The blight of cars

I hate cars.

Pollution

Cars emit vast amounts of toxic fumes, poisoning passersby and making our cities hellholes of pollution.

Due to the increase in the use of private cars, road traffic pollution is considered a major threat to clean air in the UK and other industrialised countries. Traffic fumes contain harmful chemicals that pollute the atmosphere. Road traffic emissions produce greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. (Road Traffic and pollution)

Destruction

The post-war obsession with cars led councils and developers to rip the historic hearts out of most English cities and towns, creating inhumane, alienating and polluted labyrinths of urban freeways with urine-drenched concrete subways as an afterthought for the humble pedestrian.

Death

Cars kill people, lots of people.

According to the World Health Organisation, more than 1.25 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes, and injuries from road traffic accidents are the leading cause of death among people aged between 15 and 29 years of age. (Road accident casualties in Britain and the world)

Cars killed childhood

Lastly, the number one concern of most parents of small children isn’t paedophiles or internet porn, it’s that their kids might be run over by traffic. (Play England website) That explains why parents don’t let their kids play in the street as they did in the halcyon past, but prefer to keep them safely inside. Which contributes to lack of exercise and growth of obesity among children, as well as adversely affecting children’s mental health. Car culture, in other words, killed childhood.

Personally, I think cars should be banned, period.

Cars: Accelerating the Modern World at the Victoria and Albert Museum

This is a dazzling exhibition celebrating the rise and rise of cars which shows how they are not just machines for getting from A to B but were, right from the start, spurs to all kinds of other industries, helping to create:

• countless aspects of industrial and commercial design, from instrument panels to ergonomic chairs
• innovations in industrial production, specifically the assembly line techniques pioneered at the Ford car plant in Detroit
• entire new areas of engineering relating to roads and then to motorways, the construction of stronger road bridges, flyovers, ring roads etc using the new materials of concrete and tarmac
• an explosion of consumer accessories from safety hats and goggles to driving coats and gloves all the way up to modern Satnavs
• as well as providing a mainstay for the advertising industry for over a hundred years
• and becoming a dominating feature of popular culture in films, novels and much more

The car is, when you stop to consider it, arguably the central product of the twentieth century, the defining artifact of our civilisation (and, in my jaundiced view, a perfect symbol of our society’s relentless drive to excess consumption, ruinous pollution and global destruction.)

They promised us the freedom of the road, instead we got day-long traffic jams on 12-lane highways, toxic air pollution, and over a million dead every year. This photo shows congestion blocking the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway

The car has transformed how we move around, how we design and lay out our cities and towns, it has transformed our psychologies and imaginations. As one of the curators explains:

“The V&A’s mission is to champion the power of design to change the world, and no other design object has impacted the world more than the automobile. This exhibition is about the power of design to effect change, and the unintended consequences that have contributed to our current environmental situation.

Structure of the show

This exhibition is brilliantly laid out. You progress through a labyrinthine serpentine curve of cases displaying over 250 artefacts large and small, and studded by no fewer than 15 actual cars, from one of the first ever built to a ‘popup’ car of the future.

Photo of the Benz patent motor car, model no. 3, 1888. Image courtesy of Daimler

The exhibition is immensely informative, with sections and sub-sections devoted to every aspect of cars, their design, manufacture, the subsidiary industries and crafts they support, the global oil industry, and car cultures around the world, it really is an impressively huge and all-embracing overview.

But the thing that made the impact on me was the films.

I counted no fewer than 35 films running, from little black-and-white documentaries showing on TV-sized monitors, through to clips of Blade Runner and Fifth Element on large screens.

There’s the iconic car chase from Bullitt on a very big screen hanging from the ceiling and then an enormous, long, narrow, gallery-wide screen which was showing three long, slow and beautifully shot films of landscapes which have been impacted by the car – a complicated freeway junction in Japan, oil fields in central California, and the ‘lithium triangle’ in Chile, between Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, where lithium is extracted for battery production a vast expanse of flat desert which is being mined to produce lithium and its landscape converted into a colourful patchwork of slag and beautiful blue purification reservoirs.

At both the start and the end of the show are totally immersive films which are projected on screens from floor to ceiling, the first one a speeded-up film of a car journey through London, projected onto three split screens; the final experience in the show is standing in front of a shiny round little Pop-Up Next car around which stretches a curved screen onto which is projected a montage of car disaster imagery, including car crashes, road rage incidents, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, Jimmy Carter telling us about the energy crisis, which gets louder and faster and more intense until it collapses into a high speed blur of colour. And looming over us, the viewers, I realised after a while, is an enormous drone hanging from the ceiling and looking down on us like one of H.G. Wells’s conquering Martians.

Cars Exhibition, 19th November 2019

All very trippy and intense and sense-bombarding. If you fancy a quiet exhibition, this is not it, sound from all the films is playing at once and, given the subject matter, they are almost all dynamic and fast-moving.

The exhibition is divided into three parts although the continuous serpentine journey past the display cases and films isn’t divided, as in a ‘normal’ gallery, into ‘rooms’.

1. ‘Going Fast’

The exhibition with records of all the gee-whizz visions of a perfect techno future which the car has been lined with throughout its history, with lots of illustrations from magazines and sci fi stories, clips from movies predicting flying cars such as Blade Runner or The Fifth Element. On a massive projector screen right at the start is playing Key To the Future, a film made by General Motors for their 1956 Motorama car show.

This was just one of a series of Firebird concept cars produced by General Motors. Interestingly, the design was inspired by the new jet fighter planes which had just started flying, and the cars copied the jets’ fluid silhouettes, cockpit seats and gas turbine engines designed to reach 200mph. they weren’t actually sold but were produced as experiments in function and design. And to thrill the public at motor shows with exciting visions of hands-free driving.

One feature of these designs for future cars was that a number of them were Russian, from Soviet-era drawings of an ideal communist future. It’s worth noting that the curators have made an effort to get outside the Anglosphere. Unavoidably most of the footage and technology is from America, with a healthy amount about the British car industry, and then sections about Fiat in Italy and Citroen in France.

But the V&A have gone out of their way to try and internationalise their coverage and they commissioned a series of films about car culture in five other parts of the world including one on South African ‘spinners’ (who compete to be able to spin cars very fast in as small a circle as possible), California low-riders, Emirati dune racers in the Middle East, and Japanese drivers of highly decorated trucks. As well as a section towards the end about the ‘Paykan’, a popular people’s car heavily promoted in Iran in the early 1970s which became a symbol of modernity and affluence.

Installation view of Cars at the Victoria and Albert Museum showing an Iranian Paykan on the left, a desert-crossing Auto-Chenille by Citroën in the centre, and a funky bubble car on the right. Note the massive projection screen at the back displaying a panoramic film of oil fields in central California

The section continues with the first-ever production car, the Benz Patent Motorwagen 3, introduced to the public in 1888, and the futuristic Tatra T77 from the Czech Republic, which was designed in the 1920s by Paul Jaray, the man who developed the aerodynamics of airships.

French advertisement for the Tatra 77 (1934)

There’s a whole section about the founding and development of car races, from the Daytona track in Florida, to Brooklands race track in Surrey, both accompanied, of course, by vintage film footage. They explain how the British Gordon Bennett Cup prompted the French to invent the Grand Prix in 1906. There’s racing against other cars, but also, of course, the successive attempts to break the land speed record which attracted great publicity from the 1920s, through the 30s, 40s and 50s.

Britain First Always – Buy British, UK (1930s) Artwork by R. Granger Barrett

And there’s a feminist section of the show which focuses solely on the great women car drivers who appeared at Brooklands such as Camille du Gast from France and Dorothy Levitt, and Jill Scott Thomas who became an important symbol of the women’s rights movement.

There’s a gruesome life-size sculpture of a man named ‘Graham’, which shows what shape a human being would have to be to withstand a car collision. Graham was commissioned last year by The Transport Accident Commission in Victoria, Australia to demonstrate human vulnerability in traffic accidents, and made by Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini in collaboration with leading trauma surgeon Christian Kenfield and crash investigation expert Dr David Logan.

Graham: what humans ought to look like to optimise their chances of surviving a car crash

2. ‘Making More’

The second section is devoted to the manufacturing of cars and focuses heavily on the range of innovations in manufacturing pioneered at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit as early as 1913. There are models of the factory, black and white film footage of conveyor belts, unexpected footage of meat processing plants where Ford worked as a young man and which the car plants were to some extent modelled on, photos and sketches of all aspects of the production line along with a list of the very tough rules and regulations Ford imposed on his workers.

Sure, they were paid double what they could earn at other factories (a whopping $5) but the stress of staying in one place performing the same function for 12 hours a day, with no smoking or talking and strictly regulated loo breaks took its tool: many workers developed psychological illnesses, many just quit.

Ford’s factories were designed by the architect Albert Kahn who pioneered an entirely new construction space that allowed for larger, more flexible workspaces, a design which quickly spread around the world, for example at Fiat’s Lingotto factory. There are floorplans, architects’ designs, models and photos of all this twentieth century innovation, plus the animated feature Symphony in F celebrating the complex supply chains Ford had established which was shown at the 1933 ‘Century of Progress’ Chicago World’s Fair.

By contrast one wall is filled with some immense film projections of a modern, almost totally-automated BMW car assembly plant in Munich, and there’s a Unimate Robotoc Arm, one of the first robot implements used on a production line as early as 1961 at the General Motors plant in New Jersey The principles are the same but human input, effort and endurance have been almost completely eliminated.

Murals were commissioned to celebrate the wonderful new productiveness of human labour, including the wonderful Detroit Murals by Mexican mural maker Diego Rivera

• Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals by Linda Bank Downs

Production line methods were quickly adopted to a wide range of goods including everything from furniture to architecture, and the speed and rhythms of factory life spread into pop culture, influencing music, dance, fashion and the propaganda of the new totalitarian states.

Hitler, the show reminds us, was a big admirer of Henry Ford, who was himself a noted anti-Semite, and consulted Ford about mass production techniques to help improve German efficiency, which resulted in the remarkably enduring design of the Volkswagen and Hitler’s pioneering Autobahns, but also led the Germans to the efficient mass manufacture of other consumer goods like the Volsempfänger or People’s Radio.

At the other end of the cultural scale, the exhibition includes the ‘production line’ video made in 1965 for the Detroit girl group Martha and the Vandellas song Nowhere To Run To. The Motown Sound which they typified was, after all, named after Motor Town, the town that Henry Ford built up into the centre of the American car industry.

There were to (at least) reactions against production line culture. An obvious one was the creation of powerful unions formed to represent assembly line workers. Following the landmark sit-down strike from 1936 to 1937 in Flint, Michigan, membership of the Union of Automotive Workers grew from 30,000 to 500,000 in one year! Thirty years later, and the exhibition includes some of the posters produced by a Marxist art collective in Paris to support striking car workers during the 1968 mass strikes in France.

But another reaction was against mass production, and in favour of luxury. The Model T meant cars for the masses, but what about cars for the better off? In the 1920s luxury car manufacturers returned to creating bespoke, hand-crafted models, and this triggered a growing market for high-end car accessories. The exhibition includes examples of chic hats and lighters and motoring gloves, all associating the idea of motoring with glamour and luxury (‘To drive a Peugeot is to be in fashion’).

A custom-made Hispano-Suiza Type H6B car from 1922 provides a close-up look at the luxurious and meticulously crafted world of early automotive design.

Hispano-Suiza Type HB6 ‘Skiff Torpedo’. Hispano-Suiza (chassis) Henri Labourdette (body) 1922. Photo by Michael Furman © The Mullin Automotive Museum

Thus the development of mascots on car bonnets, a small symbol which allowed consumers to quietly flaunt their wealth and taste. Thus between 1920 and 1931 French designer René Lalique produced a series of car bonnet ornaments made of glass, which are on display here.

There’s a section devoted to the development of colours, shades and tones, and to the science of producing lacquers and paint which would be durable enough to protect cars in all weathers. Even mass market manufacturers took note and in 1927 General Motors was the first producer to set up an entire department devoted to styling, the ‘Art and Colour Section’. As far back as 1921, under chairman Alfred Sloan, General Motors implemented a policy known as ‘annual model renewal’. Taking its lead from the fashion industry, the cars would be restyled and relaunched annually, with a new look and new colours (although the engineering and motors mostly stayed the same).

And hence the development of extravagant car shows like ‘Motorama’ launched in 1949 by General Motors, an annual series which came to involve celebrity performers, original songs, choreography, models in clothes straight off catwalks, and promotional films.

The ever-growing commercialisation of cars and life in general sparked a backlash in the 1960s and the exhibition explains how the humble VolksWagen became a cheap and cheerful symbol of people who dropped out, adopted alternative lifestyles, and often decorated their VW with hippy images and symbols.

The exhibition features a striking example of a car customised by Tomas Vazquez, a member of the lowrider culture that emerged in Latino communities in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s.

3. ‘Shaping Space’

The final section of the exhibition explores the vast impact of the car on the world’s landscape, nations, and cities. It looks at how the petrol engine beat early electric and steam-powered competitors by promising the ability to travel the world, transforming drivers into individual explorers.

Displays include the first ever Michelin guide published in 1900, a little red book giving tips about where to drive in France – examples of the tremendous artwork Shell commissioned to encourage drivers to get out and explore Britain (the Shell guides), and a look at the special off-road cars called Auto-Chenille by Citroën and created to undertake a publicised treks across Africa and Asia.

This section looks at the vast ramifications and impact of the oil industry around the world, from the early days when it was celebrated as a miracle resource, through the evolution of oil-based products like Tupperware and nylon. There are fascinating maps of oil reserves, films about oil extraction

And then on to the 1970s oil crisis which helped inspire the new environmental movement. There’s footage of a grim-faced president Carter making a TV broadcast to the American people and telling them they have to be more careful how they use their limited resources, ha ha ha, and a poster for the first ever Earth Day, called by new environmental activists for 22 April 1970.

Poster for the first Earth Day, 22 April 1970, designed by Robert Leydenfrost, photography by Don Brewster

So it’ll be Earth Day’s 50th anniversary in a few months. And how well have we looked after the earth in the past 50 years?

Not too well, I think. Most of us have been too busy buying stuff, consuming stuff, competing to have shinier, newer stuff, and top of the list comes a shiny new car. I was amused to read the recent report that all the world’s efforts to get people to use electric cars have been completely eclipsed by the unstoppable rise of gas-guzzling Sports Utilities Vehicles. These throng the streets of Clapham where I live. In twenty minutes I’m going to have to dodge and weave among these huge, poisonous dinosaurs as I cycle to work.

• Rise of SUVs ‘makes mockery’ of electric car push

As a tiny symbol of our ongoing addiction to the internal combustion engine, there’s an animated map showing the spread of motorways across Europe from 1920 to 2020, which contains the mind-boggling fact that plans are well advanced for a motorway which will stretch from Hamburg to Shanghai! More cars, more lorries, more coaches and buses and taxis and motorbikes and scooters, burn it up, baby!

• The evolution of European motorways 1920 to 2020

This final room has the most diverse range of cars on display, including early cars from the 1950s that attempted to address fuel scarcity such as the Messerschmitt KR200 bubble car, alongside the Ford Nucleon, a nuclear-powered concept car, and the exhibition closes with the immersive film I mentioned above, streaming around the ‘Pop.Up Next autonomous flying car’ co-designed by Italdesign, Airbus and Audi.

Summary

I think this is a really brilliant exhibition, setting out to document a madly ambitious subject – one of the central subjects of the 20th century – with impressive range and seriousness. It covers not only ‘the car’ itself but touches on loads of other fields and aspects of twentieth century history, with a confident touch and fascinating wall labels. The serpentine layout combines with the clever use of mirrors and gaps between the partition walls to make it seem much bigger than it is, as do the umpteen films showing on screens large, extra-large and ginormous.

It’s a feast for the mind and the senses.

And it’s not at all a hymn of praise: the curators are well aware of the baleful effects of car culture: there’s a digital clock recording the number of people who’ve died in traffic accidents so far in the world, and another one (in the 1970s oil crisis section) giving a countdown till the world’s oil resources are utterly exhausted (how do they know? how can anyone know?).

But there’s also another digital counter showing the number of cars manufactured in the world so far this year and it shows no sign of abating or slowing down. Car, lorry, bus, truck, coach, motorbike production continue to increase all around the world and is often [author puts his head in his hands and sighs with despair] taken as the primary indicator of a country’s economy.

We’re going to burn this planet down, aren’t we?

Promo video

Curators

The exhibition is curated by Brendan Cormier and Lizzie Bisley, with Esme Hawes as Assistant Curator.

Related links

• Cars: Accelerating the Modern World continues at the Victoria and Albert Museum until 19 April 2020
• More about the films made specially for the show by Zuketa

More V&A reviews

• More Victoria and Albert Museum reviews