Car Cultures

Perhaps more than any other commodity or “thing,” cars have been linked to the emergence and development of consumer societies. There are two reasons for this: first, the car or automobile appeared as a new and distinct object of individual consumption just as modern consumer culture was becoming established; and second, the car has led in the transition from being an object whose standardized [Page 134]mass production helped shape the economy of modern societies to being one whose variety and appeal to individual choice transformed it into a consumer society. David Gartman describes this history by showing how the early car culture of leisure for the very rich who could afford handbuilt machines was transformed into a protoconsumer culture by Henry Ford's mass produced Model T. By controlling all aspects of the process of making the car, by using a moving production line, and by employing unskilled labor on relatively high wages to operate preset machine tools (e.g., drilling jigs for the engine block), Ford was able to turn out a large number of cars, each selling for a price affordable by those, such as farmers, salesmen, commercial representatives, who would use them for work as well as leisure. The Model T was cheap partly because of standardization; each one was exactly the same. But the high cost of the machine tools needed to be recouped over many years, so the Model T remained fundamentally unchanged between 1909 and 1927. Ford famously offered “any colour … as long as it is black” because black was the only enamel color that remained consistent after being cooked in an oven to dry it quickly (Gartman 1994, 45–46).

If Ford introduced mass production and a standardized product available at an affordable price, his competitors, especially Alfred Sloan's General Motors, began to offer variety in design with different marques and models that changed annually. New features were introduced in the top ranges and then spread to cheaper marques in following years. The setting up of a design studio under Harley Earl brought the sophisticated styling of the early French limousines to the mass-produced car; the Cadillac La Salle of 1927 demonstrated the lines of an aesthetic rather than an engineering imagination in a factory-produced car. No longer were cars simply about what a standardized machine tool could stamp out but became objects that stimulated the imagination, with chrome features and streamlining that emulated fantastic air or space vehicles. Instead of social status accruing from simply having a car, it was now linked to which type of car and how new it was. Unlike clothes that are limited in their visibility by the size of the wearer's body, and unlike houses that are stuck in one place, the car is a mobile symbol of prosperity and taste that is difficult for others to ignore. The car became a visible indicator of identity as size, styling, features, color, and engine tone provided a system of signs that could be associated with class, age, gender, and even personality.

The system of marques and models became readily available to the culture at large through advertisements and commentary in magazines and the press that reinforced the visible signs of function and style of the vehicles on the roads. Roland Barthes distinguished two codes for cars in the industrialized countries, the “domestic” (the standard family sedan that varied in size) and the “sporty” (the two-seater sports car that varied in performance). Each model appeals more or less to each code in a system that continues today, although both codes combine in a variety of hybrid models (the sports sedan, the coupe, etc.) reaching an extreme convergence in the ostentation value provided by the sports utility vehicle so popular in the late 1990s. The domestic/sporty code does not operate in rural economies, especially in eastern and southern areas of the world, where the predominant family vehicle is the pickup truck or even the low-powered motorbike. And in the industrialized urban world, a new code of frugality and restraint to do with the microcar and alternative fuels threatens the domestic/sporty system of car culture. Barthes recognized that social status could be expressed through the way a car was driven as well as its material form. An embodied relationship with the car, including the way it is adapted and modified (whether with added spoilers outside or accumulated rubbish inside), asserts the identity of its owner. The style of driving—how and when power and braking are applied, how lights and indicators are used to communicate with other road users, how road space is given up and when it is grabbed—becomes an emotional expression of individuality, according to Jack Katz.

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