Bryan Appleyard, like most men of his generation, feels guilty about cars. He knows how awful they are; knows how they have colonised cities, toxified the air, imperilled the climate and killed millions, both directly and indirectly. He calls them “the Anthropocene’s battering ram”, and decries how they have “dewilded the world”.They are “the new cigarettes or, rather, fur coats”.
And yet, of course, Appleyard loves them. For the freedom they offer. For their engineering, aesthetics and what they do to our bodies. To drive “is to be connected to steel and oil, rubber, plastic and glass, and a fabulous electro-mechanical ballet of sparks, cylinders, gears and springs, all operated by the movements of the driver’s feet and hands”.
Appleyard has long been one of this newspaper’s most interesting voices, known for encompassing culture, philosophy and, particularly, technology in his writing.
This book is very much in that familiar voice: forward-looking but sceptical, gnomic but penetrating. It also has excellent anecdotes. Telling the story of Henry Ford, he describes how young Henry suffered a number of riding accidents. Years later, the Model T successfully created, Ford wrote in his notebook “The horse is DONE!”
Appleyard likes to seize on a poignant detail. Take his discussion of Hitler. The Führer was a back-seat enthusiast and did not have a driving licence. He relied on his drivers, one of whom, Erich Kempka, accompanied him to his end, even supplying the petrol to burn his body.
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Or take James Dean and the tragedy of the “Little Bastard” — a customised Porsche 550 Spyder. (Whose “lack of torsional rigidity could lead to dangerous oversteer” — one for the nerds there.) Appleyard tells the story of the mechanic Rolf Wütherich, who survived the crash that killed Dean and became a depressed alcoholic, pursued by aggrieved fans until he died in 1981. He drove into a wall. In a Honda Civic.
The book is not all stories. There is lots of early history, taking in the relationship of the car to modernism, and the UK’s bizarre, speed-limiting Red Flag Act (MPs had shares in railway companies). A short history of car manufacturing takes in Ford, GM and the Japanese revolution — interesting enough.
But the best writing is on cars themselves and the culture that surrounded them. Mao’s private Dongfeng, with its carved ivory switches and cloisonné smoking utensils. Or the late-1950s Cadillacs and Chryslers, whose absurd tail fins underwent “a process not unlike the runaway sexual selection that produced the peacock’s tail”.
Petrolheads may complain that Appleyard in one place calls the Rumpler Tropfenwagen the “Trumpfwagen” (its name means “droplet” and describes its shape). And he says that the futuristic Bugatti Aérolithe had a magnesium body when it was a magnesium-aluminium alloy. But these are very small carps to make about a book that covers a huge amount of historical and technical territory.
Towards the end the tone turns elegiac. Because the future is electric, and it is autonomous. Appleyard rightly loathes the idea that we will become “passive spectators” in our own journeys. Autonomous vehicles, for him, “represent a freedom-destroying victory over the driver’s experience of serendipity, contingency, and faith and joy in their own competence”. They also present serious legal and philosophical problems, which he summarises in a brilliantly offhand way: “Getting killed or maimed by a robot somehow feels a good deal more annoying than by a human.”
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Ultimately cars have become “disgustingly 20th century”. Even the experience of delighting in them has started to feel tarnished. To equate freedom with power and control was always very masculine. Now it seems grotesque: the freedom on offer, after all, was only ever for a few, and always at the expense of many. Cars, Appleyard concludes, will become museum pieces or, like horses, “eloquent and beautiful reminders of a vanished way of life”.
The Car: The Rise and Fall of the Machine That Made the Modern World by Bryan Appleyard
Orion £22 pp320
