![]() We learn that Vermont was a remote backwater until its Bureau of Publicity began marketing the state to pioneer motorists for leaf-peeping in the fall and skiing in winter, and that in 1931 Barbara Cartland organised a race for MG Midgets at Brooklands to demonstrate the skilfulness of women drivers. Although mainly an account of the car industry, Parissien's book offers some interesting sidelights in social history. During the second world war, the first Volkswagen Beetles were designed with a high clearance so they could be deployed on the Russian front. The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, for instance, established itself as the epitome of luxury in the first world war when it was used to chauffeur generals to the front, and TE Lawrence granted it perfect product placement in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, describing it as "more valuable than rubies". You discover how much the car (like so much else) relied on world wars as mothers of technological invention and opportunities for global branding. Parissien's is mostly a work of synthesis, culled from secondary sources, but some overarching themes present themselves. But it also responded with the single-fingered salute that is the gas-guzzling SUV, the global market for which continues to grow, undaunted by either austerity or ecopolitics. Then, as the car came to be pilloried for causing congestion and pollution, the automobile industry responded by forging new markets in southern Asia and China and experimenting with alternative fuels and hybrids that mostly sought to eke out the diminishing reserves of oil. Parissien takes us through the golden age of the car in the 1950s and 60s, when models such as the Citroën DS, the 1959 Cadillac, the E-Type Jaguar and James Bond's beloved Aston Martin DB5 combined beauty and functionality. It was Alfred P Sloan, the president of General Motors, who introduced the notion of planned obsolescence and of gradually trading up from entry-level Chevrolet to top-of-the-range Cadillac. The book reminds us that Henry Ford created not only the mass market in automobiles but also the market in car accessories, for his Model T was so lacking in refinements that the Sears, Roebuck catalogue included over 5000 items that could be attached to it. It begins in earnest in 1891 with the French engineer Émile Levassor effectively inventing the modern automobile by moving the engine to the front and adding a front-mounted radiator, crankshaft, clutch pedal and gearstick. Steven Parissien's The Life of the Automobile is a global history of the motor car, from Benz to biofuels. The car is thus an object ripe for cultural and historical analysis, and here are two books that attempt this in different ways. One way or another, people get worked up about cars. At Reclaim the Streets events in the 1990s, protesters carried mock road signs with the slogans "Fuck The Car" and "Cars Come Too Fast". In his epic anti-car poem Autogeddon, Heathcote Williams described streets as "open sewers of the car cult". And yet, like other religions, car worship increasingly provokes anger and resentment from non-believers. As well as being loaded with the symbolic baggage of money, status and sexual competitiveness, it is a pretext for grown men (and occasionally women) to engage in the unembarrassed sharing of esoteric knowledge and aesthetic delight. ![]() Those of us who congregate for the Top Gear liturgy on irregular Sundays have noticed that church attendance has dwindled recently, but the car remains an object that invites worship. W riting in the 1950s, the French cultural critic Roland Barthes argued that cars were "almost the exact equivalent of gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them purely as a magical object".
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