The Car: The Rise and Fall of the Machine that Made the Modern World

This book “The Car” is a wonderful narrative of the rise and gradual erosion of the importance of a machine that shaped the modern world.

The book is written by a bona fide automobile enthusiast Bryan Appleyard but in this well-balanced study, he also assays the ills that car culture has wrought.

This book is not just a history of the automobile; it is also a vibrant portrait of an age, a stimulating work of scholarship, and a top-notch example of nonfiction storytelling. The combination of the author’s propulsive writing style and journalistic thoroughness makes for compelling reading, particularly the technological, cultural, and aesthetic critiques he brings to bear. The author evaluates the contributions of every significant figure in the evolution of the car, from its beginnings in France and England to today’s promising electric and autonomous vehicle technologies, along with analyses of the ecological and societal costs this new era portends.

Because the U.S. dominated the industry for much of its history, two men receive

in-depth, and highly revealing, character studies: “Henry Ford was one of the two inventors of the core features of twentieth-century modernity. He invented and refined mass production and thereby created a mass market of consumers; Alfred Sloan at General Motors invented and refined the techniques of marketing to the masses. In their hands cars remade the world.” It is hard to imagine a more complete study of the automobile, albeit with an ominous coda.

Bryan Appleyard warns that an “autonomous” future for the car, for all its benefits, will be the death knell of the joys of driving—and perhaps more. If we make the wrong choices, certain freedoms could be lost. “The autonomous cars will not in fact be autonomous—they will be driven by the cloud…they will cast off the capricious exigencies of human control and surrender to the demands of government or corporate clouds.”