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1. The "New Look" in Cars (Reader's Digest, February, 1949)
The new cars are bigger, more luxurious; they are also more complicated, less sturdy, unhandier and costlier to run and repair.
Condensed from "Advertising & Selling," January, 1949
By Charlton Ogburn, Jr.
The 1949 motorcar is less an automobile than a land yacht, designed not to meet the needs of the consumer but, presumably, for the showroom and four-color advertisements. Let us suppose I can get a new car at list price. All I need is a four-passenger car. But I must buy a six-passenger model at a cost of approximately --a car big enough to hold a fashion designer and two portly business executives on the front seat and three girls in shorts on the rear, complete with tennis rackets, golf bags and water skis. Incidentally, I have no piano. Therefore, I do not need a car with a luggange compartment large enough to hold one.
Why, when all I want on the dashboard are five simple, legible instruments, do I have to pay for a plastic extravaganza that would shame a juke box?
When I can scarcely pay essential plumber's bills, all I want is economical and comfortable transportation. There may be motorists eager to pay for an extra half ton of chromium-tube festooning, enameled sheet metal, plated grillwork and bumpers as big as cowcatchers, whose garages will accommodate the distended flanks of the 1949 models and the foot and a half of empty shell at each end of the body. There may be persons who enjoy parking this overblown conveyance. What I object to is the assumption by the automobile makers that in recent years the tastes and spending habits of all Americans have become those of a Sicilian gangster trying to make time with a night-club hostess.
Recently a friend turned in her 1941 Pontiac for one of these new 1949 houseboats. Proudly she drove it up to her garage door. There she stopped. The car was too wide to go in and leave room for the car doors to open. And it was too long if it could be got in. In the end, she had to remove a steel column, andd a new overhead door, eliminate a workbench at the back and an inside staircase leading to quarters over the garage--at a cost of . A nice tidbit on top of an already overpriced car.
To bring down the scandalously high prices of the car market, it has been obvious for three years that maximum production of motorcars would be required. To achieve maximum production, simplicity in design and economical use of materials are essential. Today's cars should be no larger than necessary to meet the needs of the mass of consumers. Every effort should have been made to produce rugged postwar cars, as independent as possible of complicated mechanisms and with all parts readily accessible to the mechanic. Improvements in engineering should have been utilized to the full to decrease gas consumption, not only to save the consumer's money but also in the vital national interest, to stretch our petroleum reserves. Instead, the postwar car is larger and more complicated than ever, a hungrier consumer of steel and other scarce materials, costlier to repair, and more powerful rather than more economical on gas.
Moreover, to replace two fenders on your dream car will cost about . On some cars a bashed fender can be repaired only by cutting away part of the body. It costs money to get a mechanic even to look at some of the vitals that were easy to get at in the older cars.
How long will they last? I suppose no one knows but the makers--who have never been known to stress the durability of passenger cars. On the contrary, the industry's policy is, by continual changes in design, to make the possessor of a two-years-old model feel as if he belonged in the era of William Jennings Bryan. If the increased cost of the postwar car has gone into sturdier construction instead of into feather-touch steering-wheel suspension, self-emptying ash trays that work off the manifold, and sheer bulk, this has yet to be demonstrated.
A couple bought a trailer and a new car to haul it. At the first trailer camp, cluckings of commiseration from old-timers greeted them. The engines of the new cars couldn't stand the strain of pulling a trailer, they were told. The couple heard the same story at the next camp, and the next. One costly repair after another wore them down. Finally they found a sturdy 1936 car and since then they've had peace.
The thing that gives the modern motorcar its grotesque contours, and high price, is "streamlining." Imagine an automobile running upside down, with all the air traps of its under parts exposed to the eye as well as to the air stream, and you will have a fair picture of just how genuine streamlining you are getting. And anyway, I use a car to drive to work, or to the country on the week-ends. I do not contemplate challenging Mr. Campbell on the Utah salt flats. The Society of Automotive Engineers would be amazed to learn how few nights' sleep I lost worrying over my old cars' resistance to the wind.
The designers are craftily alert for small ways in which to make thier products more unhandy. Formerly a hand accelerator on the steering column was standard equipment and a great convenience, particularly in winter starting and on long trips when one's right foot got cramped. It was eliminated in the early '30's, presumably because as a strictly utilitarian instrument it marred the decor with its suggestion of sordid purpose. The hand accelerator is now on the market again, but as an extra at a cost of about . The visor, which disappeared in 1931 when windshields began to be tilted, has also come back as an extra. It will set you back .
Having for years turned out cars in which the driver's field of vision was increasingly reduced, the designers have, it is true, given in to the desire on the part of some eccentrics to see where they are going. The added height of windows and windshields has, however, been achieved by constructing a lower-slung chasis. Consequently, when navigating a high-crowned country road or pushing through snow, you had much better get out and walk.
I know from experience that small British cars are far easier to park and handle in traffic than our own; are much more economical with respect to gas, oil, grease, tires, antifreeze and repainting; and are generally more satisfactory for all but cross-country driving. Americans by the thousands are buying them despite their greater proportionate cost. If American manufacturers can turn out a luxury cruiser for , they could sell us a car better adapted to our needs for two thirds of that, with upkeep reduced far below current cost.
In nature, an evolutionary process is difficult to reverse once it has gone too far. Automobile manufacturers might consider the case of the Irish elk, whose antlers grew so enormous it could no longer navigate, and hence perished. I particularly invite their attention to the fate of that supreme example of streamlined bulk and power, the brontosaurus.
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