Anyone who wanted to buy a car in America in 1908 had no shortage of options. Car advertisements from that year offered prospective buyers a bewildering choice of vehicles from dozens of different carmakers, the majority of them now long forgotten. What most of these advertisements had in common was an emphasis on the social cachet associated with

For the first time, American drivers realized they could not take the supply of gasoline for granted. The oil shock led the government to introduce a national speed limit of 55 mph, and fuel-economy standards that required American manufacturers to achieve an average fuel economy, across their entire product lines, of 18 miles per gallon by 1978 an