indicated that they were not closely allied with the sports car set.’ Initially produced only as a twoseat, twodoor convertible, in 1958 the ‘T-bird’ was further distanced from true European sports cars by being provided with two rows of two seats, like a normal sedan. Thunderbird sales soared, as Ford’s marketing men backed their product far more wholeheartedly than GM was supporting its rival Chevrolet Corvette. In its first sales year the Thunderbird, priced similarly to its GM rival, outsold the ’Vette by an astonishing twentythree to one.

  The importance that Alfred Sloan’s GM vested in styling convinced Henry II that design needed to be prioritized at Ford. In 1955 the corporation increased the size of its styling office, which was given five large new studios in which to work. (GM responded by building a $125 million Technical Center for their styling staff in Warren, complete with artificial lake and huge lawns.) Unfortunately, Ford’s design chief, George Walker, was the wrong man for the job. A notorious sexual predator who made strenuous use of the casting couch and habitually sexually harassed women employees, he did not have the access to the top echelons of the corporation that his opposite numbers at GM and Chrysler enjoyed. In retrospect, George Walker was an accident waiting to happen. And in 1957 the accident occurred. The much-trumpeted Edsel range of that year – devised as a wholly new Ford Motors marque, like Mercury and Lincoln – was named after Henry Ford’s late son and Henry II’s father, in defiance of unambiguous research findings from advertising agency Foote, Cone and Belding (which canvassed its own employees, who picked names ranging from the ‘Henry’ to the ‘Zoom’). The Edsel proved one of automotive history’s most notorious disasters. Walker and his project stylist, Roy Brown, wanted to escape from the lowslung horizontality of American cars popularized by GM’s Harley Earl, and sought to make the vehicle distinctive and individual. Conventional market research was deliberately ignored; Ford relied merely on vague motivational ‘imagery studies’ which addressed practical aspects of motoring, such as ease of parking and cost of maintenance, but not the car’s appearance or performance. Walker and his colleagues wanted the car to have its own separate ‘personality’ but were no
t sure quite what that personality was.

  Ford’s marketing and public relations men pulled out all the stops for the Edsel’s launch. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby starred in the TV campaign, singing the car’s unbearably smug theme song:

  We want our friends to understand,

  When they observe our car,

  That we’re as smart and successful and grand

  As we like to think we are.

  Ominously, on the day of the long-awaited launch, carefully prepared news stories trumpeting the virtues of the Edsel were blown off the front pages by Soviet Russia’s announcement that it now possessed an intercontinental ballistic missile that could be directed at any target within the United States. When attention was eventually focused on the new car, the Edsel failed to stand up to the media’s scrutiny. The top of the range Edsel had been provided with a huge V-8 engine, making it the most powerful production car on the road. But its brakes were poor, it rode badly and its trunk was disappointingly small, despite the car’s enormous length (it was as long as the largest Cadillacs). Most importantly, the Edsel looked distinctly odd. With its bulbous paired headlights and ungainly horse-collar grille (‘a Mercury pushing a toilet seat’, or ‘an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon’, in the opinion of two contemporary critics), the Edsel proved a disaster. Against projected first year sales of two hundred thousand, Ford sold just over sixty-three thousand. In 1959, the year in which the unpopular vertical grille was abandoned, just forty-five thousand Edsels were sold. The following year the model, and the division that had been created around it, were quietly laid to rest, and Ford wrote off the project’s $250 million development cost. When Ford’s president, Robert McNamara, left the corporation in 1961 to join John F. Kennedy’s newly elected Democrat administration as Secretary of Defense, the Republican opposition constantly derided him as the man responsible for the Edsel. (In truth, McNamara thought that his greatest achievement whilst at Ford was the small, plain, no-nonsense Falcon family car of 1960.) Meanwhile, George Walker, the design chief, was quietly retired in 1961. And the wretched project designer of the 1957 Edsel, Roy Brown, was exiled to Ford’s equivalent of the gulag: Dagenham in Essex.