At the beginning of the nineteenth century, cars were playthings of the wealthy. Now they speed through every culture, with the total number on the roads climbing to a billion in another decade. The global dependency on automobiles for transportation is no accident. It can be traced to the genius of entrepreneurs like Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan at General Motors, who vastly expanded markets by reducing profit margins, lobbying policy makers, advertising new models, designing cars for “obsolescence,” and destroying alternative forms of transport, such as the electric trolley. The history of the automobile shows how, over several generations, as technologies develop and personal incomes rise, societies can become dependent on a consumer product. It also shows how, subject to little governmental control, this dependency can reorient communities and economies, leaving few to question the costs and risks of the resulting ecological shadows.
The first community’s reaction to the first traffic “accident” is both the beginning of our indifference to the shadow effects of automobiles and a preview of the international community’s reaction to today’s global traffic crisis.
Bridget Driscoll, a rather ordinary woman of her times, could never have imagined her name would appear in so many encyclopedias more than a century after her death. She became a footnote in the history of road traffic when, on a muggy August afternoon in 1896, Arthur Edsall ran her down in front of London’s Crystal Palace in a demonstration “motor-car.” Dr. Charles Edwin Raddock rushed out of the Crystal Palace to assist her. But her brain was “protruding,” and, within moments, she became the very first person ever to die in an automobile “accident.”
The inquest into her death, teeming with barristers and solicitors, probed many questions. Was the car speeding? Was Mr. Edsall reckless? Did he kill Mrs. Driscoll? Was he at fault? Some witnesses felt that Edsall was speeding when he swerved to the right to pass two cars just ahead. Other witnesses, though, felt Mrs. Driscoll was at least partly to blame, becoming confused—“rattled,” in the words of one witness—by her own efforts at “dodging.”
May Driscoll, at her mother’s side at the time of the crash, disputed this, testifying that Mr. Edsall didn’t even seem to know how to drive. Mr. Edsall denied everything, declaring he was neither reckless nor speeding, and swearing he rang the car bell and shouted out to warn Mrs. Driscoll. He wasn’t even sure, he added, how she was knocked over, claiming the car stopped 2-3 inches from her body. The doctor who examined Mrs. Driscoll’s body, however, concluded that the car must have hit her “very severely.”
The coroner, Percy Morrison, listened to this contradictory testimony but, in the end, told the jury they could “come to no other conclusion than the car was properly driven, straight and slowly.” After deliberating for six hours, the jury returned a verdict of “accidental death.” In a legendary, although perhaps apocryphal, statement, the coroner said that he hoped “such a thing would never happen again.”1
Since then, “such a thing” has killed at least 30 million and perhaps as many as 60-90 million people. Currently, traffic collisions, which most of us continue to call “traffic accidents,” on average kill more than 800 people and injure 34,000 every six hours—the time it took the Driscoll jury to return its verdict. And traffic deaths and injuries are rising steadily. Annual deaths are likely to nearly double by 2020 as the number of cars and commercial vehicles continues to climb.2
This growth in the number of vehicles is putting a severe strain on the stability of the global environment. The auto industry consumes a major portion of the world’s natural and energy resources. Automobiles also emit carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and particulates into the air, contributing to climate change, acid rain, and unhealthy levels of smog. Even in the United States, with some of the world’s strictest tailpipe emission standards, transportation accounts for a third of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, 15 percent of the nitrous oxide emissions, and 40 percent of the volatile organic compounds.3
Why have automobiles proliferated so? What forces have been changing the environmental and safety standards of passenger cars and trucks over the last 100 years? What is the impact of automobiles on living conditions in developing and developed countries? The answers must begin with the history of how automobiles came to be mass-produced in the United States.
Rise of America’s Auto Culture
Many brilliant minds invented the motorcar—from the fifteenth-century theoretical design by Leonardo da Vinci of a self-powered vehicle to the first gasoline-powered automobile built by engineer Karl Benz in 1886. Until the year Bridget Driscoll died, motorcars were built methodically, each one different, at great expense. Then, in 1896, the American Duryea Motor Wagon Company built 13 nearly identical Motor Wagons. This was the beginning of mass production of automobiles.
After opening his Highland Park plant in 1910 Michigan, Henry Ford took mass production much further, developing an increasingly efficient moving assembly line, which would churn out millions of Model T Fords in the decades to come. It took Ford 13,000 workers to produce 260,720 cars in 1914, while it took the rest of the industry 66,350 workers to produce 286,770 cars—or about five times as many workers to produce basically the same number of cars. Prices began to plummet after the first Model T was sold in 1908—from about $850 in 1910 to $360 in 1916 to $260 in 1921—and, before long, as Ford lowered the price of his Model T to half that of most competitors, the average American worker could afford a car.4
Ford strove at every turn to cut costs and increase net profits, working from the principle of low profit margins on ever higher sales volumes. As he lowered his prices to increase his market share, profit per car fell from $220 in 1909 to $99 in 1914, the year he introduced a minimum wage of $5 for an eight-hour day for his factory workers. He did this, not because he was a socialist, as some were hollering at the time, but to decrease the high turnover of workers at his factory and thus save on hiring and training. “The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day,” Henry Ford explained afterward, “was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made.”5 The results were nothing less than spectacular. Sales soared and with them overall profits, doubling from $30 million to $60 million from 1914 to 1916.
In 1916, the year sales surpassed 500,000, an average Ford assembly line worker could buy a Model T with less than 3 months’ wages. By 1920, over half of the world’s cars were Model Ts, and, by 1925, an average American worker—not just a Ford worker—could buy one with less than 3 months’ wages. By 1924, the Highland Park plant had rolled out 10 million Model Ts; by 1927, when production ended, the number had reached 15 million.
The American car culture began to form during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The first speeding ticket was issued in 1902. The first car was stolen in 1905. Painted center lines appeared by 1911; stop signs and traffic lights by 1914, the year after more cars were made than horse buggies. By the time car radios first appeared in 1929, there was one registered automobile for every five Americans—up from one for every thirteen in 1920.6 With so many cars came the demand for more streets and highways. The U.S. Federal Highway Act of 1921 subsidized state highway departments; meanwhile, states began to impose gasoline taxes to finance new roads. The network of roads spread rapidly. Rising car sales became a sign of economic prosperity and, by association, effective political management. In the 1920s alone, the number of passenger cars registered in the United States nearly tripled, from 8 million to 23 million.7
Automobile sales in the United States slowed during the Great Depression of the 1930s and World II in the 1940s. Nevertheless, the United States remained at the core of the global auto industry. Around 25 million motor vehicles (cars, trucks, and buses) were registered in 1934, some 70 percent of the global total. By 1937, the number had climbed to nearly 30 million, still around 70 percent of the global total. The number of passenger cars, trucks, and buses in the United States grew only slightly over the next decade, from about 32 million in 1940 to 33 million in 1946.8 Sales took off again, however, in the 1950s, partly because middle-class families left the cities for the new suburbs, which had poor or no public transportation. “The automobile,” in the words of economist Richard Porter, “made suburbia possible, and the suburbs made the automobile essential.”9
By 1950, the number of registered vehicles had risen to 49 million. Drivers began to travel longer distances, especially after the 1956 National System of Interstate and Defense Highways Act funded a 40,000-mile web of free interstate highways. Everything to do with cars—whether production, advertising, renting, selling, or driving—continued to grow from the 1950s onward, becoming an ever greater part of the U.S. economy. The rise in the sheer number of vehicles is indicative. In 1960, nearly 74 million motor vehicles were registered; by 1965, the number had surpassed 90 million.10 In 1970, some 108 million motor vehicles were registered in the United States (89 million passenger cars and 19 million trucks and buses), or roughly one vehicle for every two Americans. Although it now accounted for only 44 percent of total registrations worldwide—a sizable decrease from the 70 percent share in the mid-1930s—the United States was still by far the largest national market.11
The number of cars, trucks, and buses registered in the United States continued to climb through the 1970s and 1980s—from about 133 million in 1975 to 156 million in 1980 to 172 million in 1985 to 188 million by 1991—when one out of every seven workers was somehow linked to automobiles. The largest television advertising expenditure in 1990 was on automobiles (17.6 percent of the total). Just the production of automobiles alone accounted for 3.3 percent of America’s gross national product (GNP) in 1991.12
The number of registered vehicles rose through the 1990s, surpassing 200 million in 1995 and 213 million in 2000.13 By 1998, the U.S. automotive sector was spending more than $14 billion on advertising alone, ranking first in advertising outlays, ahead of the general retail sector at $11.6 billion and the movie and media sector at $4.1 billion.14 The United States had become, with only a touch of hyperbole, a mad car culture by the end of the twentieth century.
Half of Americans now live in suburbs, where motor vehicles are the primary mode of transportation, as, indeed, they are even in the cities. Public transit accounts for only 2 percent of all urban trips (compared to 7 percent in Canada and 10 percent in western Europe). Even today, with over 230 million registered passenger cars and commercial vehicles for less than one-twentieth of the global population, the United States accounts for over one-quarter of the world’s total number of automobiles. Most families own two or more vehicles; private motor vehicles outnumber driver’s licenses. Americans consume, as a result, over 40 percent of the world’s annual production of gasoline. And the current trend is toward larger, heavier, less fuel-efficient vehicles, with sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) and other light trucks now accounting for nearly half of all vehicle purchases—a reflection, in part, of generous federal business tax deductions in recent years. SUVs and light trucks now constitute over 40 percent of the total U.S. vehicle population.15
Moreover, each car, SUV, and light truck in the United States tends to travel farther than in many other countries—10 percent farther, on average, than in the United Kingdom, around 50 percent farther than in Germany, and nearly 200 percent farther than in Japan. The total distance cars travel in the United States exceeds the combined total distance traveled by cars in all other developed countries. Thus cars and light trucks, which account for about 40 percent of American oil use, are a core source of global carbon emissions, contributing about the same amount as the entire Japanese economy.
Americans spend hundreds of billions of dollars on buying and operating these cars—on fuel, tires, tolls, registration fees, insurance, and repairs. These direct costs, moreover, are just a portion of total societal costs. Taxpayers subsidize motor vehicles with free parking spaces, roadwork, bridges, traffic enforcement, environmental cleanup, and the procurement of oil. To this must be added the financial costs of traffic collisions. At a rate of nearly one collision every three seconds, and 300 deaths or injuries every hour, the total costs of traffic collisions—from medical treatment to insurance to disability to police and legal services—exceeded $230 billion ($820 per person) in 2002.16
Cars have become “essential” in the United States for many reasons. Thanks in part to advertisers, owning a car has come to mean independence, success, and status; it also evokes coming of age, a desire for speed, a sense of adventure and romance. But cars have also become “essential” because they are in fact a necessary, or at least a highly convenient, part of everyday life in the United States, whether to commute between home and work, run errands, transport children, or take the family on weekend outings.
Such dependency on the automobile is not accidental. The true genius of entrepreneurs like Henry Ford—who died in 1947 worth $1 billion, ranking as one of the wealthiest business people of all time—was making money by expanding markets with low profit margins and high sales volumes. New markets arose in part because more workers wanted—and could now afford—a car and because government policies put in place the infrastructure to support more cars. Other creative entrepreneurs, like Alfred Sloan, president and later chairman of the board of General Motors from 1923 to 1956, expanded markets with strategies like “planned obsolescence,” which encourages customers to upgrade to a new model every few years. Sloan stimulated consumption as well by introducing “style” into automobiles, selling models with differing features and offering credit to buyers. Such entrepreneurs also expanded markets by destroying, or at least contributing to the decay of, other modes of transportation—in particular, the trolley (electric streetcar).
The trolley was cheap and convenient in many U.S. cities at the turn of the twentieth century. Nearly every city of 25,000 or more had trolleys by 1900. Passengers took some two billion trolley trips in 1890. Just 30 years later, the number of trips had jumped to 15.5 billion a year. The trolley by 1920 was, according to historian Mark Foster, “the chief mode of transit for nearly all classes and ages: businessmen commuting to their offices; industrial workers going to factory jobs; housewives on family errands; and children traveling to and from school.”17 Trolleys from the 1920s onward went into decline for a host of reasons. Some trolley systems were mismanaged by shortsighted, incompetent, or corrupt executives. Some went bankrupt, unable to adjust to the changing needs of local economies, and unable to combat the convenience and increasing affordability of cars.
Yet automakers also targeted the transit systems. One infamous example became evident in the 1949 legal case of the U.S. government versus National City Lines. A holding company formed by General Motors (GM), Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tire and Rubber, National City Lines set about acquiring transit firms in over 40 cities. It then demolished the trolley lines and replaced the trolleys with GM buses, which ran on Firestone tires. The federal court in Chicago found General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tire and Rubber guilty of antitrust violations. Other firms in the automotive sector undercut transit firms by granting exclusive (and sometimes illegal) supplier contracts, by providing financial and technical assistance to municipalities to switch from rail to road transit systems, and by lobbying and financing supportive politicians. The result was the loss of rail transit systems—like the 1,100-mile Pacific Electric Red Car System in Los Angeles and Orange Counties—and the increasing reliance of individuals and economies on cars and buses. Over 90 percent of America’s trolley system was dismantled by the 1950s.18
It’s too simple to depict the victory of autos and buses over rail transit systems as a corporate-government conspiracy. Many cases exist where local governments in the United States have supported rail transit systems. And in a few cases, too, public protests have blocked the growth of road systems since the late 1950s (for example, when citizen groups halted freeway construction in San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, D.C.). Yet, as sociologists Peter Freund and George Martin write, the reality is not far off a conspiracy for a simple reason: “The auto-industrial complex is monied and quite influential; the interest groups that oppose it are considerably less monied and less influential.”19
As the previous sections have shown, the American auto market has continued to expand since the days of National City Lines. So have the auto markets of western Europe and Japan, where governments and firms similarly promote the growth of automobile consumption. The three markets, although slowly declining as a percentage of the global share, still account for around 50 percent of global production of motor vehicles and about 65 percent of registered motor vehicles.20 As chapter 4 will document, however, these markets have also been changing in other ways over the last half century, ways that include adopting much higher environmental and safety standards.