The automobile

BERNHARD RIEGER

“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.” It was the presentation of the new Citroen DS 19 at the Paris Motor Show in October 1955 that led French intellectual Roland Barthes to compare automobiles to the religious edifices that undisputedly tower at the apex of medieval sacral culture.

The pioneers experimenting with road vehicles powered by internal combustion engines in the late nineteenth century could not possibly have foreseen the developments they were about to set in motion. After all, the contraptions Wilhelm Maybach, Gottlieb Daimler, Carl Benz, Armand Peugeot, Emile Levassor, and others designed were modest and challenging affairs, hampered by unreliable, smelly engines, low horsepower, and aver­age speeds below 20 mph. At the time, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the internal combustion engine would rule the road. Buyers in search of power and speed turned to automobiles propelled by steam engines, trusting a tried and tested technological alternative to produce kinetic energy. As late as 1906, a so-called “steamer” held the speed record for cars at 128 mph. But while “steam carriages” delivered good performance, the time it took to fire them up before each journey limited their appeal.

Over the next century, the impact of the automobile has been dramatic. By 2008, 850 million passenger cars were in operation around the globe, a figure projected to almost double to over 1.6 billion by 2035. These vehicles owed their existence to an international automobile industry employing 50 million people to produce almost 60 million passenger cars and 20 million trucks and buses in 2011. Although the automobile ranks as a solidly established technol­ogy, carmakers invested close to US$ 90 billion in research and development in 2010 to improve their products and production facilities. In a global league table of research-intensive sectors, this figure placed the auto industry third behind pharmaceuticals and “technology hardware” and well ahead of computer companies as well as electrical firms widely associated with inno­vation. At the same time, the automobile displayed an unquenchable thirst for oil as cars and trucks guzzled up over 40 percent of the roughly 85 million barrels consumed per day in 2010.

The automobile's proliferation and its manifold consequences cannot be reduced to a history of technical progress. To be sure, since 1900 the motorcar has undergone significant changes in body design, engine power, speed, fuel efficiency, suspension systems, safety engineering, accessories, and more. Yet these engineering features constituted incremental modifications that enhanced the performance and appeal of a device whose basic features (a combustion engine, four inflated wheels, driver behind a steering wheel, electric starter) were already in place by the early 1920s. Rather than exclusively focus on the material object, social scientists have viewed cars as elements in systems of “automobility” that encompass - beyond automobiles - “car-drivers, roads, petroleum supplies and many novel objects, technologies and signs.”^[731] This approach, which situates the car within a wide web of political, social, and economic relations, has proved useful for analyzing how larger frameworks have shaped specific forms of car use while highlighting how automobiles have helped transform numerous societies in multifarious ways. Unlike many social scientists interested in “systems,” scholars engaged with automobility have emphasized the impor­tance of the individual by devoting considerable attention to drivers and their behavior. Their findings thus closely intersect with historical and anthropo­logical inquiries into the automobile's lasting fascination irrespective of its financial, social, ecological, and public-health costs. Indeed, expanding global demand for cars has been underpinned by a deeply emotional devotion to cars as personal and collective icons. Nevertheless, studies of both auto­mobility and of cars as consumer fetishes tend to neglect the capital-intensive systems of production that, while bringing hundreds of millions of automo­biles into existence since the early twentieth century, have proven of colossal economic and cultural importance beyond the industry itself.

Regimes of production

Composed of thousands of intricate, often fragile parts automobiles are highly complicated mechanical artifacts whose production and maintenance has always posed major challenges. Manufacturing these sophisticated devices on a mass scale required novel forms of industrial organization that played key roles in reshaping labor practices all over the world. Making cars - as much as using them - has left an indelible imprint on many societies in the twentieth century and beyond.

Around 1900, automobiles were socially exclusive and expensive items whose high price derived in part from a mode of production that saw integrated teams of highly skilled workers and artisans assemble vehicles in their entirety. While allowing companies to accommodate individual wishes of wealthy clients and incorporate custom-made elements in early cars, labor-intensive production procedures limited the potential for price cuts that would have extended the car market. At the turn of the century, cars epitomized the luxury good not only due to their purchase price but because their maintenance and handling entailed considerable costs. Since early cars were difficult to drive, many early owners hired chauffeurs. It is no coincidence that the French moniker for these novel contraptions - “automobile” - entered into many languages: after all, with its long­standing tradition in the luxury trades, Paris figured prominently among the centers of early auto manufacturing.

This situation changed fundamentally when Henry Ford implemented his ambition to build a “universal car” for the “wants of the multitudes.” Soon famed for its versatility and rugged performance, the legendary Model T provided a basic means of individual transport and generated unprecedented demand far beyond elite circles when launched in 1908 with a price tag under US$ 1,000.

Exceptional productivity gains stood at the heart of Ford's corporate ascent. Ford increased the workforce at his factory in Highland Park, Michigan, from 7,000 to 30,000 as he expanded production during the 1910s, but the over fifteen-fold jump in output derived primarily from advanced forms of labor division. Drawing on examples set by precision-engineering companies manufacturing guns, sewing machines, and bicycles, the manage­ment at Ford separated assembly processes into thousands of specialized tasks. At the same time, the company designed specialized machine tools on an unprecedented scale to manufacture standardized components. The most important and best-known element in Ford's manufacturing regime was the logistical measure that maintained a steady flow between thousands of distinct work stations, where workers either produced components or assembled them into the Model T. Inspired by Chicago's slaughterhouses where hundreds of thousands of carcasses were dressed at great speed at specialized work stations as they moved along ceiling rails at a set pace, the management transferred the principle behind these gory “disassembly lines” to the car factory.

The workforce experienced this new type of factory as a profoundly alienating environment. The blend of advanced labor division, mechaniza­tion, and a work pace set by the assembly line resulted in monotonous, deskilled, and stressful jobs that granted employees virtually no control over their daily lives on the line. In 1913, staff turnover rates at Highland Park shot up to 370 per cent and seriously disrupted production. To reverse this trend, Ford doubled wages to $5 a day in January 1914 and subsequently launched a range of welfare measures for employees that included sports facilities, hospitals, and night schools. Generous remuneration practices and a savings and loan association added to Ford's growing mystique because employment in his plant offered prospects of prosperity that workers in other industrial sectors could only dream of.^[733]

Behind Ford's comparative largesse stood a deep-seated paternalist desire for comprehensive and unchallenged authority in his company. Ford forcefully quashed all attempts at unionization into the 1930s and subjected workers to eagle-eyed supervision in the workplace as well as initially in the private sphere, where investigators from the company's “sociological department” policed employees' domestic cleanliness, family life, and sexual mores between 1913 and 1920. Retaining control over all aspects of manufacturing also motivated Ford's drive towards vertical integration. To insulate itself from market swings and the vicissitudes of outside suppliers, the corporation strove to stamp its authority on all production steps from the extraction of raw materials to the manufacture of components to the finished car. By the mid-1920s, Ford Motor Company owned and operated mines, forests, saw mills, steel works, forges, tool shops, railroads, and more in addition to its assembly facilities. In an effort to gain indepen­dence from latex imports, Ford even launched an ill-fated attempt to run its own rubber plantation deep in the Brazilian rain forest.

Occasional setbacks did not diminish the international celebrity status Ford had attained by the mid-1920s. Built between 1917 and 1928, the company's gigantic new River Rouge factory attracted a steady stream of tourists, journalists, and engineers who subsequently spread tales of the daily miracle of auto production across the world. My Life and Work (1922), a bestselling summary of Ford's convictions and prejudices (including his notorious anti-Semitism), reinforced his stardom in many countries. Foreign observers studied what soon came to be known as “Fordism,” a set of business principles that resonated far beyond the world of auto making and pointed the way to highly productive enterprises paying good wages on the basis of standardized mass manufacturing. Ford, many contemporaries were convinced, had hit on the formula for mass production and mass consumption alike. This scenario possessed great appeal across the political spectrum, allowing business circles to emphasize the importance of mechan­ization, standardization, as well as productivity and the Left to draw attention to the importance of generous remuneration. Indicatively, Fordism was championed by both Stalin and Hitler; indeed, the latter decorated Ford with the Third Reich's most prestigious medal for offering advice on the dictator's altogether unrealistic mass motorization program.

Ironically, however, at the very moment Ford's reputation peaked abroad, his company lost its dominant position at home. As a result of its owner's highly personalized management style, his focus on standardization, his commitment to vertical integration, and his aversion to updating the Model T, Ford Motor Company ceded market share to General Motors after 1925. Under Alfred Sloan's leadership, GM pioneered strategies for car markets that had already passed through the initial phase of mass motoriza­tion. New forms of consumer credit and marketing played a role in propelling GM to prominence as did a greater emphasis on styling and the annual introduction of re-designed models from 1923 on. Moreover, GM targeted a broad spectrum of an increasingly differentiated auto market by offering “a car for every purse and purpose,” allowing drivers to switch among various GM brands. Sloan thus pursued a more flexible variant of mass production than Ford who had famously quipped that “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”^[734] After 1945, General Motors consolidated its commercial lead by embracing new forms of labor-saving automation and adopting machine tools to perform several manufacturing processes under the supervision of a single worker. In the 1950s and 1960s, this colossus towered as the world's largest corporation by a wide margin.

The postwar boom accelerated the proliferation of Fordist production regimes in the international car industry as well as other sectors. In the 1950s, Western European auto manufacturers gradually gained the capital for comprehensive mechanization and automation that embedded manufac­turing procedures that by and large resembled American examples. Japan, meanwhile, followed a different path. In a drawn-out process, Japanese carmakers transformed Fordism and developed a novel mass production regime that ultimately proved superior to the American original. Boomeranging back to United States and beyond in the 1980s, methods developed in Japan helped to radically change auto making and, like Fordism before, came to be seen as a new benchmark of economic efficiency across numerous industrial sectors.

Japanese executives who visited Detroit soon after World War II recognized the central importance of Fordism's labor-saving arrangements for lowering car prices. Postwar Japan, however, provided a fundamentally different economic environment than the USA in the early twentieth century. If American Fordism was born from comparative abundance that allowed vast production runs of individual models, the Japanese way of producing cars had its roots in postwar scarcity and reconstruction. As a society recovering from wartime devastation, the country suffered from capital shortages that severely restricted investment in high-priced machinery. Car executives also anticipated comparatively small production runs for individual models due to limited demand. In consequence, Japanese automakers embarked on a search for a flexible, yet highly productive mass manufacturing system that permitted the assembly of several models on the same line without lengthy interruptions for retooling when production switched between models. Flexibility and cost­efficiency were thus central to Japanese auto-making from early on.

Among the highly productive Japanese systems of car manufacturing, the one Toyota - a producer of looms and other equipment for textile production that had moved into truck production in the Thirties - developed between the 1950s and 1970s provides the best-known example. From 1953, shopfloor manager Taiichi Ohno gradually deployed machinery that could be easily retooled to accommodate the production of several car models and thus limited investment in expensive labor-saving hardware. As a result, Toyota workers had to become adept at operating a machine that performed more than one function - unlike the typical Fordist worker who operated a single-purpose machine. Ohno also identified the large quantities of parts American auto manufacturers stocked as a source of major and unnecessary outlay. Detroit employed so-called “buffer inventories” so as not to run out of components and suffer production delays. Ohno, by contrast, developed an ingenious system of “just-in-time” (or kanban) production that permitted the assembly line to flow on the basis of the exact number of parts required to fulfill the daily quota.

Although numerous bottlenecks initially hampered the “Ohno line,” it subsequently became a defining feature of Japanese flow production that ran without large, expensive inventories. To ensure a steady supply of compo­nents, Toyota established long-standing relationships with small- and medium-sized companies. While Toyota developed engines and auto bodies in-house, it delegated the design and production of components such as suspensions, brakes, exhaust systems, and more to specialized contractors. Closely consulting with its suppliers and acquiring stakes in them, Toyota never aspired to the vertical integration characteristic of American auto manufacturing. As Japanese car producers came to sit at the center of net­works of components producers that delivered auto parts in agreed qualities and quantities, they pioneered what has subsequently been called “outsourcing.”

In addition to market forces and growing demand, an ethos of improve­ment (kaizen) galvanized auto production in Japan. Through a system of incentives and pay increases, Toyota encouraged workers to suggest how productivity and quality could be raised. The management also pooled employees in groups that were collectively responsible for the work performed at a particular section of the assembly line. While a worker's task within a group could shift from day to day, each group's duties reached from a specific manufacturing task to checking its work pieces for faults to prevent deficient components from travelling down the line. Rather than leave the detection of defects and imprecisions to an inspection department at the end of the production process as was customary in Western European and America, Japanese corporations strove to integrate quality control into manufacturing routines.^[735]

Outsourcing, just-in-time assembly, group work, and quality management resulted in a vertically disintegrated, lean form of mass production that lent Japanese manufacturers a significant edge by the 1980s. Japanese auto­mobiles made significant international inroads, when global demand for smaller cars increased during the oil crises of the 1970s. In 1983, almost a quarter of the new cars bought in the United States were made in Japan.^[736] Faced with the new Asian competitors, Western European and North American automakers reexamined their Fordist principles and successfully adapted just-in-time procedures, group work, and outsourcing into their production routines. In conjunction with industrial robots and digital data processing, the impulse from Japan turned flexible mass production into the new industry standard in the 1990s. Indeed, Toyota's success gained appeal far beyond the auto sector. As business schools and management gurus extolled forms of labor organization pioneered in Japan, leanness and flexibility rested alongside neo-liberal free-market ideas as economic mantras of the early twenty-first century.

The international proliferation of Japanese production principles is indica­tive of broader dynamics of globalization that internationalized the auto sector in the late twentieth century. Beyond seeking to boost exports, car managers have long attempted to establish international production networks. In the first half of the twentieth century, these efforts met with limited success due to trade barriers, restricted global demand, and a lack of investment capital. Only the American giants had the financial resources to maintain international subsidiaries during the interwar years, a strategy primarily adopted to circumvent contemporary protectionist trade barriers in foreign markets. After 1945, they were joined by Western European and Japanese manufacturers including FIAT, Volkswagen, Nissan, and Toyota. While most companies focused their operations on domestic markets in the 1950s and 1960s, expanding corporations also opened plants in economically promising Latin American and African countries. As they secured footholds in future markets, auto manufacturers became multinational corporations that tended to assign secondary importance to the developing world, employ­ing their subsidiaries to produce dated models with aging equipment. Volkswagen's presence in Mexico provides a case in point. The country's stable growth during the 1950s and 1960s prompted VW to erect a compre­hensive production facility in Puebla in 1967; there, recycled machinery initially used in West Germany produced the VW Beetle beyond the turn of the millennium.^[737]

Like many other sectors, auto manufacturing displays the hallmarks of globalization's acceleration since the 1980s. The expansion of the European Union (EU), the foundation of the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), and the treaties brokered by the World Trade Organization removed a plethora of trade obstacles and thus substantially facilitated the international exchange of commodities, including cars. These develop­ments encouraged carmakers to increase their stakes in low-cost countries in the vicinity of lucrative markets. Mexico, for instance, attracted sizeable investments in the 1990s due to its proximity to the United States and Canada. Volkswagen, beyond continuing Beetle production, upgraded its plant in Puebla in the 1990s for the manufacture of mid-size models destined for the USA.

Rapid growth in populous nations such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China further stoked the sector's globalization. Establishing plants in these new mass markets not only met demands by local political elites, who, most notably in China's and India's cases, insisted on foreign companies entering into joint ventures with emergent local firms. A direct presence also reduced the risks associated with currency volatility and put manufacturers in a position to design cars in accordance with local preferences and tastes. After the turn of the millennium, some firms began to morph from multinational into transnational corporations. Rather than uphold hierarchical distinctions between primary and secondary markets across the world, headquarters flexibly coordinated far-flung production networks that responded to specific regional demand patterns.^[738] As the largest global manufacturer in 2011, Volkswagen exemplified these trends. Volkswagen maintained factories in twenty-six countries to produce dozens of auto models for various markets and employed 280,000 of its 500,000-strong workforce outside Germany. Of the 8.5 million vehicles it sold that year, VW delivered 2.25 million in China, 1.98 million in Western Europe, and 1.15 million in Germany.^[739]

While carmakers have long commanded prominence in the corporate world, workers have experienced auto production as a mixed blessing. Since the early days of mass production in Michigan, auto plants have habitually attracted manual laborers from near and far, offering employ­ment to men and women with different skill levels as well as regional, national, and ethnic backgrounds. Recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe overwhelmingly staffed Ford's assembly lines in Highland Parkin 1914. In the 1930s and 1940s, they were joined by a sizeable contingent of African Americans from the Deep South. During the postwar boom, West German manufacturers hired large numbers of Southern Europeans and Turks while Renault operated its plant in the Parisian suburb of Billancourt overwhelmingly with Algerian laborers. Mostly filling low- skilled, repetitive, and onerous jobs, these migrants were attracted by advan­tageous pay and benefits. The auto industry's comparatively high wages came largely thanks to union representation, unlike the early example of generous remuneration set by Ford. In the United States of the 1930s, the United Auto Workers union drew on Federal legislation to overcome employers' violent resistance to worker representatives and established itself as a powerful guardian of labor rights in Detroit. In postwar Western Europe, line workers also owed improving remuneration and legal protection to union lobbying. As a result, jobs in American and Western European car factories counted among the world's best-paid blue-collar positions between the 1950s and the 1970s.

Since the 1980s, however, corporate globalization strategies have weakened unions' bargaining positions. Beyond the corporate strategy of moving production to low-cost locations, labor activists identified post- Fordist manufacturing routines as a threat to the workforce. While employ­ers praised Japanese-style group work and flexibility as a remedy to work­place alienation resulting from monotony, unions vehemently contested this rosy reading. They pointed to the lower remuneration levels, longer working hours, and higher stress levels frequently encountered in post-Fordist factories. Indeed, flexible mass production met with resistance among auto workers from the outset. In the early 1950s, Toyota and Nissan could only implement their organizational schemes after breaking up the unions that staged several strikes against the management. Over the ensuing two boom decades, Japanese car workers possessed safe jobs but earned less, worked longer, and enjoyed fewer vacations than their counterparts in North America and Western Europe.^[740] As the car industry expanded into countries with weak labor laws in the new millennium, the affluent, union-backed autoworker who had been prominent in the postwar United States and Europe progressively looked like a temporary Western anomaly. To be sure, the international proliferation of auto plants contributed to boosts in income levels in low-wage regions, but numerous workers' legal position remained precarious in many countries that car executives targeted as future markets. From the workers' perspective, the advances in productivity and globalization cannot be narrated as a straightforward success story. Although critics of globalization's social inequities arising from changes in the international division of labor have primarily trained their aim at low-pay sectors such as textile production and the assembly of electronics, the auto industry has displayed similar socio-economic dynamics. Indeed, auto man­ufacturing inspired many of the management concepts that have transformed global production regimes with decided mixed results for line workers since the late twentieth century.

Regimes of consumption

The auto industry's growth and prominence testifies to the seemingly unceasing and unlimited appeal of the automobile. Casting a spell on millions of people in different parts of the world, cars have figured as far more than prosaic devices that allow drivers and passengers to move from A to B. As they developed tremendous individual and collective resonance, automobiles came to rank among the twentieth century's undisputed icons.

Since cars are expensive to purchase and maintain, mass markets for automobiles have been consistently predicated on rising incomes. The USA remained the only mass motorized nation for the first half of the twentieth century. In the late 1920s, 80 percent of the world's 32 million cars were registered in the United States, turning more than half of all American families into car owners. Since World War II, mass motorization has become a regular consequence of sustained economic growth, be it in Western Europe, Japan, Latin America, India, and China. Those who can afford it buy a car to extend their physical mobility and give them greater control over the speed, route, and timing of particular journeys. Economic motivations have long underpinned car purchases, not least mobility's ability to boost individual earning power. In the early-twentieth-century USA, farm­ers bought Model Ts to overcome rural isolation, to employ the sturdy vehicle for chores around the farm, and to take produce to market. The urban middle class also recognized the car's economic advantages as profes­sionals and entrepreneurs used them to call on clients and customers.

While eminently practical considerations prompted many purchases during early stages of mass motorization, the automobile soon developed into a deeply emotive possession. Countless owners have established excep­tionally close relationships with their cars, regarding them as badges of personal identity and treating them as objects of affection. Beyond its eco­nomic roles, the motorcar owes its elevated personal status to its potential to enrich free time through evening trips, weekend excursions, and extended holidays. Moreover, cars have long functioned as complex status symbols whose acquisition not only testifies to owners' socio-economic success but projects their cultural preferences and affinities. A vast number of customiz­ing “scenes” have sprung up around certain models and styles, all obeying specific rules, rituals, and carnivalesque cultures of display. These range from Chicano men and their spectacular “low riders” with improbable suspension systems to young Asian Americans who modify import cars from Japan and Korea to countless individuals dedicating time and money to restoring and maintaining old vehicles including Rolls Royces, VW Beetles, Morris Minors, 2CVs, Fiat Cinquecentos, and Ladas.

Above all, however, the act of driving establishes an intimate bond between car and owner. In many mass-motorized societies regarded as a major rite of passage into adulthood, learning to drive amounts to a drawn- out process in the course of which a person ideally acquires - or not! - a complex set of coordinated skills involving multiple senses. Over time, habituation transforms what are initially distinct actions required to steer a vehicle into an intuitive, flowing performance that leaves many a driver with the impression of feeling at one with an automobile. Put differently, learning to drive adds a new facet to individual identity. As an anthropologist has noted, driving reveals “the individuating potential... of machines that empower the mundane self to expand into new domains of action and imagination.” Throughout the twentieth century, the automobile's capacity to heighten an individual's sense of self manifested itself in the West and beyond. When postwar Japan underwent mass motorization, Japanese society employed a new word imported from English to label the novel sense of personhood drivers derived from handling their automobile. It became known as their “maika,” a phonetic adaptation of the English “my car.”^[741]

Car owners have experienced driving as a profoundly liberating act. From the outset, observers linked the motorcar with freedom. Henry Ford received numerous letters from American farmers in the 1910s that thanked him for helping them overcome rural isolation: “Your car lifted us out of the mud. It brought joy into our lives,” wrote an early fan of the Tin Lizzie.1^[742] At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, Americans, Eric Foner has stated, “were constantly reminded in advertising, television shows, and popular songs” that it was while driving that “they were truly free.” Praise for the car's liberating properties was by no means the preserve of political liberals. In a speech in 1933, Adolf Hitler commended the car because “it obeyed human will” rather than “the time table” that “hemmed in” the railway traveller.^[743]

The automobile's emancipatory and empowering potential has stoked numerous conflicts - and not just within families when teenage offspring wished to use the family vehicle as an escape tool from parental oversight. Due to the car's association with liberty, disputes surrounding auto owner­ship have often revolved around the question of whose claims to freedom were recognized as legitimate in a given society. Driving and car ownership frequently gained political dimensions, highlighting the fault lines of social and political exclusion. Throughout the twentieth century, cars have served not only to advance claims to full citizenship but also to carve out autono­mous niches in authoritarian environments.

Women repeatedly struggled to assert their right to drive due to notions stipulating the domestic sphere as their realm alongside a widespread equa­tion of mechanical competence with masculinity. In the early twentieth century, numerous American female drivers confronted misogynistic charges that their presence on the road represented a public danger as well as an affront to the supposedly natural hierarchy between the sexes. American feminists countered these attacks by pointing out that driving put women in a position to fulfill their domestic tasks with greater efficiency. They gained further ammunition as growing numbers of female drivers proved their skill behind the wheel, not least by causing fewer accidents than their male counterparts. Squarely contradicting a core notion underpinning contemporary gender hierarchies, displays of female automotive compe­tence allowed American feminists to advance claims for gender equality including calls for full political rights for women. In this context, the car developed emancipatory qualities in the most literal sense. These mechan­isms retained potency in the early twenty-first century when Saudi Arabian feminists demonstratively got behind the wheel to defy legal bans on female driving.^[744]

In addition to gender, race has figured prominently in regimes of auto­motive inclusion and exclusion. The Nazi dictatorship's ban of all Jewish Germans from car ownership in 1938 provides a particularly stark example of how automotive regulations correspond with wider policies of racial margin­alization. Racial discrimination against drivers also manifested itself in liberal nations. For much of the twentieth century, “driving while black” was considered a provocation among significant sections of the white population in the USA - unless African Americans behind the wheel could easily be identified as chauffeurs in a white person's employ. Indeed, in 1948 a mob in Georgia attacked and murdered an African American out on a drive with his family because his car signaled to the perpetrators that he was ‘“too prosperous” and hence “not the right kind of negro.”^[745] Racial discrimination persisted in liberal-democratic countries including the USA and Great Britain throughout the twentieth century, irrespective of their constitutional commitment to legal equality, manifesting itself not least in disproportio­nately high rates of roadside traffic checks on non-white drivers. At the same time, civil rights legislation increasingly lent members of racial minorities tools to challenge these discriminatory practices and assert their legitimate right to use the road.

In the Soviet Union, the state found it difficult to position itself vis-a-vis the automobile. Despite casting itself as a champion of technological innovation in the quest for Socialism, the Soviet state hesitated to promote individual car ownership. Given their commitment to collectivist forms of social and political organization, Soviet officials favored investment in public transport in the form of trains, buses, and the metro system in Moscow. In the 1930s, the only way ordinary Soviet citizens could acquire an automobile was by winning one in the lottery. At the time, automobiles were the preserve of politically privileged circles to such an extent that “the appearance of a car signified an official on the road,” as Lewis Siegelbaum has observed. At the height of the purges that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, their mere sight of an automobile could instill fear in bystanders because of the regular use of motorcars in arrests. The car's intimate association with state power, however, did little to undermine the desire for automobiles among the Soviet population. One concession the authorities offered to deflect popular discontent at a chronic lack of con­sumer goods came in the 1966 decision to quadruple car production. While motorization levels remained low in comparison with the West and deliv­ery periods ranged between four and ten years, many owners - mostly university-trained members of the intelligentsia - devoted considerable time and energy to maintaining their treasures. Persistent shortages of spare parts and services gave rise to a black market that “guaranteed that millions of... citizens would become entangled in webs of essentially private relations that were ideologically alien” to the Soviet Union. Although they gave up their early fundamental opposition to privately owned cars, Soviet authorities regarded the automobile with profound ambivalence for offering citizens “a degree of privacy and personal auton­omy” that stood in tension with official ideologies of collectivism, public ownership, and state control.^[746]

As the Soviet example illustrates, the state has played prominent roles in the auto's history. On the one hand, state agencies adopted and adapted supervisory and regulatory frameworks to maintain public order on the road. Many initiatives not only sought to keep traffic flowing smoothly as mass motorization progressed; they also minimized dangers and disrup­tions arising from the presence of a powerful machine in public space. Prussia was the first state to introduce driving tests in 1903, a regulation extended to all of Germany in 1909 and subsequently implemented by state governments in the USA after 1910, albeit in a very gradual manner. Over the years, state agencies have passed a host of regulations including man­datory vehicle inspections, speed and alcohol limits, educational initiatives to encourage civil driving, and the installation of road signs. While many rules (including whether one drives on the left or the right) vary among nations, they display a considerable degree of international similarity across the world. The automobile therefore counts among the examples of globa­lization that have advanced comparatively uniform everyday rules and routines across different continents, incomplete as this standardization undoubtedly has been given local variations.

The state has played an active role in promoting the automobile beyond regulation. Ever since Henry Ford established his global business empire and demonstrated the auto industry's economic potential, governments have vied with each other to attract carmakers. Among policymakers, the car industry has widely been viewed as a key sector furthering national economic growth by bringing investment, skills, and jobs into countries. In the 1950s and 1960s, Latin American nations including Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina permitted only the sale of cars whose parts and components were predominantly manufactured domestically. More recently, China and India have made access to their expanding auto markets conditional upon firms from North America, Europe, and Japan forming joint ventures with local firms, a strategy designed to nurture domestic manufacturers. Governments have not only encouraged the growth of the car industry so to boost a country's manufacturing base; they have also portrayed these policies as a commitment to their nations' general welfare by bringing car ownership within the reach of ordinary people.

Road projects to strengthen the national infrastructure have provided another priority for governments of many political stripes. By enhancing mobility, roads facilitated the exchange of commodities and stimulated economic growth, a conventional line of reasoning has maintained. Long before the advent of the automobile, political leaders had viewed road­building as a catalyst for nation-building. Hitler and Mussolini took up this theme and launched highways with the argument that these new arteries would allow Germans and Italians to visit distant parts of their countries and thus develop a stronger sense of national belonging. Similar arguments underpinned the program for interstate highways initiated in the USA in the second half of the Fifties. While roads complemented nation-building processes dating back to the nineteenth century in Germany, Italy, and the United States, they played a central role in creating a sense of national togetherness among the Brazilian population in the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, Brazil possessed only a thin and patchy railway network that ran between port cities and inland areas producing cash crops including coffee, sugar, and rubber. Financed by foreign investors and designed to help connect agricultural regions to the world market, the rail­way network primarily complemented river navigation and did little to facilitate communication within Brazil's vast territory because no lines linked its central regions. To enhance domestic trade and communication, the government began an effective road construction scheme in the 1950s that joined previously isolated interior parts. In Brazil's case, the highway rather than the railway was the transport technology that helped transform far-flung and ethnically diverse regions into a national entity.^[747]

In addition to underlining the automobile's political and economic significance, infrastructure projects draw attention to the ecological complex­ities of mass motorization. Only pervasive interventions could render the environment suitable for cars, buses, and trucks, whose operation subsequently threw up numerous unintended consequences. In ecological terms, automobiles have had the most palpable local and regional impact in urban areas where, among other things, they stoked suburbanization. Leaving aside the fact that extensive car use has regularly resulted in urban and exurban gridlock, cities around the world paid a high ecological price for auto-friendly traffic policies. Built-up areas with large surfaces sealed by tarmac have suffered increasing flood risks; exposure to constant noise has had adverse effects on the health of urban residents living along busy roads and highways; and between the 1960s and 1980s, North American and Western European societies banned lead additives from gasoline because of the public-health costs of cumulative poisoning and as a response to campaigns against acid rain.

Air pollution provides the most dramatic examples of the environmental damage resulting from car use. In the early 1950s, Californian scientists uncovered the photochemical reactions that transformed auto exhausts into ozone, which in high concentrations stunts plant growth, acts as an irritant to eyes, and aggravates respiratory problems. Sunny and highly motorized conurbations prone to temperature inversions proved particu­larly at risk to developing the brownish smoky fog that gained notoriety as “smog.” First observed in Los Angeles during the 1940s, smog repeatedly became the subject of apocalyptic media reports on Mexico City between 1970 and 1990, where rapid population and economic growth underpinned an increase in the number of vehicles from around 100,000 in 1950 to 2 million in 1980. Automobiles were responsible for 85 percent of the pollu­tants that turned the Mexican capital into the globe's smog capital. Cheap gas from Mexico's state-controlled oil company fueled the car boom as did a social stigma surrounding the use of public transport including the city's metro system. In 1970, a Mexican doctor joined a swelling chorus deploring that his city - previously known as the “the region with the most luminous air" - resembled a gigantic “garage with closed doors in which the driver never turned off the engine.”^[748] Schools habitually shut during the summer months; the population was told not to leave the house; birds fell out of the sky in mid-flight. As late as the early 1990s, an estimate put the annual death toll due to air pollution at 12,500. Since then, the city’s air has improved substantially. Reforestation, initiatives to relocate industries to other parts of the country, mandatory vehicle inspections, the introduc­tion of catalytic converters, and a scheme that bans owners from using their cars once a week have made Mexico City, like many a car city, a far less toxic place.

Given its character as a readily identifiable source of pollution, the automobile acted as an important spur of public environmental awareness during the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, in the United States public frustration about smog and air pollution stood behind the 1970 Clean Air Act that stipulated the foundation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Since the late 1980s, ecological debates about cars have often revolved around the themes of energy use and impending climate change, thus shifting the focus from local and regional to global ecological concerns. Motor vehicles accounted for about 12 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases in the 1990s. Despite a dramatic increase in vehicle registrations from 1990 to 2010, direct emissions from cars did not rise proportionately due to improved catalytic converters and more fuel-efficient engine designs. While industry-friendly circles viewed this trend as a source of optimism, restrict­ing ecological assessments of the automobile’s energy consumption to driving-related emissions provides an incomplete picture. In addition to driving them, the production of cars requires copious amounts of energy. As an environmental historian has observed of Germany, making a car in the early 1990s “emitted as much air pollution as did driving a car for ten years.”^[749] Residential sprawl enabled by the automobile has also added to emissions not only by increasing car use but due to the growing size of suburban homes, which, in turn, consume more energy. Satisfying the world’s desire for individual mobility in an ecologically responsible fashion thus confronts humankind with an unsolved challenge. Frequently touted as a low-emission alternative after the turn of the millennium, the electrical car continued to suffer from limited travel ranges due to available battery technology. What is more, even a practical electrical automobile fails to address the question of environmentally friendly energy generation.

While mass motorization persistently posed perplexing environmental problems, affluent societies gradually reined in the automobile's immediate physical risks. Before World War I, concern about the appearance of highly powered, fast-moving contraptions with the capacity to maim and kill road users contributed to vocal and at times violent opposition to the automobile on both sides of the Atlantic. Public animosity soon gave way to fascination, but the motorcar provided ample confirmation of initial concerns about its physical dangers. As the number of automobiles in the United States rose from 73 to 118 million between i960 and 1972, the annual death toll on the nation's roads increased from 38,000 to 56,000. During West Germany's mass motorization in the Fifties, yearly traffic-related fatalities increased from 8,800 to 14,400. Car crashes aroused considerable attention, especially if their victims were celebrities like Isadora Duncan, James Dean, Grace Kelly, Albert Camus, and Princess Diana. Since the 1970s, however, fewer people have died in auto accidents in well-off societies despite a continuing expansion of vehicle ownership. In 2011, American and German annual road deaths stood at around 32,310 and 4,009 respectively. Public lobbying, advances in road construction, speed limits, intensive driver education, the development of seat belts, airbags, and efficient braking systems, better passive safety through sturdy auto bodies, investment in emergency services, and the enforcement of legal regulations (not least against drunk-driving): all have played important parts in reducing the physical risks of car traffic in North America and Western Europe.

Yet when placed in global perspective, the car remained replete with dangers. In 2009, the World Health Organization noted that 1.2 million people died annually in traffic-related accidents, with a disproportionate share of these fatalities occurring in poor countries. India alone registered over 105,000 road deaths in 2007. Aging cars, inadequate road maintenance, weak enforcement of safety regulations, patchy health services, and risky driving styles render the road a lethal space for drivers, bus passengers, pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists in large parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It is thus not only in the worldwide distribution of automo­biles but in the uneven spread of physical risks that global social inequality remained manifest in the early twenty-first century.

Table 20.ι Estimated road deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (2006/7)

Source: Global Status Report on Road Safety: Time for Action (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2009)

Conclusions

The physical and environmental risks of driving have done little to under­mine the fascination that has swept the globe since the early twentieth century. Beyond serving as a convenient source of transport, a status symbol, and a badge of identity, the automobile has embodied the promise of liberty like no other object. While its association with freedom immersed the car frequently in conflicts of social and political exclusion, liberal and authoritarian political regimes alike sought to promote the automobile. At various times, governments adopted auto-friendly policies to demonstrate their commitment to popular welfare, to forging and enhancing a sense of nation belonging, and to boosting key industries. Meanwhile, auto manufac­turing emerged as a catalyst of globalization processes that left as deep an imprint on the twentieth century as driving. The organizational principles of mass production pioneered in the United States and subsequently trans­formed in Japan reshaped labor practices not just in the car industry but proved influential across a wide range of sectors. The attempts of individual firms to turn themselves from multinational into transnational corporations in the late twentieth century provided another instance of the auto sector as a force of globalization. Although the car industry achieved staggering advances in productivity, its multinational and multiethnic workforce owed its generous wages and benefits of the postwar period mostly to forms of union representation that came under increasing pressure in the late twen­tieth century. Spawning new forms of production and consumption with yet unforeseeable ecological and physical consequences, the automobile has played a major part in recasting the meanings of work and leisure across the globe in a process that inadvertently began when Carl Benz and his con­temporaries first took to the road.

Further reading

Babson, Steve, ed. Lean Work: Empowerment and Exploitation in the Global Auto Industry. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995.

Brinkley, Douglas. Wheelsfor the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Bruegmann, Robert. Sprawl: A Compact History. Chicago University Press, 2005.

Clarke, Sally H. Trust and Power: Consumers, the Modern Corporation, and the Making of the United States Automobile Market. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Daito, Eisuke. “Automation and the organization ofproduction in the Japanese automobile industry: Nissan and Toyota in the 1950s,” Enterprise & Society 1 (2000), 139-178.

Dreyfus-Armand, Genevieve, Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, and Emile Temime, eds. Renault sur Seine: Hommes et lieux memoires de l'industrie automobile. Paris: La Decouverte, 2007.

Flink, James J. The Automobile Age. Cambridge, ma: MIT Press, 1988.

Ford, Henry with Samuel Crowther. My Life and Work. Garden City: Doubleday, 1922. Freyssenet, Michel, ed. The Second Automobile Revolution: Trajectories of the World Car Makers in the 21st Century. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Grandin, Greg. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009.

Johnson, Amy. Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2009.

HubertoJuaez Nunez, Arturo Angel Lara Rivero, and Carmen Bueno, eds. El auto global: desarollo, competencia y cooperation en la industria del automovil. Puebla: Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia, 2005.

Ladd, Brian. Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. University of Chicago Press, 2008. McCarthy, Tom. Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

McNeill, John. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Cenutry. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

Meyer, Stephen III. The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921. Albany: SUNY Press, 1981.

Miller, Daniel, ed. Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg, 2001.

Mom, Gijs. The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age. Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Moran, Joe. On Roads: A Hidden History. London: Profile, 2009.

O'Connnell, Sean. The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896-1939. Manchester University Press, 1998.

Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1988.

Plath, David D. “My-car-isma: motorizing the showa self,” Daedalus 119/3 (1990), 229-244.

Rieger, Bernhard. The People's Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Rinehart, James, Christopher Huxley, and David Robertson. JustAnother Car Factory? Lean Production and Its Discontents. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Sachs, Wolfgang. For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1992.

Scharff, Virginia. Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age. New York: Free Press, 1991.

Seiler, Cotton. Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. Chicago University Press, 2008.

Siegelbaum, Lewis. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.

ed. The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Block. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Sloan, Alfred P. My Years With General Motors. Garden City: Doubleday, 1964.

Sperling, Daniel and Deborah Gordon. Two Billion Cars: Driving Towards Sustainability. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Theory, Culture & Society 21:4/5 (2004), special issue on "Automobilities.”

Vanderbilt, Tom. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). London: Penguin, 2009.

Volti, Rudy. Cars and Culture: The Story of a Technology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Wolfe, Joel. Autos and Progress: The Search for Brazilian Modernity. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and DanielRoss. The Machine That Changed the World: How Lean Production Revolutionized the Global Car Wars. New York: Scribner, 1990.