Posted 1/29/2006 05:38:00 PM by Douglas

Why do American cars so voraciously suck? Because that's the kind of cars we want.

America's tempestuous affair with the car has become a passionless marriage. Americans still need their cars, but the world has changed and they no longer really love them. Chrysler was taken over by Germany's Daimler. Japanese firms, such as Toyota and Honda, are opening plants as Ford shuts down.

There's a lot more to it than that, but it's true that we no long really want to be identified with our cars. But there's some chicken&egg going on with that aspect as well. Do all new cars look the same because we don't identify with them, or do we not identify with them because they all look the same? I don't know, but I do know if they started making a car that looked like a 1940 Chevrolet, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. But all the "nostalgia" styling Detroit can come up with is the PT Cruiser and the HHR, both of which look like a hearse.

The Age of the American car is passing into nostalgia. Latham once studied a slew of road movies from the early 1990s in which old American cars were nostalgically treated. The most famous was Thelma and Louise, in which two put-upon women find freedom in an open-top T-Bird. At the end of the film, the heroines hold hands and drive off the edge of a cliff.

It is a fitting image for the death of a slice of the American Dream. After decades of the car being so much more than just a mode of transport - of symbolising industry, art, freedom, sex, a triumphant America - it has now become simply a way of getting from A to B.

Sad, but true. Toyota will soon overtake GM as the world's largest auto maker, and while I can't decry corporate Darwinism, I can be saddened by the day when every car is a Toyota Camry, a boring car for boring people.