People sometimes ask me why I'm so interested in cars. This is not always a neutral question -- I have a fair number of friends who disapprove of cars on political or environmental grounds, or who just consider it a little déclassé.
I suppose I don't necessarily seem the type. A lot of gearheads have an intense, emotional relationship with a particular type or genre of cars, the kind some people have with sport teams. Some are collectors, or amateur hot rodders. I'm not. Many are driven by nostalgia, and the desire to capture (or recapture) the things they loved when they were 16. I'm not. I have my own tastes, to be sure, but I've never been one for fannish devotion or nostalgia. While there are cars I might like to own one day, the list is smaller than you might think, and it's not high on my list of priorities.
Which brings us back to the question of why.
To me, cars are primarily a fascinating sociological phenomenon. The auto business is an industry that spans industries -- intersecting everything from manufacturing and design to finance and high technology -- and it serves as a bellwether of the larger social, economic, and political trends of the time. Cars occupy a unique social position; they're driven by fashion and novelty like consumer products, but manufactured and purchased like durable goods, and they carry heavy connotations of class and status. You can tell a great deal about someone by the car they drive, and even more by the cars to which they aspire. For the same reasons, you can tell a great deal about an era by its cars: its fads and obsessions, its anxieties and its dreams. Cars are clay in which the forces that shape our history leave their fingerprints very clearly.
I'm not here to justify or defend the existence of the automobile. The rise of the auto industry has had profound social and environmental consequences, many of which (such as
the use of tetraethyl lead in gasoline) are very difficult to defend rationally. As I've said before, interest does not necessarily connote approval. I do believe, however, that it's important to remember that nothing happens in a vacuum, and blindly disapproving of something without considering its context -- or why and how it came to exist -- is a perilous endeavor.
Whether or not you approve of them, cars are an enormously significant social, historical, and economic phenomenon. The central question I set out to answer in each of the articles on this site is why. Why something was designed the way it was; who was responsible for it; why it worked (or didn't); the context for its success or failure; what lessons we can take from it.
That's what interests me, and that's why I'm here.
