Car Chaos
Wayne Ellwood says why he loves and hates the automobile.

The fantasy machine
Jeremiah Creedon explores the deeper symbolism of the car.

Friday night burnout
Cars and teenagers are a deadly combination. George Fisher reports.

Splitting the city
Mick Hamer explains how the automobile has colonized cities and divided their communities.

Auto earth
How cars crash into the global environment. By Eric Draper.

The Proton Saga saga
Take a dash of Japanese know-how, a pinch of cheap labour and a lot of Government support and you've got the Malaysian national car. A report by Halinah Todd.

CARS - THE FACTS

Let them drive cars
The Third World is heading for full-scale dependency on the car. Michael Replogle argues there is still time to turn around.

Tanked up on sugar
Moyra Ashford on Brazil's efforts to substitute alcohol for gasoline.

Wednesday is an odd day in Lagos
Tangled traffic in the Nigerian capital. Report by O'seun Ogunseitan.

Simply ... Back to the garage

Sparks fly on the factory floor
New management systems in the car industry. Jane Slaughter and Mike Parker ask what they mean for the workers.

My earliest memories are filled with cars.

Snapshots. Heading off for summer vacation in our family's old 1953 Meteor, playing with my two sisters in the back-seat. Or my uncle driving his '57 Chevy into the lake one muggy August day for the ritual washing. Chuck Berry prancing through his joyful paean to the automobile, No Particular Place to Go. Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road zooming around the Kentucky backwoods in his souped-up '56 Ford.

For me and millions of my peers, cars were an integral part of growing up in North America in the 1950s and 60s. The great rite of passage on turning 16 was getting your license. Learning to drive the family car and being allowed to do so were milestones on the road to adulthood.

In that sense not much has changed over the last 30 years. Learning to drive is still a major event in any teenager's life and the automobile has not lost its force as a cultural icon. You only have to visit the car-shows each Spring in cities all over Europe and North America to see that the lure of the automobile is very much alive. Rapt men (car culture is mostly male) clutching colour brochures saunter past sleek machines, like supplicants before deities. The two-hour journey through congested traffic to get there, the $10 parking fee and the crowded drive home are not allowed to interfere with the worship.

The mythology of freedom and mobility is still intact. But the world today is vastly different than the one inhabited by German inventor Carl Benz back in 1886 when he patented the first motorcar. There are nearly as many cars manufactured every day around the world (about 100,000) as there are babies born. The real overpopulation problem is not with people, it's with cars.

I got a sense of that when I visited the General Motors truck plant in Oshawa, Ontario while researching this issue. It is a typical high-tech, assembly operation: sixteen hours a day, six days a week, 50 weeks a year, trucks chug off the assembly line at the rate of one a minute. That's 5,700 trucks a week - of one model by one manufacturer. And that scene is replicated in dozens of factories in dozens of countries around the globe: from Mexico to Korea, from Australia to Italy.

Driving home from the factory I began to ponder the words of my old English professor. On a long digression in the midst of a Chaucer lecture he once opined that the automobile was to modern society what cathedrals were to medieval Europe. Cruising along the 16-lane highway the comparison seemed to me completely appropriate. The domination of our lives by the car is so complete that we take it for granted.

So how do we combat this mechanical blight? One way is not to feel overwhelmed by the immensity of the problem. Understanding how the car culture has changed the way we live is a first step. If, like me, you own a car, stop squirming with guilt. Try driving only when absolutely necessary. But in the meantime you can also get involved in local planning and environmental issues and help turn our towns and cities back into people-places rather than car-parks.

Letters
Letter from La Paz
Update
Endpiece: by Jenny Vincent
Reviews: including William Hinton classic
Country profile: New Caledonia / Kanaky

COVER ILLUSTRATION: Barbara Levy
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