Not so long ago, operating a motor vehicle required a level of finesse and concentration that I believe many of us in the 21st century would find untenable. Before the widespread adoption of electric starters circa 1920, even something as routine as initiating combustion entailed rotating a crankshaft by hand. In addition to being inconvenient, this manual process was dangerous. A mistimed move or an engine backfire could violently reverse the crank’s rotation, breaking the thumbs and wrists of the unwary. Gripping the crank properly and positioning one’s body in relation to it was a skill acquired through practice—or so I imagine.
If you were lucky enough to get the engine going, you then had to advance or retard the ignition timing via controls on the steering column, adjusting according to engine load and fuel quality. Then, without synchronized transmissions, you had to match engine speed to wheel speed during each shift merely to avoid grinding gears or losing control.
The list goes on.
In those days, the relationship between car and driver was more collaborative than supervisory. And you don’t have to listen to me to understand that. Ask a senior citizen about the first car that they purchased or visit the Packard Museum in Ohio. Or in my case, after trying both of those routes, head to the car meet by Westfield Old Orchard in Illinois. Last time I was there, on September 2, 2019, to my bewilderment someone pulled up to the parking lot in a Ford Model T.
In the open cabin, the Ford Model T has a wooden steering wheel, a flat black dashboard with minimal circular switches, and a bench seat with horizontal ribbing but no headrests or seatbelts.
Behind the wheel, I could see a cluster of small levers on the steering column that controlled, perhaps, the throttle and spark timing. None of the three pedals was an accelerator. The left one toggled between low and high gear, the middle engaged reverse, and the right squeezed a brake band inside the transmission, rather than the wheels. Wheel braking fell to the handbrake lever. To this day, I come up short trying to mentally map the choreography of hands and feet to an image of daily driving. And the Model T offered one of the more convenient and accessible driving experiences of its time, from what I understand. The Grand Prix cars of that era mystify me even more. It could be that these cars are so rare to see in the wild that the novelty factor is enough to capture my imagination. But I think there could be some logic to the bewilderment, too.
Roughly five years after I saw that Model T, I headed down the Pacific Coast Highway to the Peninsula for Monterey Car Week. And among the many delights of that week, finding a Bugatti Type 35T on display was one of the most memorable, and in some ways more memorable than an adjacent Tourbillon that I spent equally as much time staring at.
There is something beautiful about a chance occurrence with that which you never thought you’d live to see, and the Type 35T had that kind of beauty for me. But what made that car stand out even next to an exclusive Bolide, a pristine Chiron, and a jaw-dropping Tourbillon was that I could appreciate, simply by looking, the miracle that the Type 35T or any car can operate at all.
There the miracle sat, with no roof to speak of, only a little windshield and a handbrake lever jutting out from the side of the body panel. The paint lining the cockpit was chipped and worn, likely where drivers and mechanics would have leaned in or climbed over, revealing some bare metal or primer beneath. The steering wheel was thin, the gauges unlabeled. The machine needed you to understand it.
Now, since I am in no rush to break my wrists, I am content taking a more supervisory role in modern vehicles. But it does matter that there is some relationship between the machine and me.
The likes of electric starters, automatic chokes, and fuel injection have decisively made cars safer and more accessible—thank the heavens—but the impact on the meaning of the car-driver relationship is a murkier story.
To see what I mean, let’s start with an easy target: automatic transmissions.
General Motors introduced the Hydramatic in 1939 as the first mass-produced fully automated transmission. Within a few decades, it and its descendants had reshaped the American driving experience. Nowadays, automatics, CVTs, and single-speed transmissions account for nearly all new car sales in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest Automotive Trends Report.
For the vast majority of drivers, the prerequisites of understanding gear ratios and rev-matching have been thoroughly obsoleted. It doesn’t sound that bad at first, but I think Ian Bogost of The Atlantic captured well the sense of loss in 2022 when he wrote that the manual’s chief appeal “derives from the feeling it imparts to the driver: a sense, whether real or imagined, that he or she is in control.” When that sense of control disappears, will something better come along to restore it, augment it, or replace it? Or might that sense of control leave an eternal cavity when it goes away?
Automotive technology, over the decades, shifted in this direction and advanced to encompass what I’ll call convenience features, a category different from safety and accessibility, though not entirely divorced from them. Then came infotainment systems, which, among other developments, provided a window into advanced navigation software. And navigation is where I really start to feel the tension between control and convenience. I remember a time when, in preparation for a family trip, we would log on to the shared living room PC, pull up Google Maps or MapQuest, and print out the step-by-step directions toward a destination. Or, with varying degrees of success, we’d rely on landmarks and locals to point us in the right direction. The last time I distinctly remember navigating in this way was in 2011, when we traveled to Florida to visit my grandmother. Today, I can think of high schoolers in my circles who have never seen a paper map. I always thought that built-in navigation was so cool growing up, and I still love having it integrated into the car, especially now that it’s gotten so much faster and more accurate. But then upon further reflection, I am a little unsettled by how readily technology can influence my experience of moving through the world.
An intuition for connecting landmarks, understanding gear ratios, and grasping physical relationships between speed, distance, time, and power adds genuinely valuable ways of thinking and acting spatially—in one’s life and career, not just behind the wheel.
What about analog clocks? Remember those? Not just behind the wheel. One time in college, in fact, a friend told me about a professor who had to explain to the lecture hall, teeming with people who grew up only knowing digital clocks, how to tell the time on an analog clock before proceeding with the planned material. Historically, this was the starting point for a lesson that would make heavy use of modular arithmetic.
What makes that anecdote as fitting as it is unsettling is not the dearth of students who appreciate analog clocks, but rather that apparently nothing, for some of them, in their two decades of life, had sprung up to facilitate a similar mental model. Clock faces weren’t just interfaces for telling time—they were ontological handlebars. And when they vanished, the grip may have loosened with them.