From The Baffler, October 17:
The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car by Witold Rybczynski. W.W. Norton, 256 pages. 2024.
I came to know the architect Witold Rybczynski some thirty-five years ago when my mother gave me her copy of The Most Beautiful House in the World, a reflection on his personal journey through home design and construction. As a grad student writing about the history of transportation technology, I found a model in Rybczynski’s humility, his willingness to try on new ways of thinking about subjects he had demonstrably already mastered. In his earlier book, Home: A Short History of an Idea, he put domesticity at the center of architectural practice, and in One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw, he invited readers to consider commonplace tools anew; his next “natural history,” Now I Sit Me Down, tackled the chair. With his latest, The Driving Machine, Rybczynski takes on an artifact that is at once a tool, domicile, and social signifier.
The book arrives at a turbulent time for car designers. A century of automotive privilege is being unwound in cities around the globe as new thinking gives rise to bike lanes, bus corridors, and pedestrianized landscapes. Persistent connectivity and automated driving systems are transforming automobility. Sales of new internal combustion vehicles will end in many places within a decade, revolutionizing both how cars are built and how they move through the world. And, even as automobile ownership explodes in the developing world, ever fewer American teens want to drive.
Though ostensibly global and comprehensive, Rybczynski’s attention skews European, and he spends much of his time between the 1930s and 1980s. We race past the experimental and Edwardian, or brass era, to the smaller European mass-market cars of the 1930s. There is the Volkswagen Beetle, of course, but also the Fiat Topolino, Czech Tatra, and the French Citroën 2CV (Deux Chevaux, or two-horses). The assignment given to the designers of that latter car was for a vehicle that could carry a bushel of eggs across French fields without them cracking. The resulting low-priced, air-cooled design, completed in 1939 but only released after World War II, sold in the millions and remained little changed for decades.
These cars followed the philosophy of Henry Ford’s Model T: cheap, lightweight, rugged, innovative. Debuting in 1908, the Model T was the ur motorized, field-traversing egg-carrier. Adolf Hitler himself idolized Ford and explicitly ordered a “people’s car” that would transform Germany into an American-style motorized society. But Rybczynski doesn’t draw these connections. Instead, he dashes off a potted history of Ford and his fifteen-million-seller before veering back to what he really seems to care about: the Europeans and European-inspired American designs. Penned sketches of the Briggs Dreamcar, the streamlined Chrysler Airflow, and Ford’s Lincoln-Zephyr are juxtaposed with models from Mercedes-Benz and Tatra.
Indeed, his categorization is a bit haphazard. There’s a chapter on “fun” sports cars, though the Mazda MX-5 Miata—celebrated by critics when it debuted in 1989 as “the return of the honest sports car”—is filed instead under “Made in Japan.” A chapter on “the next car” includes both the Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S because they’re electric, but the Leaf was a dead end while the Tesla revolutionized the electric vehicle market. A mishmash of designs falls under the heading of “also-rans” for the postwar era. Here as elsewhere, the author is at pains to separate car designers from architects. “The fate of a building,” the architect observes, “rarely depends on its users—once built, it’s there for better or worse, and it’s not going away,” but “if buyers don’t warm to a car, it can go away very quickly.” He unfolds, for instance, the familiar story of Preston Tucker, though without providing the context and drama that made the 1988 film Tucker: The Man and His Dream such a hit. Henry Kaiser also warrants a mention. Kaiser had been heroically mass-producing ships during the war, but he, too, failed in his bid to take on Detroit with the Kaiser-Frazer Henry J. There are citations of sedans from Nash Motors and Hudson; Ford’s famous failure, the Edsel is listed, as is the Chevy Corvair.
It’s true that customers didn’t warm to the crummy Henry J. sedan when a Chevrolet offered more bang for their buck, but Tucker found eager depositors for his 1948 “Torpedo”; he just couldn’t assemble the capital to deliver the gorgeous and radically innovative car. The independents were similarly done in by market consolidation, not design miscues, as Rybczynski often has it. The Edsel was ridiculed for some of its styling, but it was an entire line of fairly conventional cars in search of a price point. Consumers embraced the rear-engined Corvair, especially its sporty Monza version—at least until Ralph Nader called it an “automotive time bomb” in his indictment of General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed.
Though Rybczynski admits to having owned some fifteen cars over the years and to changing his own oil and spark plugs, he prefers to think of himself not as a typical car guy but as homo faber. “Using a well-designed tool,” he writes, “whether it was a Peugeot pepper mill, a Dupont fountain pen, or a Contax II camera, provided its own pleasures.” But let’s be honest about what his 1969 BMW 1600—the original “ultimate driving machine” and the author’s favorite car—was designed to do: drive fast, too fast for safety’s sake, around curves and corners....
....MUCH MORE
