The Automobile: A Fad

by Paul

In this day and age, cars are thought of as a necessity more than anything else. Some cars are an extravagance (BMW, Audi), some are a personal statement (Prius, Hummer), and others are a tool (Pick-up trucks, minivans). But automobiles are rarely thought of as a choice. Every soon-to-be sixteen year old dreams of owning a car, and every child has played with hot wheels as a child. There are 7.7 cars for every ten people in the United States, and these cars are used every day, all day. Every trip to the grocery, every commute, every family outing is taken on a gas-powered, four-wheeled vehicle.
Such a dependence on the automobile creates a certain mindset. But I want to look at the car in a different light, as simply another fad; one that has lasted an extremely long amount of time, to be sure, but a fad all the same. After all, an object or idea cannot become this ingrained in a culture without having its own introduction into pop culture.

The first gas-powered automobile was made in 1896 by Henry Ford. With the invention of the assembly line, Ford was soon able to churn out an enormous number of cars for very little money, making cars affordable for an everyday American. Over the next hundred years, cars expanded into every single facet of our lives.
But how did the car become such a pervasive part of our lives? Few Americans know that before the automobile, almost all of our cities had extensive trolley systems that served as the major form of transportation. People either lived very close together, or extremely far apart, and therefore had little need for a car. What made the car so immensely popular so fast?
One of the best reasons is simply independence. The United States is a staunchly independent country, on both a national and individual scale. All throughout our short history we have snubbed out noses at the established superpowers (until we became one ourselves, that is). So it stands to reason that an average American would leap at the chance to partake in one of the most fundamentally independent actions someone can take: driving. This is especially true when the car was first introduced, when walking was the most common form of movement, and trains the fastest (train companies were at the time considered corrupt, powerful, and malicious). The idea of owning your own vehicular transportation must have been an amazingly appealing idea.
Another reason the car became so popular was that the rich had already owned cars before Henry Ford made them affordable. This made automobiles a luxury item, much like private jets are now. Imagine if owning a private jet was suddenly cheap enough for every sixteen year old to get for their birthday. The change that would take place would be immediate and extreme, for the same reason and with the same effect as the introduction of the car.
Of course, the car’s dominance was helped along by the Model T, Robert Moses, the New Deal, the Federal Aid Highway Act, and the rise of the middle class, but those events were more of a symptom of the automobile’s rise to dominance rather than a cause. Independence and social aspirations were truly the reason the car became the overindulgence it is today.

But as the automobile has become a necessity rather than a luxury, it has also become a restriction rather than a form of independence. Once, driving meant speeding down a road without inhibitions, but now it means sitting on a slab of concrete in the hot sun, waiting for the car in front of you to move an inch or two. It means paying almost $9,000 a year to move from isolated point A to isolated point B. Ugly concrete parking garages have infested our cities. Suburbanization has crawled farther and farther from urban centers, with social, political, and environmental consequences that we have yet to fully understand; and highways have become a blight on our cities and countryside. The car’s popularity, coupled with our dependence upon it, has made cars the biggest impediment to the freedom that they are supposed to represent.