End of the Road

Cultural Commentator Stephen Bayley laments the passing of the motor car as a symbol of technical and aesthetic extravagance.

The car is a terrible paradox. Evidence of man’s restless ingenuity, it is also a witness to his destructive avarice and folly. Henry Ford created the “gasoline buggy” to escape the crushing tedium of life on a mid-West farm. It’s that same spirit of freedom and that vista of opportunity that still make cars so covetable, even as their polluting ubiquity robs us of freedom and opportunity wherever they are used. It was, tragically, Henry Ford’s own Detroit that was strangulated as a viable city when the 1956 Highways Act built freeways cutting off life from the city centre.

The car ruined city centres everywhere, while powering and justifying the building of lifeless suburbs from Birmingham to Calgary to Sydney. The suburb and the car were in a Faustian pact without a happy ending. But there is something so powerful, if delusory, in the idea of power-driven personal freedom, that once the genie of  ‘auto-mobility’ is out of the bottle, who is going to force it back in and replace the bung? There are very strong environmental and practical pressures in the west for us to stop using cars, but who – now that Wilfred Thesiger is dead – is going to tell one billion Chinese, yearning to be free, that they must be forever condemned to the tedium of life on the farm?

For a century, from Ford’s Model-T of 1908 to the Crash of 2008, the car was the greatest symbol of industrialised capitalism. No other manufactured product has quite the same rich mix of art and investment. No other manufactured product has quite the grip on the customer’s cupidity. No other manufactured product is quite so desirable. The car may not be art, but in its democratisation of beauty, its secure grip on symbolism, its sheer sculptural heft, it has effortlessly usurped the role of art.

Cars, maintained Roland Barthes, run over by a laundry truck in Paris in 1980, “are our cathedrals”. He was being ironic, but the essential truth – that cars are everyday objects, created by anonymous artisans that exercise a magical influence on the public – is valid. The United States has no Chartres, but it does have a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado. Vulgar, absurd, ridiculous? Yes, of course, but surely magnificent too? Whatever epicene taste judgements we might employ to condemn the pink Cadillac, it is beautifully true that a civilisation capable of producing it could believe in... anything. At least for a while.

And now Detroit is a city of the dead and Ford’s touching dream is redundant. Electric cars may claim some residual romance, but the adventure of the automobile is over. There is speculation that manufacturers will, in future, sell the batteries and give away the car, rather as King C Gillette did with blades and razors. The disposable car? If that happens, it will mean an end to all the absurdly rich symbolism of prestige and pleasure and preferment that was the history of car design.

A world without cars will be a cleaner, safer place, but also a more boring one. There is something essentially tragic in the rise and fall of the automobile.

Stephen Bayley’s latest book, Cars, is published by Conran Octopus