In 1900 some countries possessed not one car. Most of the roads linking big cities were unsuitable for a vehicle travelling at 30 kilometres an hour, and engines of the early cars were imperfect. Many of the cars actually consumed more water then petrol, and frequently the motorists driving up a steep hill saw, just in front of them, steam jetting from the boiling water in the radiator. Cars were not yet designed to be driven at night, except in brightly lit cities, and even the headlights, burning kerosene, were not bright.
...
Cars were liberators. They conferred freedom. dispensing with the timetables that dominated all other forms of transport, and enabling the drivers to throw aside old drudgeries and routines. A car affected courtship and marriage, where people shopped, where they picknicked and holidayed, how they formed funeral processions, where they went to church and cinema ...
- Geoffrey Blainey, in A Short History of the 20th Century

"There can be no triumph of National Socialism without radio, sound films and motor cars," he [Adolf Hitler] intoned. "Simple, reliable economical transportation is needed. We must have a real car for the German people." He described a mass-produced car that could be bought by anyone who could afford a motor-cycle, His vision for a people's car was of an automobile that would hold a family of four and cost less than a thousand marks - a price far lower than that for any car on the market at that time.
- Phil Patton, in Bug

Australian taxpayers will hand an ailing American car company more than $50 million to design petrol-hungry vehicles, many of which will be made only overseas ... The Prime Minister, Mr Howard, said the $30.2 million this year and the $20 million to be paid in 2012 was an "earnest" commitment to the future of Australian manufacturing. ... [He] said the money would "help secure the future of ... the iconic Ford Falcon" - whose sales are their lowest since 1992.
-press report in the Sydney Morning Herald 6/5/2006 - "PM gives Ford $50m to make petrol-guzzlers"

...Everywhere people associated the British with trains, bridges and dams, but most of the first cars in the Empire were foreign, French, German and American manufacturers having gained an early lead over the British. American cars dominated the Australian and Canadian markets from the start, and even in India the first car of all was French - the Maharajah of Patiala's De Dion Bouton, whose licence plate number was 0. The British built cars for the small easy roads of their own islands, and until the end of the Empire never did master the tougher imperial markets. Rover's Indian and Colonial model of 1907 hardly swamped the far-flung highways, and when in the 1920's Morris Motors introduced a new model actually called the Empire, they sold four.
- Jan Morris, in Farewell the Trumpets.

Detroit iron - big V8 engined sedans and sport utility vehicles (SUV's) - have fuelled America's private transport bonanza and restless travel bug, and the value-added profits from the car industry have oiled America's economy.
Though times have been tough, no-one thought this magic money-making formula would run dry, but now Michigan is waking up to the idea that the auto makers are going bust and are leaving town.
That no-one wants to buy V8 pick-ups and crude SUVs when petrol is more than $3 a gallon (more than $1 a litre), appears to have come as a complete surprise to two of America's "Big Three" car makers, General Motors and Ford.
Car industry executives like to talk about a "Perfect Storm" of high fuel prices, environmentalism, far eastern competition and pension and health-care liabilities as though they'd been mugged by events, but the writing has been on the rusting chrome hub caps of America's car manufacturers for years.
- from the British Telegraph report on the 2006 Detroit Motor Show, quoted in a Sydney Morning Herald article on 10/1/2006. The same issue of the Herald carried the following news story:

Ford vowed to reclaim the US market with innovative vehicles as it took the covers off a supercharged Mustang and a huge Ford ute called the Super Chief, a 6.7 metre long vehicle "inspired by a locomotive".
It seems every time American car makers make a gain in fuel efficiency, they use that benefit to build a bigger vehicle ("It's big with a capital B", Ford boasted).

The first thing we need to be clear about in this context is that a car is not primarily a means of transport - or rather, if that sounds a bit too extreme, that our relationship with the car has very little to do with the fact that it gets us from a to b. Trains and buses get us from a to b: cars are part of our personal territory, and part of our personal and social identity. A bus can take you to the shops and back, but you do not feel at home in it or possessive about it. A train can get you to work, but it does not make socially or psychologically significant statements about you.
- Kate Fox, in Watching the English

Commuting accounts for little more than one-quarter of all personal trips, but for the structure of the lives of working Americans it is the single most important trip of the day. ... Over the last two or three decades driving alone has become overwhelmingly the dominant mode of travel to work for most Americans. The fraction of us who travel to work in a private vehicle rose from 61 percent in 1960 to 91 percent in 1995, while all other forms of commuting - public transport, walking and so on - declined. ... We are also commuting farther. ... In short, we are spending more and more time alone in the car. ... The car and the commute, however, are demonstrably bad for community life. In round numbers the evidence suggests that each additional ten minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 10 percent.
- Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone

Jane Jacobs regards the cultural addiction to the motor vehicle as the single biggest contribution to civic decline. “Not TV or illegal drugs, but the automobile, has been the chief destroyer of American communities. One can drive today for miles through American suburbs and never glimpse a human being outside a car or a truck … While people possess a community they normally understand that they can´t afford to lose it; but after it is lost, gradually even the memory of what is lost is lost. In miniature, this is the malady of the Dark Ages.”
- Paul Sheehan, in “Why the West is riding for a fall”, Sydney Morning Herald 15/1/05.

A pedestrian seized by an impulse to put an end to it all by leaping in front of the traffic in the downtown Granada of the 1950´s had little chance of success. Most of the few cars in town were pre-1936 vehicles that lumbered slowly around ahead of a cloud of choking fumes that came to us by courtesy of CAMPSA, the government petrol monopoly. Those who were really bent on suicide would have done better to trot along behind a car, rather than hurl themselves into its path.
- Grahame Harrison, in Night Train to Granada

... Britain's Daily Telegraph reports that the ban on the gipponi, or "big jeeps", will be imposed on any vehicle weighing more than 1800 kg and with tyres greater than 70 cm in diameter. This broad description, intended to prohibit four-wheel-drives, also includes luxury cars from many of the world's car-makers.
"I have nothing against off-road vehicles being used in the countryside", says Claudio Del Lungo, the city councillor for the environment, "but I am determined to keep them off the roads in town".
Since the vehicles do not form a car class of their own in Italy, Florence has had to come up with the weight and wheel description to keep them at bay.
- Bob Jennings in the Sydney Morning Herald "Drive" (31/12/04), on the ban on non-resident four-wheel-drives and big luxury cars in Florence, where "driving and parking are already a nightmare".

Striking a patriotic chord might not help you win customers in China, but offending national pride is a sure-fire way to lose them.
It is a lesson that Toyota of Japan learned the hard way. In December the car maker had to withdraw and formally apologise for 30 magazine and newspaper advertisements depicting stone lions - a traditional sign of Chinese power - saluting and bowing to a Prado Land Cruiser.
"These ads were intended to reflect Prado's imposing presence when driving in the city", said Julie Du, account manager with Publicis Groupe's Saatchi & Saatchi, which made the ads.
"You cannot but respect the Prado", the ad says. But Chinese words often hold multiple meanings. Prado translates into Chinese as badao, which also means "rule by force" or "overbearing".
- opening of "Toyota falls flat on its face on way to China", story in the Sydney Morning Herald (20/1/2004).

It may well be that some bullbar designs are too dangerous and that 4WDs more than a certain size merit more stringent licensing requirements. Logic suggests so. But if the evidence is so strong, why do some people peddle these coffee-shop clichés as an obstruction to rational and informed decision-making? Public debate about these vehicles and bullbars (and they are separate issues) should not be overtaken by half-truths and sensationalism.
- journalist Peter Harrison, completing a week (2/8/02) in which the Sydney Morning Herald stirred up a lot of fuss about 4WDs.

What more do we need to know before 4WDs are recognised as killing machines and taxed or hounded out of popularity, before drivers are required to sit competence tests and hold truck licences before they can get behind the wheel of a 4WD?
- journalist Miranda Devine, after listing a catalogue of sins attributable to suburban uses of 4WDs in the Sydney Morning Herald (1/8/02)

How clever is a country which gives a price advantage to a vehicle which: (a) is not made in this country; (b) tops all gas-guzzler shame lists; (c) weighs up to three tonnes and damages roads, kerbs and roundabouts as a result; (d) is extremely aggressive in a collision; (e) is more likely to have a collision because of its higher centre of gravity and compromise tyres and suspension; (f) affords poor vision of children and cyclists; and (g) is driven by a person who has bought it in spite of b,c,d,e and f?
- journalist Tony Davis, fulminating in the Sydney Morning Herald (30/7/02) about the use of 4-Wheel-Drive vehicles for urban transport. The "price advantage" he refers to is explained elsewhere on this site.

Despite current air pollution problems, motorised transport has improved public health in many ways and it is reasonable to acknowledge that we could not sustain cities of the scale of today's Sydney at all on the basis of the transport systems that predate the internal combustion engine ... the modern transportation system has increased access to medical care, especially to urgently needed and emergency medical care, and that has increased life expectancy dramatically ... Air pollution problems and traffic safety problems must be addressed with seriousness and commitment, but the auto is certainly not an unmitigated threat to our good health; it is just as often a means to achieving good health.
- Martin Wachs

Twelve yards long, two lanes wide
Sixtyfive tons of American pride
She blinds everybody with her super high-beams
She's a squirrel-squashin', deer-smackin' driving machine.
Canyonero ! Canyonero !
Advertising jingle for the Canyonero SUV, the 4WD of Homer Simpson's dreams

Nevertheless, the hypercar is not a panacea. It is, after all, a car. "It still takes up space, gets stuck in traffic jams and has to be parked", says Meadows. "It glorifies the individual at the expense of the community and its roads dominate the landscape. If everyone on earth wants one we're still in trouble. The worst danger of the super-car is that it would make us think we're real smart and distract us from the real transportation tasks - which are to cut our population in half, to revise our settlement patterns so we don't have to travel every day."
- "Dartmouth's Meadows", quoted in Page, Paving the Way for the Hypercar, Science Spectra Issue 12 1998.

According to a detailed proprietary study recently [1996] completed by the Rocky Mountains Institute, even an early, illustrative and unoptimised four- to five-passenger hypercar design using a water-cooled 20-kw (15 hp) external-combustion engine, a 50-kg nickel-metal-hydride buffer battery, glass glazings, refridgerative air-conditioning and other off-the-shelf technology could readily weigh two-thirds less than an average US production car: conservatively, 521 vs 1,439 kg kerb mass.
- Ernst von Weizsacker, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, in Factor 4

How much power and mass are needed to drive ten miles to work ? Once certain types of transport come to prevail - autos of high horsepower and heavy mass - they create a traffic context in which alternative, softer, means of automobility are less feasible and less safe.
- Peter Freund/George Martin, The Ecology of the Automobile

Motorised vehicles create new distances which they alone can shrink. They create them for all, but they can shrink them for only a few.
- Ivan Ilich, Energy and Equity

One of the most hallowed of planning concepts is the separation of pedestrian from vehicular traffic. This is for the benefit of vehicles, so they will get the prime space.
- William Whyte, City

When in 1270 Bacon predicted, among other things, that "one day we shall endow chariots with incredible speed without the aid of animals", he was jailed for fourteen years by his Franciscan order for being in league with the devil.
- Max Lay, in Ways of the World

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