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Behind the Wheel of a Large Automobile

Car guys in crisis

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.

Witold Rybczynski, so engagingly self-critical when writing about his practice as an architect, loses this quality as a driver.

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. He has also owned a pair of Minis, including a retired 1962 race car (“a rash purchase”) and a 1984 model (“chic, and so much fun to drive”), as well as a Toyota Celica GT (“a brief fling”). In other words, these are cars as sporting equipment. Rybczynski, so engagingly self-critical when writing about his practice as an architect, loses this quality as a driver. Cars are beguiling that way.   

He devotes a chapter to cars that are “good tools” in another sense as well: vehicles for carrying people and stuff. This category begins with examinations of the 1929 Ford Model A station wagon and 1935 Chevrolet Suburban Carryall. It includes the off-roading U.S. Army Jeep, British Land Rover, and modern Chevy Suburban SUV (more of a namesake than a direct descendent of the carry-all), as well as car-based minivans from Chrysler and Volkswagen. Rybczynski has owned his share of this kind of tool too, including a Volvo wagon, a pair of four-wheel drive Subarus, and a 1985 GMC Jimmy S-15 SUV.

Yet just as he elides what it means for a car to be a pleasurable tool for driving fast, the “good tools” dogpile conflates two opposing design ideals. One reeks of toxic masculinity; the other oozes feminine domesticity. “A favorite of the Secret Service,” Rybczynski writes, “the [Suburban SUV] has appeared in so many blockbuster action movies that it has its own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.” Like the Jeep and Hummer, these are the tools of American imperium. A station wagon connotes something entirely opposite. The car-based Ford Country Squire, Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser, and Chrysler Town and Country: these are the machines that made the school run and retrieved dad from the suburban commuter rail in the 1960s and 1970s. Chrysler then applied the Town and Country label to its minivan, which became the mom mobile of the 1980s and 1990s. One need only compare the faux wood paneling to trace the family tree.

This conflation goes to the crux of the trouble, not just for the book’s organizational structure but for the contemporary car with which we men of a certain age—not to mention Detroit automakers—are trying to come to terms. Back in the day, a real man knew how to change a tire, check the oil, and perform a jump start. We were masters of the automotive domain, whether the ride in question was a Jeep or a wood-paneled mom mobile. Not today. “We have become used to cars that never fail to start, never falter, never break down,” Rybczynski observes. “I remember my old BMW 1600, whose distributor I often had to open and wipe dry in damp weather, and whose engine—not fuel-injected—was often balky in the cold Canadian winters.” Like a good Boy Scout, he carried jumper cables and spare fan belts in the trunk. Many new cars lack spare tires, and even oil dipsticks are being eliminated. And now that every car is a moving computer, repairs must be done by a specialist. In light of such advancements, what is a man good for anymore?

Many men have compensated for the fact that the modern vehicle—whether electric or electronically controlled—is beyond our ken by plopping down for a massive pickup truck or SUV. The threat posed by these outsized machines is quite real, and designers have been leaning into that bellicosity over the last decade. Elon Musk’s team has taken this trend to cartoonish proportions with the jagged, ungainly stainless steel Cybertruck, which weighs in at over three tons. It’s electric, true, but where Nissan failed with the Leaf, Tesla has succeeded by cleansing the electrical vehicle of its femininity. Indeed, the Washington Post described the company’s $100,000 Roadster, released in 2006, as “more testosterone than granola,” adding that electric cars “don’t have to be for wimps.”

Rybczynski himself seems lost in this modern world, unmoved by the performative masculinity of Musk’s Cybertruck and uninterested in what the modern driving machine has to offer. He can’t even bring himself to test drive a Tesla sedan, turning the task of evaluating the car of the future over to his “friend Jason,” and he shunts pickup trucks off to the side, even though the top three best-selling vehicles in the United States are all trucks.

How to square Donald Trump’s offer of a cabinet post to Musk, J. D. Vance’s proposal to replace electrical vehicle incentives with tax breaks for American-made internal combustion vehicles, and Musk’s $75 million contribution to the pair’s campaign? I don’t know. I refuse to surrender the boyish delight of cars to toxic masculinity, but I’m disoriented myself.

Rather than an architect’s insight, we get the old familiar chauvinism.

I’d hoped that Rybczynski would be just the scholar to help us work through the crisis of the car guy. He demonstrated a subtle understanding of gender roles in architectural practice in Home by incorporating interior decorating, consumerism, and fashion into his analysis. Yet not once does he put the reader inside the vehicle designs he considers in The Driving Machine. In 1927, GM created the Art and Color Section under Harley Earl, who brought women on board to bring their “feminine taste” because “today’s modern woman, no longer just a voice from the backseat, has the last word in the purchase of seven out of ten cars.” But rather than an architect’s insight, we get the old familiar chauvinism. The European cars Rybcznski favors were “built by engineers and drivers,” he writes, quoting a Motor Trend article from 1957, whereas “stylists and fashion experts” designed American cars. There follows an “elegy” to the mechanical, the “analog” car of old, and to the purity of driving a stick shift. Rybczynski’s conclusion that “our romantic affair with the automobile has cooled and settled into something that seems more like a loveless marriage” has been conventional wisdom since the 1950s.

The American, wrote John C. Keats in 1958, felt an “adolescent tightening in the groin” when he met the Model T; but by mid-century, the American car had grown “sow-fat,” leading men to strike up affairs with svelte European sports cars. Keats, a social critic best known for his takedown of suburbia, The Crack in the Picture Window, played car culture for laughs in Insolent Chariots. But as Detroit began to succumb to foreign competition and government oversight, the literature of the automobile took on a decidedly hostile tone. Beginning in the 1970s, American auto industry insiders like Brock Yates, Bob Lutz, and John DeLorean penned screeds blaming the decline and fall of the real man’s automobile on hippies, effeminizing stylists, Ralph Nader, government bureaucrats, and bean counters.

Most recently, Matthew Crawford yoked stick-shift nostalgia to a racist, misogynist, and xenophobic anti-government screed in Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (2020). That book was something of a sequel to 2009’s Shopcraft as Soulcraft , which became a cudgel against coastal elitism in the culture wars. Why We Drive “aims to explore this one domain of skill, freedom, and individual responsibility—driving—before it is too late, and make a case for defending it.” Like Rybczynski, Crawford can have fun driving because he is a better driver than you are, and better than “some upstanding member of the PTA backing out in her Suburban.” Her car is “like a womb.”

The architect’s not a woman-hating he-man like Crawford or Vance. But neither does he have much to offer us car guys left bereft without carburetors. Having promised his wife that he wouldn’t buy another car when his Mercedes reached “the end of the road” after twenty-four years, Rybczynski, now in his eighties, walks, rides the bus, or hires “Herr Uber.”