Editor's letter: A cultural turning point?

last updated 8 January 2015

Is America’s long love affair with the automobile finally cooling? The statistical evidence is strong that for many young Americans, the thrill is gone (see Talking points). My son certainly never glued together a model Pontiac GTO, as I did sometime in the early 1970s, and he probably never felt the particular thrill I got as a boy when I could ride in my best friend’s mom’s white Mustang convertible. But anyone waxing lyrical about the golden era of automobiles has forgotten something—just how rotten many of those cars were.

We always had a more or less decent station wagon, but thanks to my parents’ frugality—a trait I foolishly resented then but cherish in them now—our second car was almost always an affront to safety and aesthetics. The first of these rolling disasters was a Chevrolet Corvair that my father inherited from his mother. It was the Monza model, an ugly study in bronzy brown that pumped exhaust fumes into the interior when you turned on the heat. A subsequent Opel Kadett and then a Ford Pinto disintegrated under the assault of road salt; my father eventually bolted in a metal plate to replace the Pinto’s corroded floor, but ended up donating the thing to a high school auto mechanics student—who quickly conceded defeat. After college, I bought a Chevrolet Chevelle that immediately veered viciously to the right when you put it in gear, and billowed blue smoke when going downhill. I remember those lemons—and my resourceful father peering under their hoods with his timing light—anytime someone says they don’t build them like they used to. Be happy they don’t.