Car-Free Family

Because I grew up in a family that never owned a car, I probably come to this seminar with a completely different perspective of automobile ownership than those of my classmates. My father is a retired artist who worked for forty-eight years as a map maker at The National Survey, which was located around the corner from our family’s house. My mom worked at both the local elementary school and at a micro-printing business, both of which are located within easy walking distance from our home.

As I read Auto Mania, I found myself proud of my parents for being able to comfortably exist and have a fully-functional family without the benefits of a family car. As children growing up in the 1960s, my sister, two brothers, and I never felt the least bit slighted by the fact that we had no car. Tom McCarthy describes the general feeling in the 1930s regarding a man who doesn’t own his own automobile in this way, “To be without an automobile was increasingly a form of public nakedness in which a man, as one commentator put it, “ran the risk of being singled out among his fellows…as either hopelessly poor or perversely out of the swim”(53). I also realized that my family contributed nothing to the environmentally damaging results of automobile use, at least not directly.

As Alex wrote in his post, I was surprised to read of how much thought was given to the amount of waste created and the environmental impact of automobile production and use. I was always under the impression that there was little, if any, thought given to this during the early years of the auto industry.
Henry Ford was impressive with the way he ran his company in the early years. I was left feeling that Ford was a man of integrity that was determined to give the working man the most value possible in his automobiles.
Another man that I found to be impressive was GM president, Ed Cole. Cole’s adamant championing of catalytic converters was a shining example of a high-level executive that truly understood the problems that we were facing as a result of our unquenchable thirst for the automobile. McCarthy writes, “No Detroit executive played a more important role in forcing the industry to reduce smog-causing emissions” (178). Ed Cole was the kind of executive that the automobile industry is undoubtedly in short supply of these days. “He was just magnificent,” GM’s Joe Colucci recalled. Ford’s (James C.) Gagliardi agreed. “He did what I was hoping we at Ford would have done, and had the balls to do it” (192).

It’s both interesting and disturbing that the Big Three felt they were above the government regulations and consistently found themselves behind the foreign automakers in the areas of mileage and low emissions.
While reading the beginning of the book, I was surprised to see where we, as a society, refused to take heed of what we were told by experts regarding the impact of the manufacturing, use, and disposal of the automobile. I find it disheartening that we have presently, at least until the recent economic downturn, once again embraced the larger, more environmentally unfriendly SUVs. Will we ever learn?