'The Driving Machine' Is a Ride through the Design History of Cars
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Witold Rybczynski has owned 15 cars in his life, and all of them make an appearance in "The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car"(Norton, $29.99). In fact, the book is something of a paean to the famed design and architecture writer's vehicles, which tended toward the utilitarian.
These included, initially, a 1960 Volkswagen Beetle, a 1962 Mini Cooper, a 1964 Renault 4L (long-term rental), and a 1969 Citroën 2CV. "One of the striking things that I became aware of when I wrote the book is that most of the cars that I admire were really designed by engineers," Rybczynski tells Car and Driver. "These cars were sort of thought out. They were logical. They weren't styled in the way that happened later. They were solving problems."
The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car
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In fact, according to Rybczynski, the book was initially intended to be called "The People's Car," and was going to cover solely the type of vehicles that put their respective nations on wheels, cars like the Ford Model T, VW Bug, Mini, Fiat 500, Toyota Corolla and the like. "But as I wrote the first chapter, I realized that it really wasn't something that was satisfying, that I needed to write about more types of cars," Rybczynski says. "And if you're writing about the Volkswagen, you can't really avoid other cars that Porsche has designed and the sort of history of the car. So it really broadened into a story that brought in all sorts of cars."
This broadening tracks with Rybczynski's own car ownership, which later included a 1968 Volvo 145 wagon, a 1969 BMW 1600, a 1976 Toyota Celica GT, a 1983 Honda Prelude, a 1985 GMC Jimmy, a 1986 Audi 4000, a 1995 Infiniti G20, and a 1993 Mercedes 300E.
Rybczynski skitters conversationally and conversantly through the automobile's nearly 150-year timeline, often from behind the wheel, veering into milestones, both well-worn and obscure, as if they were roadside attractions that could be narrated past, or pulled into and toured. These include the earliest German and French cars, the development of mass production, the influence of aviation and the military, the invention and dominance of styling, the struggle of innovative/outlier independents in the face of industry consolidation, the rise of Japanese car manufacturing, and the shift to electrification.
Having written widely on the design of buildings, furniture, and landscapes, he found the exploration of the automobile to be at once compelling, and distinct. "There's no ancient history of cars," he says. "So everything about cars, all the inventions that make cars possible, all happened in a very short time. And many of them really happened in my lifetime." In fact, he discovered that his personal timeline (he was born in 1941) coincided with a core moment in the lifespan of the car. "It wasn't just that the memoir covers a period of time that I happened to own cars. It was also a kind of era of a certain kind of cars," he says. "Basically, it was the analog era. Which is now over."
Researching automotive history created some challenges that were familiar from exploring his previous subjects. "I went to a couple of car museums, but I didn't find them very useful because you can see the car, but you can't sit in them or get a sense of what it's like to drive them," he says. "And so it's a bit like furniture museums where you can't sit in the furniture. You look at a chair, but it doesn't tell you anything."
His solutions? One was YouTube because, as he says, it provides "a sense of what it's like to drive a car." The other was perusing old car magazines. "I actually was a big reader of Car and Driver back in the '80s. When David E. Davis was the editor. It was almost like a literary magazine back then." (It should be noted that his tradition clearly continued; in his section on the Chevrolet Suburban, he quotes a C/D article written by yours truly.)
The book is, by no account, exhaustive. It's slim, at just over 200 pages. And it pretty much ignores two key categories: trucks and sports cars. This was intentional. "I realized that trucks was much too complicated a subject. You couldn't actually cover it in a single chapter," Rybczynski says. "And for high-end sporting cars like Ferraris, I've never driven one of those—I've never even driven in one. And so they were just completely foreign to me."
Rybczynski was trained as an architect and worked for nearly 40 years as professor of the subject, first at McGill University in Montreal and then at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Having sold his Mercedes and not replaced it, he no longer owns a car. But we wondered if he'd ever taken to his drafting table to work on an automotive design.
"No, no, it wouldn't have occurred to me," he says. "I barely understand how cars work! I mean, I could change the spark plugs and the fan belt and change the oil, but I I'm not mechanically gifted at all. I wish I was. I design buildings, but I knew enough to know I could not design a car."
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