The Car Was Not Invented in America, But We Invented What the Car Meant

From the December 2017 issue

The car was not invented in America, but we made it ours. We’re not talking here about technical innovations such as vehicle mass production or interchangeable parts or the electric starter. Those were all America’s, sure. Europe can lay claim to just as many automotive achievements—unibody construction, disc brakes, even front-wheel drive. But we invented what the car meant. We were the ones who built our dreams around it.

The car gave Americans the ability to envision ourselves on the road, in faraway places, our destinations wholly up to us. Before the car, most people had never traveled faster than a galloping horse, save for those who boarded trains. But cars were different from trains or even horses because they were completely under our control. And that mattered. Cars enabled and embodied mankind’s freedom to dream and do. Cars individuated and empowered us. One could even argue that the idea of space exploration germinated on dusty highways that led to places where we didn’t know what we’d find until we got there. The car was the first machine to make us comfortable with the unknown. It made explorers out of all of us.

The car created another kind of comfort, too. When Henry Ford put out the word that he’d pay able-bodied men $5 a day to work in his factory in Highland Park, Michigan, it begat a mass migration out of the agrarian South—upward mobility for the sake of mobility. The wealth created by those factories radiated outward, from the personal to the local to the national. Workers lived near where they worked; spent their paychecks at the bars, bowling alleys, and barber shops near where they worked; and were provided with local medical and dental care, eventually, from where they worked. That expanding wealth created societal prosperity, a middle class of Americans who could pay for the things they made. And those things they made required and stimulated so much commerce, trucking and delivering so many goods to so many places, that they knit the country tightly together into one truly United States.

The car can’t be untangled from our country, our growth, our aspirations. It has made us who we are—lazier and fatter, maybe, but also people who know the freedom of self-determination every time we go to CVS.

And, of course, the car can’t be untangled from this magazine. In its way, Car and Driver has provided those of us who make it with our very own American Dream, and for that, we thank you.