A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

(That said, electric vehicles are greener than those powered by fossil fuels even when charged with electricity from nonrenewable sources. That is because power stations burn fuel far more efficiently than car engines do and therefore produce fewer emissions per unit of energy produced. This remains true even when transmission losses are taken into

As car ownership became more widespread among African Americans, a new genre of guidebooks emerged in the 1930s. The most famous of these was The Negro Motorist Green Book, by Victor Green, a Black travel writer, who took his inspiration from similar books that helped Jewish travelers avoid discrimination. These books listed hotels, restaurants, an

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Many of these measures draw on an approach called shared space, pioneered by Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer. In 1968 he designed a residential street in the city of Delft where equal priority is given to cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, forcing road users to pay attention to one another. “When you don’t exactly know who has right of way,

And all of this increased dependency on the car. Before 1920, most American city dwellers had commuted to work on foot or by public transport. But during the 1950s commuting by car became the norm and has been ever since: today eight in ten Americans drive to work, usually alone. Zoning rules contributed to car dependency in the new suburbs by stri

The company also created a new brand, Pontiac, to fill the price gap between Chevrolet, at the bottom of the ladder, and Oakland, on the next rung up. Pontiac represented a further deviation from Ford’s approach, in which carmakers focused on making a single model.

Supporting the use of cars, and the car industry more widely, had also come to be seen as crucial to national progress. In 1916 the United States had overtaken Britain and its empire as the world’s largest economy, and its dynamism was exemplified in its leadership in the manufacturing and adoption of automobiles. European nations did not want to b

The automobile, it seemed, had arrived in the nick of time to liberate cities from the tyranny of the horse. But how would people react to the coming of this new machine?

Henry Ford was one of several carmakers who saw an opportunity to build a vehicle that combined the power and ruggedness of a touring car with the low cost of a runabout (i.e., coming in at less than $1,000). His company had launched a successful two-passenger runabout, the Model N, in 1906 for $500, and followed it up with the essentially similar

So the approach taken by the Ford Motor Company for its new Model T, which was launched in October 1908, was (like the car itself) something of a departure from the norm. Most of the advertisement is text, not imagery, and rather than being aspirational, its tone is practical and no-nonsense: “high priced quality in a low priced car … the Ford car