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As cultural symbols go, the American car is quite young. The Model T Ford was built at the Piquette Plant in Michigan a century ago, with the first rolling off the assembly line on September 27, 1908. Only 11 cars were produced the next month. But eventually Henry Ford would build 15 million “tin lizzies” (“any colour, so long as it’s black”).
Modern America was born on the road, behind a wheel. The car forged some of the most enduring elements of American culture: the roadside diner, the billboard, the motel, even the hamburger. For most of the last century, the automobile represented what it meant to be American: going forward at high speed to find new worlds. The road novel, the road movie, these are quintessential American ideas, born of abundant petrol, cheap cars and a never-ending interstate system, the largest public works project in history.
In 1928 Herbert Hoover imagined an America with “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage”. Ford Motion Pictures, once the largest film producer in the world, churned out more than 3,000 movies extolling the thrill of driving. James Dean drove a Mercury, Steve McQueen a Mustang. Charger, Blazer, Javelin: the names reflected a society that hurtled onward, never looking back, as the car transformed America from a farm-based society into an industrial giant. The love affair continues. The US now has far more cars than garages. There are 204 million registered cars, trucks and SUVs, but only 191 million drivers.
The cars that drove the American Dream have helped to create a global ecological nightmare. Europe’s appetite for oil has been restrained by high petrol taxes, small cars and more efficient public transport. In America, by contrast, demand for oil has grown by 22 per cent since 1990.
The extraordinary worldwide rise of the middle class and the demand for an American lifestyle, of which car ownership is a key component, has fuelled a staggering boom. By 2050, perhaps a decade earlier, China will have 130 million cars; Moscow’s roads were built for 30,000 vehicles; the city now has three million; India is planning the mass-production of a four-seater car that will cost $2,500.
The horrors of excessive energy consumption (of which cars are only one part), associated climate change, dwindling biodiversity and population growth are detailed in Hot, Flat and Crowded, a new book by the American writer Thomas L. Friedman. As the title suggests, Friedman fears the worst, but unlike so many books about the changing environment he also hopes for the best. His book is not about hand-wringing, slowing economic growth, moral censure or a radical change in lifestyles, but about harnessing American expertise, ingenuity and cash to the next great industrial revolution – finding solutions to the energy crisis that make economic sense.
Friedman points out that the green economy is a huge investment opportunity, and a chance to reassert American national strength. “The ability to design, build and export green technologies for producing clean electrons, clean water, clean air and healthy and abundant food is going to be the currency of power in the Energy Climate Era – not the only one, but right up there with computers, microchips, information technologies and planes and tanks.”
The imperative here is avowedly patriotic: “Green is the new red, white and blue.”