Whither the American Automobile – Aaron Robinson

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. Midwest towns such as Flint, Michigan; and Kenosha, Wisconsin; once pulsed with industry and employment thanks to their lucky selection as the location of major auto plants. No other country rivaled the U.S. for automobile output. On one Thursday in April 1955, Chevrolet Motor Division set a one-day industry production record of 7,902 cars and 2,178 trucks, utilizing 33 million pounds of steel, 50,400 tires, 1.7 million pounds of paint, 27 million gallons of water, and 650 tons of coal. Parked nose to tail, the vehicles would have formed a line 35 miles long. Manufactured by just one of the five brands of one American automaker on one day. 

In Eisenhower’s time, we were pretty sure what an American car was, though it had taken decades to reach that point. The motorized vehicles that first crawled up from the primordial stew of the buggy and bicycle industries were fairly standardized across the world for about the first 30 years of the automobile. When the French first moved their engines from under the seats to behind brass grilles at the front of the car, so did the British, Germans, Italians, and Americans. Ditto with the arrival of windshields, canvas roofs, and electric lights and starters. 

The fledgling automobile also began to separate from the carriage and develop its own unique design language. Tall grilles, long hoods, low rooflines, and large wheels were pioneered by early independent coachbuilders like Brewster & Co. of New York as totems for speed, power, and prestige, and these attributes remained core design currency for a century. Then, during the Great Depression, the American car began to substantially diverge from both its own roots and from its continental cousins. Annual model changes, a uniquely American phenomenon, were initiated to keep the automobile at the pointy tip of fashion and give the customer a reason to trade in. A car from 1930 thus had more in common with a car from 1910 than it had with one from 1939. 

Independents had been the main sources of fresh design thinking to that point, but major automakers began developing their own in-house styling departments. Chrysler gambled heavily on the radical, innovation-packed 1934 Airflow, an aerodynamic stunner that melded the fenders and body into one harmonious unit and pioneered unitized construction. Too expensive and avant garde for the public, the Airflow was a disastrous sales flop, but engineers and designers everywhere got out their tracing paper. Even Toyota credits the Airflow, examples of which were purchased by the Japanese royal household, with inspiring the design of its first production car, the AA, in 1936.  

Airflow-style streamlining was ubiquitous by 1940 in a nation obsessed with speed. That year, GM promoted Harley J. Earl, the 47-year-old head of its Art & Color department and the son of a Los Angeles car customizer, into the newly created position of corporate vice president for design. Earl became the de facto arbiter of vehicular fashion for a generation, by virtue of GM’s then massive share of the U.S. market.  

Some would say his greatest contribution to the American automotive landscape was the tailfin. Though it was really one of his underlings, Frank Hershey, who took cues from the twin-tailed Lockheed P-38 fighter and sculpted two rounded protrusions onto the haunches of the 1948 Cadillac. Division general manager Nicholas Dreystadt is said to have hated them, and comedian Jack Benny joked on his popular radio program that the new Cadillacs looked like two salmon swimming upstream. But the public swooned and a fad was born.

Even Enzo Ferrari slapped fins and chrome on some of his cars, as the style came to epitomize the post-war American success and optimism envied by so many around the world. If American cars offered anything unique in this period besides their size and fuel appetites, it was their relentless optimism, which reflected a country that was at its optimistic apogee. No, you couldn’t buy jetpacks and flying saucers yet, but you could get a taste of tomorrow in your car. 

The euphoria didn’t last, of course. What American Motors designer Dick Teague later derided as “the golden age of gorp” came to a sudden end on October 4, 1957. While Americans had been pasting decorative fins and chrome rockets onto its cars, the Russians had built a real rocket capable of launching a satellite called Sputnik. Tailfins became a cultural wedge issue. 

Louis B. Wright, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., disdained what he called “American tailfin culture” in his annual report on the state of American intellectualism. “In 1957 we reached the ultimate in vulgarity when our engineers lavished their best efforts on the backsides of motor cars,” he wrote. “There is some doubt whether we deserve to survive.” Meanwhile, conservative pundits such as syndicated columnist Alice Widener fired back against the “socialist-minded propagandists,” arguing that if Americans wanted tailfins on their cars, they should have them. 

If all this sounds eerily familiar more than six decades later, so should the conclusion of the editors of Alabama’s Montgomery Observer, who wrote in a 1960 editorial: “The tail-fin was horrid, but as a symbol of American decadence and ostentation, it infuriated the middle-class snobs, and that made it a satisfying national asset.” Or, in the parlance of our own time, tailfins owned the libs. 

Either way, the tailfin was dead and sensibility and straight lines lay ahead as Detroit moved into the 1960s determined to follow architecture’s shift away from rococo fakery and towards the clean shapes we associate with the midcentury epoch. GM had only recently opened its new technical center in Warren, Michigan, a midcentury masterwork designed by Eero Saarinen with floor-to-ceiling glass walls, floating stairways, polished guywires and geometric reflecting ponds. The cars that poured forth from it were likewise square and spare. 

Over in Dearborn, where tailfins had never really dazzled Ford’s conservative gatekeepers, the Rotunda design dome, a famous art deco edifice erected in 1934, caught fire and burned, perhaps finally releasing the oppressive spirit of Henry Ford to the great beyond. The elegantly cool 1961 Lincoln Continental, also known as the Kennedy Lincoln, looked about as much like its chrome-festooned predecessor as a swan resembles a platypus. 

Everything was tried in the 1960s: Rear-mounted engines in Corvairs, overhead cams in Pontiacs, aluminum engines in Buicks, turbine engines in Chryslers. John DeLorean, running Pontiac engineering in 1963 and sensing that America’s teeming youth would want horsepower when they got their licenses, thought it would be a good idea to drop Pontiac’s biggest V-8 into its smallest car. Both the Pontiac GTO and the muscle-car era were born.

Back then a confident Detroit was fearless. Every generation of Corvette from the original 1953 C1 up to the 1984 C4 was a stark break from its predecessor. Against today’s cautious incrementalism, each new model was a daring and ground-breaking innovation. The Italians, long celebrated for owning the monopoly on high style, stole just as much from Detroit as Detroit stole (and, also, bought for cash) from them. 

However, creeping up on the American car was a crisis that keen observers had forecast since the early 1960s. If mobile behemoths with roaring V-8s were the hallmarks of the American colossus, the gasoline supply was its vulnerability, and it struck in the fall of 1973. The subsequent gas lines of the ’70s combined with new safety and emissions regulations to squeeze America’s native carmakers, opening the door to a deluge of cheaper imports. 

For the first time in its history, the American automobile industry was on its backfoot. It responded initially by shrinking its cars, shrinking its workforce, and looking abroad for inspiration. But it wasn’t enough to build small economy cars like the Chevy Vega or the Ford Pinto in Ohio or Michigan; the U.S. automakers needed to rethink their entire business model from bumper to bumper. Part of it was streamlining product development by knocking down old silos separating design, engineering, and manufacturing. Part of it was drastically cutting costs, and part of it was embracing new technologies and foreign ideas. 

Ford became the first U.S. automaker to integrate European-style flush headlights on its 1985 Lincoln Continental Mark VII, successfully challenging and rewriting an old federal rule mandating circular 5.75-inch lamps or quad rectangular lamps. The dam broke. Flush became the fashion and, in response to the universal dictates of aerodynamics and safety regulations, all cars started migrating towards a unitary shape resembling polished river stones or half-used soap bars.  

Can you still find any of that old, American fearlessness and optimism in today’s “American” cars? The question is flawed. Cars are a minority of the sales today. What defines an American car in 2025 is largely the full-sized American truck, all 19 feet and 6000 pounds of it. “Longer, lower, wider” has become “longer, taller, and able to tow more than the other guy.” Ford F-150s and Explorers now get the money of people who once bought Tauruses and Grand Marquis, so much so that Ford has completely abandoned the production of cars apart from the Mustang. Meanwhile Cadillac Escalades and Lincoln Navigators have largely booted traditional luxury icons such as the Mercedes-Benz S-Class out of the country club driveway. 

Sleek elegance has been displaced as the essential aesthetic by a kind of hyper utilitarianism, denoted by high ground clearances, blocky bumpers, and bare black-plastic trim over the wheel arches. The faces of these vehicles are contorted into the determined grimaces of rock climbers, the color palettes thick with khakis and other non-metallic earth tones. Americans used to want a Cadillac for the price of a Chevy; now they buy classed up farm trucks and cars that look like hiking shoes.

As it happens, American automakers excel at giving these buyers what they want, from the Ford Bronco to the Jeep Wrangler to the Ram Rebel. Their trucks exude the uber-tough authenticity that is very much in fashion now—and that was never fully achieved by the import brands despite billions in investment (admittedly, the Toyota Tacoma and 4Runner are hot-selling exceptions). Call it smart marketing, call it a stroke of luck, but if there is anything like an impenetrable moat around Detroit, it was dug by trucks. They plainly speak American to Americans, being big in a big country, tough in a nation that is nostalgic for its rugged, pioneering past, and seemingly trustworthy at a time when people are desperate for heroes. 

The essential nature of the American automobile? It’s not embodied by a huge grille or a soaring tailfin or even an eight-foot load floor, but by a mirror, one which we turn upon ourselves. No country has bared its soul so completely through its vehicles, has its 130-year journey with its evolving aspirations and manifest social upheavals so explicitly cataloged in pressed steel, plated chrome, and molded plastic. We think of the Mustang as a masculine muscle car, but it was women entering the workforce in the 1960s and wanting to express their independence that made it a hit. The 1984 Chrysler minivan arrived as boomers were starting their families, and its success launched a genre. 

Meanwhile, the Germans, who are rightly vaunted for their lofty technology, built essentially the same car, the Volkswagen Beetle, for more than 60 years. The British MGB was a sexy fleshpot when it debuted in 1962, an obsolete antique when it finally faded out in 1980. In that time the American car went through countless reinventions, from finned behemoth to front-drive compact, propelled by the changing times.  

The Marlboro Man drives a Chevy because he must. Because his identity and his vehicle are inseparable. Because he is, simply, an American.