Factually! with Adam Conover - The Origin of Car Culture, “Horse Busses” and Sexy Bicycles! with Dan Albert

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

Historian and author of the book "Are We There Yet?: The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless", Dan Albert joins Adam this week to talk about what led to the universal car, the 1890's bike craze, selling more than just a mode of transportation, and more! This episode is brought to you by Kiwi Co (www.kiwico.com/FACTUALLY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

Plus, they throw in a handy guide filled with info about each snack and about Japanese culture. And let me tell you something, you are going to need that guide because this box comes with a lot of snacks. I just got this one today, direct from Bokksu, and look at all of these things. We got some sort of seaweed snack here. We've got a buttercream cookie. We've got a dolce. I don't, I'm going to have to read the guide to figure out what this one is. It looks like some sort of sponge cake. Oh my gosh. This one is, I think it's some kind of maybe fried banana chip. Let's try it out and see. Is that what it is? Nope, it's not banana. Maybe it's a cassava potato chip. I should have read the guide. Ah, here they are. Iburigako smoky chips. Potato

chips made with rice flour, providing a lighter texture and satisfying crunch. Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. You got to get one of these for themselves and get this for the month of March. Bokksu has a limited edition cherry blossom box and 12 month subscribers get a free kimono style robe and get this while you're wearing your new duds, learning fascinating things about your tasty snacks. You can also rest assured that you have helped to support small family run businesses in Japan because Bokksu works with 200 plus small makers to get their snacks delivered straight to your door.

So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover, and Americans do not just have a car culture, we have a car society. 83% of American adults drive frequently, and a similar percentage of all drivers say they enjoy driving at least somewhat. Now, look, I am not one of them. As you'll know if you listened to my earlier podcast with Salida Reynolds, I am not a car guy. I do not own a car. I do not enjoy driving. In America, life is a highway,, if you listen to my earlier podcast with Salita Reynolds, I am not a car guy. I do not own a car. I do not enjoy driving.

In America, life is a highway. But, you know, if I have to ride it all night long, I'd rather just take the bus. And I do. Now, look, I get that I'm unusual in that respect. But the fact is, when you take a step back and examine our society objectively, from like the perspective of an alien come down to Earth looking at it for the first time, our transportation system looks very weird. Why is it that in order to just move about our own communities and participate in the world, we need to make a five-figure expenditure on a two-ton metal tank? Not to mention that we continue to pay to fuel it,

store it when we're not using it, and we have to buy government-mandated insurance for it forever. And the reason we make that purchase is because we all know that this transportation method murders people regularly. Like, this does not seem like an obvious way to organize a society's transportation system. So why did we organize it this way? You know, plenty of other countries have transportation systems in which car ownership is the exception, not the rule. And it's not like the Geico Gecko wrote our constitution. So why do we build our society around cars starting so early in our histories? Like in the 1930s in Europe, cars were still a toy for aristocrats.

But by that time, one half of American households already owned one. The infrastructure for cars in America by that point was already decades ahead of anywhere else. Or think about this. We know that cars kill. Around 37,000 people died in car crashes in 2017. And our rate of road fatalities is four times what it is in the UK. And we treat these deaths like there's some kind of unfortunate inevitability like cancer or heart disease, but they're not. We have mechanisms that could make cars safer if we wanted to. We could have been putting speed limiters on cars to make them less deadly, or we could turn four-way intersections into roundabouts. But look, we're a nation of Sammy Hagar's.

It's not that we can't drive 55. It's that we will not. I Can't Drive 55 was the name of a Sammy Hagar song. I hope that was clear. But why is it that we continue as a nation to prioritize speed above human life? Or consider our interstate highway system. Building it took the largest and most expensive public works project in United States history. That's right, this thing makes the Hoover

Dam look like a dust buster. Vacuum cleaner joke. So why do we build it instead of improving the sprawling system of rail lines we already had? For that matter, why do we let passenger rail wither and die in this country? And why is it next to impossible for us to build new railways now? Recently, China built 10,000 miles of high-speed rail in just a decade. But in that time, America couldn't even manage to build a train between Los Angeles and Bakersfield. It makes no sense. Well, to help answer these questions and to explain to us the history of how America became a car society and to examine where we might be driving off to next, our guest today is Dan Albert. He's a historian, and his recent book, Are We There Yet?

The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless is a thoughtful and incredibly interesting history of the car in American society. Without further ado, please welcome Dan Albert. Dan, thank you so much for being on the show. Oh, it's wonderful to be here. I'm excited for the invitation. Thank you. So we've been talking about how the car took over America's transportation system. You have studied the subject extensively. What did you find? What is the thesis of your book in a nutshell? Well, I think the thing to understand that it's not so much about the car taking over America or even America just jumping on the car and saying, you know, we want cars, but that it's really a very complicated process.

And we're in a world today where people are very divided, you know, bicycle rider versus a pickup truck driver. And to me, I think once we all understand the process by which this happened, maybe we can all kind of find a common ground and move forward together. There's a lot more pickup truck drivers than there are bicycle riders, though. I mean, in the eternal struggle between the two, I think the bicycle riders are losing generally. Yes, I think you're absolutely right. And I have to mention, I heard you on the War on Cars podcast.

I heard you talking with Salida Reynolds. And I want to make sure that you understand I've been in this fight a lot longer than a lot of people. I wrote for something called the Auto Free Press in New York in the 90s. And ever since the 1970s, in my sense, even as a young person, that the end of the automobile was nigh has really driven all of my understanding. On the other hand, I don't look at people who drive pickup trucks as the enemy. I think we need to understand what's going on. Yeah, I've said this many times.

Yeah, I don't ever, I've said this many times, I don't have any judgment of how anybody chooses to get around their community because so much of the time, what determines how we can get around is how our community is designed. We simply don't have a choice. I mean, even in Los Angeles, I've spoken many times, I take the bus around, but even that is because I happen to live near bus stops and I happen to have the time and, you know, a lot of folks don't. So, you know, the question is not what should we all individually do? It's how did we design our society to be this way? How do we design the hard structures of our infrastructure and our actual communities? And then how do we change those going forward? Yeah. So if we take a look at that historically, I think there are two points that are pretty interesting. One is if you look at cities where the car really first showed up in the United States, they had one experience. And if you look out in the rural areas, particularly farms in the United States, they came along a little later and they had a very different experience. So in that first case, what you had really was young men in a rut. These were transatlantic rich, the one-tenth of one percent.

And they were importing vehicles from Europe, and these were very powerful vehicles. Nobody needed these for transportation. I mean, if you think about it, the whole world was kind of invented without the automobile. Yeah, this was for little Lord Fauntleroy to drive around pleasure driving up and down Fifth Avenue mowing down pedestrians for fun. Absolutely. And it's funny, one of the things that happened was early on, Willie Vanderbilt, who was one of the worst of these guys, had a plan to build his own private highway right down the center of Long Island.

And the New York Times editorialized, well, I guess you could do that, but what fun is that? The real fun of this whole thing for these guys is seeing how close they can get to pedestrians without killing them. I also know that in later years when, you know, I know from reading Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, the great and powerful and sometimes nefarious city planner of New York, that when the original highways, which were then called parkways, were built in the New York area, he designed them largely for pleasure driving. And the reason they were called parkways was they put, you know, trees on either side in order to make them sort of a luxurious, you know,

you'd take the car out for the weekend and drive upstate to see the countryside. Of course, now those same roads are being used by commuters every single day to, you know, go back and forth from Westchester into Manhattan or in and out of Long Island. But their original purpose was really designed for the pleasures of the rich. Oh, absolutely. And even by the time these parkways get going, we're talking about much more of a mass ownership, certainly, you know, maybe average or above average in terms of wealth. But, you know, this is the point where people are really using vehicles to get out on the countryside. And one thing that's very interesting

about the parkway movement is that actually predates the automobile. And you get architects like Olmsted developing parkways. You also get the automobile driver was not simply trying to get from point A to point B, but they were trying to use their vehicle to get out into nature. Sort of take the machine out into the garden. out into the garden. And the first manager of the national park system built a parkway to connect all of the Western parks together and in fact, democratized travel to the national parks. So the automobile and these parkways really did open up the countryside to a huge mass of Americans. But then, as you say, I mean, we just drive way too much and we've had to turn from basic roads and streets and highways to swallowing up our parkways and using

them for things that they were really not intended for. Yeah. So you said that in the early days in the cities, it was really the idle rich who were buying automobiles, but in the countryside, it was different. How is it different in rural areas? So the big difference, I think you have to point to Henry Ford. Now, Henry Ford, by the time Ford Motor Company was founded, he was on his third company. He had failed twice in the business. And the reason he had failed was he had investors who kept wanting to make money. And he kept saying, who cares about that? I want to make the family horse. I want to make the universal car.

And ultimately, that's what he did. And famously, with the Model T, he built a very lightweight, very robust, very easily repaired, and very good for off-roading vehicle. Really? It was like an ATV. For off-roading vehicle. Really? Off-roading, by the way, meant off-roading in the days when all of the roads were off-road. Right. Dirt roads and not even gravel roads. Exactly. Mud in the rainy season and dust the rest of the year.

Absolutely. So that's what the Model T could do. And he had farmers in mind when he built it. And he also believed that you would buy a Model T and you'd be done. No new Model T every three years or anything like that. It was just buy your car, keep your car. It went 40 miles an hour. He believed that was all anybody needed.

40 miles an hour, he believed that was all anybody needed. The idea of building a car with, you know, glass enclosures, why would you want that, right? This is a family horse. And so motor vehicles went out into the countryside in huge numbers. He was building 2 million a year at his peak right around the beginning of World War I. And that really inverted the story of the automobile in the United States. It did not simply spread from the city and the wealthy. It actually grew from the grassroots as well. And I can see that being a huge, I mean, let's give credit to the automobile. That's a huge revolution if you live out in the countryside and you live many miles from the nearest town or, you know, the sort of thing you always hear in any kind of historical fiction. Okay, well, let's head to Boston. It'll only take us three days.

You know, those sort of distances. I'm sure that's a revolution in quality of life for folks who live in rural areas. Oh, absolutely. Most people live their lives within several miles of home, right? So it's not so much that the automobile came in and replaced something else. It replaced isolation and it created a level of mobility or really a level of travel that just did not exist before. That's a huge transportation revolution for rural areas. But in the cities, a couple miles from your home

is all of Manhattan. And also in the early part of the 20th century, there was more and more public transportation being built. And we had these, the cities were building ways to move people about the cities that were not reliant on owning a personal automobile. You know, the New York City subway is close to 100 years old, if not older than that. So, which is, you know, about the, we're talking about the same time periods here.

So how did we move to a place where, okay, now this is the way that even the average person in suburban and urban areas is doing all of their travel. Right. So the automobile does take over and it takes over all travel. That does not happen until much, much later than you might think. However, you talk about mass transit as being available. So why did the automobile come in? transit as being available, so why did the automobile come in? Well, in fact, mass transit created the new geography of the city that bit by bit required the automobile. In other words, you go from having cities, even in the 1850s, that are only about as big as you can walk across.

In other words, from the center of the city to your house, it's about a half-hour commute, but it was either by foot or perhaps on something like an omnibus, which would be a horse-drawn carriage. You could pay a nickel and get a ride. Yeah, a horse-drawn bus, basically. A horse-drawn bus. A little later, you get something that's actually called the horse bus, and this is the same thing, but now you have rails embedded in the road and people who first experience talked about it as wow this is like going on a sled on ice it's so smooth it's so fast and the economics got better and it got cheaper and so that begins to spread things out and then electricity so once you have electric streetcars now you begin to have very uh more landscape available, land I should say available to live on and commute into the city or travel across the city or so forth.

So the city really begins to expand. Two other points really to understand. One is you have all these immigrants, you know, and you may have noticed America seems to be a little uncomfortable with certain kinds of immigrants. We have a mixed relationship with the idea of immigration, certainly, or we have a pendulum that swings back and forth in terms of our ideas about it. Absolutely. And in particular, in this period, you're looking at immigrants coming from Eastern Europe. You're looking at Catholics. You're looking at Jews and other quote-unquote undesirables.

And so there's this mass of people coming in, you know, cooking new things, opening saloons. And so you get this middle class that would rather not be there. They'd rather be further out in the suburbs. There are streetcar suburbs well before the automobile.

And then as the streetcar itself becomes more democratized, oh no, those people are on the streetcars as well. It's a very short hop from there off of the streetcar and into the automobile. I mean, the pejorative term people use for that process is white flight associated with this. Yes, absolutely. And you have native born whites who are going out to the ends of these streetcar lines where they can live in segregated neighborhoods. And one of the interesting things about the economics is these streetcar companies don't necessarily need to make money selling tickets on the streetcar. They are real estate companies. They are real estate companies. They build a nice white suburb outside of downtown and they say, oh, you can take the streetcar there. So they provide access and they make that process about how in the early days of public transportation, we would build suburbs or build neighborhoods around, you know, you build the transit line first and then you build the apartments, the residences around that.

I didn't realize that it had that racial dimension to it. It certainly did. And also it had that economic dimension to it. In other words, it was laissez-faire capitalism. There was no like, let's plan a great network of streetcars. It was, where can I buy some cheap land and where can I run a rail line to it? These were privately owned rail lines. This was not public transport in the sense of government doing it. It was mass transport in the sense that there were a lot of people on one vehicle. But other than that, it was pure commerce. I see. Thank you for the correction on that. So you're saying that that process sort of caused the city to spread out, and then those folks end up buying automobiles instead so that they can sort of segregate themselves even more. And then I would imagine that the reliance on the automobile would then cause the city to push out even further because, you know, once you start getting to the point where, okay, everyone has automobiles, now we can build highways and freeways and parkways out to the suburbs.

Well, that just pushes everyone out further, further, further. Absolutely. So it's just that same process on steroids. But so when we look at, say, other countries that had access to the automobile at the same time that we did, why did this process happen on steroids in the United States, where when you go to, I've traveled a fair amount in my life, and I have to say that America seems to be the country that is most built around the car in this way? Why did we take to it so specifically? So you're absolutely right. We're looking at, I believe it's about 880 vehicles per thousand people. We have more vehicles than we have drivers to drive them. Even if we all jumped in and did our part, we would still have to leave an awful lot of cars parked.

Right. park. So the major reason in my view is we got there first. The United States was by a generation or more ahead of any other country in terms of embracing the automobile. You can ask why that is. Some of it is basic economics in terms of the levels of wealth out in the countryside. So farmers in the United States, rural people were relatively well off compared to say European peasants, if you will. We also had very much decentralized planning or no planning at all. So if you go to England, for example, and even if you look at the railroads in England, the railroads as they were developed in England, were developed to connect existing cities. The railroads in the United States were developed to create new cities.

Atlanta did not exist until the railroads started. Really? So we had open land. We had so-called virgin territory, although, as we all know, people were living there. But we also had, we were disinclined as a nation to sit down and do what, for example, the Swedes do, which is say, okay, let's put the factories here, the homes here, the commercial district there. That's not how we do things. That's not how we roll. Yeah. You'll notice, however, that as soon as people have enough wealth, they very quickly gravitate towards the automobile.

And if you look at China, for example, the speed with which that country is turning itself over into an automobile society is just staggering. Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit more about those early days of the automobile. I understand that early on when the automobile first became popular, it wasn't even clear that the internal combustion engine as the way to move the car around, like as the engine method, was a foregone conclusion. Like what were the range of cars available? What were the range of different ideas at that time? I think you've hit on a really interesting point. The first 4,000 vehicles in the country, about 1,500 of them are electric.

Really? About 1,500 of them are steam, and the rest, the balance, about 1,000 are internal combustion. Now, steam cars, maybe, is that the next advancement? Because it took about 100 years for Elon to bring back the electric car. Is the steam car next? See, you know, this is the biggest disappointment to me, and I write about it in the book. I mean, if you think of steampunk and cosplay, that stuff is so cool. I agree.

I agree. If I could be driving a steam car now, I'd be thrilled by that. I could put my goggles on and toot-toot around the countryside. Absolutely. And there was a car called the Doble. This is into the 1930s. It is a steam car. It is the most elegant, beautiful, incredible piece of engineering.

You would want to just watch this thing motorized without even moving. And it was traveled on silent power, really, you know, none of this noisy gasoline engine stuff. So incredibly elegant. So why didn't it survive? Well, one of the reasons is that it was not favored by regulation. So there's a great quote by a guy named Maxim who was early involved in electric vehicles. And he said, look, we could have had steam cars in the 1860s or 1870s. And in fact, we did. The automobile was invented many times.

But it wasn't taken up. And one of the reasons was the city governments were not excited about having steam cars on their roads. Steam engines had a tendency to blow up. Okay, there it is. Yeah. And that was true on steamships. That was true on locomotives. But in fact, the steam cars did not have those same dangers.

They were at much lower pressure. So steam worked. Steam had a fuel economy problem, so to speak. It actually is fairly fuel efficient, but you had to keep adding water to it. So you could only get so far before you had to add water to it. That problem was eventually solved. was eventually solved. The electric, which predated both gasoline cars and in a lot of ways, steam cars in the city, was in a lot of ways the perfect solution, just as in a lot of ways,

it's the perfect solution today. It stopped easily. It started with a flick of a switch. It was quiet. It didn't smell. It didn't make noise. We know now that, you know, if you look at London and New York, the average speed in the city for a vehicle is about 10 miles an hour, give or take. Electric vehicle, no problem at all. And in fact, better than a gasoline vehicle. A woman challenged a man to a race. This was famously in some of the motoring presses. And she said, yeah, okay, so maybe your top end is faster than mine, but let's run a real race. We're going to take a day. We're going to both go about our kind of daily errands and let's see who wins. Now, if you go back, this is around 1900, 1905. Okay, you pull up to the hardware store, you get your stuff,

then you got to get out and you got to crank the machine from the front. And maybe it doesn't quite start. You got to run to the steering wheel and you got to make some adjustments and you go crank it again and so forth and so on. This is the gasoline engine you have to do that with. I'm sorry, this is the gasoline engine, right? Meanwhile, our lady friend is getting into her vehicle, flipping a switch and going from the dress shop down to the tea room and so forth. So it was a very practical machine.

Here's what it didn't do. It wouldn't take you out into the countryside for a journey unprepared, which is the way it was described. The reason people wanted to do that was because of the bicycle. Wait, okay, hold on. Why the bicycle? So prior to the automobile in the 1890s, there is an absolute bike craze. And it's hard to imagine how insane this was.

Yeah, and it's not just about people riding bikes. People are suddenly riding bikes. The bike chain's invented in the 1870s, And suddenly, you know, the bike is safe. It's viable. You get, you know, telegrams delivered by bicycle and all of that kind of thing. But also the bicycle was sexy. The bicycle was cutting edge. And if you think about it, you know, those playing cards, right? You've seen them, the back of the playing cards. What do they have on them? Bicycle. Bicycle playing cards. Yeah, exactly. So the bicycle was where it was at. And it was very much wrapped up into the culture. For example, women started, you know, I don't know if you've ever worn a dress trying to bicycle, but if you don't tuck your cuffs in your pants and you,

you know, you try to wear a dress, it doesn't work out well. I've also seen political cartoons from that era about, you know, how people were worried that women bicycling was them exhibiting loose morals, that it was raising a generation of young hellions, which is very, you know, very similar to any sort of like moral panic we see around any youth fad. But yeah, in the late 19th century, it was over women bicycling. That's right. Kids today, these crazy kids today, and you know what it had to do with? It had to do with those bike chains catching your dress. So what do you do if you're a woman? You start wearing bloomers. Ah, that created the bloomer. Exactly. So these are puffy, puffy pants that come down to your knees and then, oh my God,

your ankles are exposed. So yeah, moral panic. That's the athleisure of the 19th century. That's the yoga pant of the 19th century is the bloomer. There you go. The yoga pant of the 19th century. I just have to say, this is the thing about history that I love so much is that it sprawls out in every direction and every little thing that happens influences everything else. Fashion influences, transportation influences, city planning influences, the course of history. And when you're actually tracking it,

you almost never get this tidy little story of A happened and B happened. You get it like a multiplicity of occasions in every direction. But that's sort of what makes it so fascinating, is seeing how all those things come together. Yeah, I agree. And obviously, you know, here we are thinking we're living in the present, but we're living in someone else's history, right? Someone else's future past. What are we going to look like? You know, it seems sensible. All we got to do is get rid of these cars, but boy, it turns out to be a lot harder than we thought. So the bicycle was creating what, this romance of going out into the countryside for people? Absolutely.

And again, this fellow Maxim says, look, we could have had these cars before. Why didn't we? Well, certainly regulation was part of it. But another part of it was nobody had this desire or nobody had the imagination that you could go freely out into the countryside without a railroad timetable or being stuck on a rail line. You could just go wherever you wanted. And his view was that the automobile was simply the bicycle's next iteration. So the reason that electric cars and steam cars didn't catch on was because the gas engine, what specifically gave you that ability to go out into the countryside for long distances?

It just had longer range? I think so. I think I talk about this in the book. I found this wonderful quote by an electrical engineer saying, you know, we could actually provide battery swapping stations or charging stations along those roads out into the countryside. swapping stations or charging stations along those roads out into the countryside. But a journey fully prearranged, as he described it, is not what we're looking for. That's not what people want. Whereas with gasoline, you could go hither and yon wherever you felt like it.

There's another element here, too, though. I talked before about how smelly and dirty and greasy and difficult to operate these early gasoline automobiles were. Sounds like a drawback, doesn't it? Yes. Yes, it does sound very bad to me. I don't like a smelly, greasy thing. Turns out not to be the case. Oh, why is that?

Well, because young men particularly, but men in general in this period are realizing that part of being a modern man is the ability to control machinery, to fix machines. That's really what made you manly. It was a macho thing, if you will. So famously, a guy named Albert Pope, who had the biggest bicycle company, and then he became a major producer of electric vehicles said, you know, people aren't going to sit over an explosion. And people don't want, right? People don't want all this greasy machinery with these knobs and gears and all this complexity. And in a lot of ways, he was wrong for a lot of these buyers. A lot of these early buyers were men who felt they needed to keep up, needed to be 20th century, and really wanted to prove their mettle by pretending they knew how to fix a car, whether they did or not. Yeah, and that became such a big part of car culture. And the way that you

describe that puts me in mind now of how people's associations with their Teslas, right? Now that we're in an era where people don't really fix cars themselves, that, I mean, certainly you can, especially if you have an older car, but the cars that are being manufactured are so sort of iPhone-ized that they're very, very difficult to do anything but extremely routine maintenance on them yourself.

No one's building a Prius from scratch or anything like that. But the association that men, especially young men, have with Teslas, for example, as being this sort of new technological marvel that they get to participate in and sort of control and enjoy, it strikes me as very similar to what you just described with the internal combustion engine 100 years ago. I think that's right. And in a way, it makes me feel old, you know,

because I had an early Apple II Plus, and I played with it. And I got kind of, you know, at this point, the things are too complicated, and I can't do much with them. I did actually build my own electric car. I had a 1972. Yeah, yeah. I'll tell you about it. I had a 1972 Beetle.

Engine was taken out and electric motor about the size of a watermelon in the back. I just used lead acid batteries, the kind people use to start their cars. Nothing fancy. And it was great. It was great fun. Drove it around town. I live in a small town. Got rid of it for two reasons.

One of them is I did not feel safe taking my children around in it. The town is loaded with giant SUVs and pickup trucks. All we had to do was be hit once at a low speed and I would have, you know, I don't even want to imagine

what would have happened. The other reason is I was done. I made it. It worked. I was done. There was nothing else to do to it. Right? And so when you own a 1972 Beetle, half of the fun of owning a 1972 Beetle for someone like me is fixing the carburetor, changing the oil pump, and so forth and so on.

There's nothing to be done with these EVs from my perspective. Kids today that get involved in modding their cars, they call it tuner culture. And what they're talking about is changing out chips and reprogramming engine mapping. They're not talking about really getting grease under their fingernails. Right, hacking the firmware so that you can play Doom on the card console. Stuff like that. But you're saying that one of the reasons that the internal combustion engine beat those other two was because it was sort of branded and marketed as being manly? Is that the case?

Well, yes and no. I mean, I will say you're absolutely right. Manly? Is that the case? Well, yes and no. I mean, I will say you're absolutely right. It does become marketed as manly, or more to the point, the electric vehicle becomes marketed as for women, a ladies' car. Henry Ford bought his wife, Clara, a 1914, I'm going to say it was a Detroit electric. I don't think it was a Baker. I think it was a Detroit electric.

One of the fun things to do if you go to the website for the museum, the Henry Ford museum is you can look around the interior of this car. It had tufted upholstery. It had a vases. You put flowers in it and it was entirely glassed in time. Yeah. Oh, it was cool. And it's, you know, it, it frankly looks almost like a driverless car. It had a little tiny tiller that she would sit in, a hold as she sat there. It had, she sat in the back of the cabin. In front of her, facing her, would be a guest, another lady, maybe taking her down to the dress shop. And then another lady sitting next to her, maybe they were going for lunch or what have you. But for all the world, you move that tiller to the side and they just look like they're sitting at home in the drawing room. Yeah.

And so that was marketed to women. There's no evidence that women, you know, somehow preferred tame, lovely little cars. This is very much a social construction of gender. of gender. But it's certainly true that that machine with the thrusting pistons that swallowed up air and spit out fumes and roared and had to be muscled to life physically, that was very much the car for men. And that very much became the American automobile. See, I love talking about these things because it makes us realize when we look at all the different models that sort of existed back then, it makes you realize that the way we think about cars today is not at all a fore never again. And obviously we're now in a world where car manufacturers want you to have a new car every three years.

They've convinced us that renting your car for three years and having a brand new one, so they can sell you a new one and then sell the old one to someone for a markup as pre-owned, we're in that universe. So how did those models of ownership change over time? someone for a markup as pre-owned, were in that universe. So how did those models of ownership change over time? How did we get from there to here?

The short answer is something called Sloanism. So let me take you back. We're now 1908. The Model T comes off the assembly line in October, and people eat it up. This is a car for people that never had a car before. And it was a crazy thing to drive. It had three pedals. None of them actually operated the gas. The gas was up on the steering wheel.

I mean, it was just a wacky machine. And if you as a driver today went back and tried to drive that machine, you'd be utterly confused. But most of the people who bought one had never had a car. And they would buy it for cash. That was something Henry Ford was very big on, using cash, not using credit. By the middle 1920s, though, he's producing 2 million cars a year. And they're reaching a point of saturation.

So pretty much everybody who can afford a car has one. And it's around this time that Ford's, call him his foil, a guy named Alfred Sloan. You may have heard of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Yeah, before all my PBS shows I used to watch as a kid, I feel like they'd say funding for this program is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Exactly, and that's probably the best thing that Alfred P. Sloan did for the world.

That and the Sloan Kettering Hospitals. Okay. But we're about to describe something not so good, I take it? Well, what he also invented was planned obsolescence. And this is the idea that, as you say, every three years, you need a new car. And he describes this quite clearly in his sort of autobiography of General Motors. And he says, the goal in each new model year is to create a certain level of dissatisfaction in the owner of the car that's still perfectly viable as a transportation machine. viable as a transportation machine. And what he realized was by the mid-1920s, there's plenty of used cars around. If you need transportation, you can go buy a $40 Ford Model T or even a $200 old Chevy. Yeah.

So he stopped selling transportation and he started selling new. And one of the biggest innovations was color. new. And one of the biggest innovations was color. So they came up with color paint that actually dried fast and lasted. And from that point on, the car was a fashion statement of the highest order. And that's when you begin to get this idea that every three years you need to buy a new car. And re-engineering cars, that's expensive, coming up with new, you know, innovative engineering, safety design, all of these kinds of things. Why do that when you can come up with a new car color

or a shinier radio knob, right? Or a radio knob that looks like it came off a spaceship, right? So, you know, just like fashion, there's no reason to buy a new dress unless the hemlines too short. And this year the hemlines are longer. Yeah. And again, he, he says this quite clearly. He says, uh, you know, the, the woe betide the carmaker that does not follow the laws of the Paris fashion. fashion uh that's a quote yeah wow that that also reminds me uh more than anything of you know my relationship with technology with the iphone say that uh you know people people talk about it as though oh there's planned ops lessons like they make the things stop working i don't buy that i think the main reason uh that uh uh you know that is the pressure of the new. It almost feels hard to resist.

The last time I bought a new iPhone, I had gone three or four years without buying one. And I felt every time I did that as though it was almost like a resistance I had to make. I was fighting back mentally going, no, no, no, I'm not buying a new one. No, I watched the keynote, but nope, I'm going to be fine with this. I'm going to hold out as long as I can. And I think instead of buying one every two years, which is the cycle, I managed to go, you know, three or four years.

And I felt like, okay, I've done a really good deed. Now I can finally unburden myself and purchase an X or whatever. And, you know, that sort of pressure is, you know, that it's almost just the cycle itself of there's a new one every year and it's going to be slightly improved that puts that pressure on you, whether or not you believe in it. Absolutely. I mean, you know, improved, improved over what? And we've seen this with phones now, right? They're kind of trying so desperately to get us to buy a new one. What's the new one? And as you say, this effort to resist that just pull of consumption, and it's true in all parts of our lives.

But in terms of the automobile, it's just brutal. And it's worth pointing out that it actually worked really well. So we went from saturation to just explosion, right? So I need my own car that represents me. My wife needs her car that represents her. My teenager needs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? And if you can keep building cars and selling them every three years, look at the economic activity you're generating. So you're actually generating wealth for people as well. Well, we have to take a short break. We'll be right back with more Dan Albert. Okay, we're back. So Dan, I'd like to talk about how after cars became so popular, after, as you said, suddenly we're in a world where everybody has to have their own car that represents them, that's in the color of their choice.

How did we start transforming our society around the car? For instance, the National Highway System, I said in the intro, is the largest public works project in American history. system, I said in the intro, is the largest public works project in American history. So it's literally, you know, we put more of our collective energy behind building that than anything else. Why did that happen? And what were the goals of that project? I think it's interesting. A lot of people think of the interstate highway system as, you know, 1956 is the year, and this is Eisenhower, this is, you know, ruffled potato chips, barbecues, let's all live in the suburbs. And that's certainly true, right? That's what the highway did and, you know, tracked housing and so forth and so on. The origins of the highway

system, the interstate highway system, really go back to the 1930s. And planners were coming up with the highways as a way to weave the country together, make the economy more fluid. Automobiles were going to remove friction in commerce. They were also going to use these highways to, get this, destroy the city. They looked at the city and they said, it's a slum. They looked at the city and they said, it's a slum. So we're going to really do people a favor because they're living in this terrible housing and we're just going to plow it under. We're going to get rid of these cities, which by the way, happen to be full of undesirables and radicals and communists and anarchists. And people of racial backgrounds we don't like. Exactly, exactly. And we're going to create this new landscape, which is, you know, built according to a racialist agenda, a racial ideology, whereby we can segregate people. And, you know, I don't want to put

this out to say, you know, the highway engineers who were doing this were doing it on their own for some nefarious purpose. Yeah, of course not. Yeah, no, I think it's absolutely true that they looked at the cities and said, these things are not fit for the automobile, and we're going to build a world of automobiles. What we call sprawl, they call decentralization. Yeah, you can see how all those things go together, that the combination of the sort of scorn for the city, and I know that a lot of our cities were not in the best repair during that period, right? And general racial animus and the federal policy of redlining that ensured that white folks would be able to purchase homes. And this sort of futuristic idea about the automobile, all those things go together to create that effect. Exactly. And, you know, this is 1950.

People are still taking the bus. People are still taking trains. People can still walk places. Families have one car. Very quickly, that will begin to change. It even, you know, kind of expands rapidly in the 1980s to a degree not even expected in the 1950s. You know, this thing kind of got out of hand. And now we are all of us trapped in the world that the automobile has made. trapped in the world that the automobile has made. Is this something that people, that the average person wanted at the time, this transformation? Did people say, oh yeah, get me out of the city, build me a highway.

I love the Long Island Expressway. You know, were people saying that? You know, it's funny, you say people, and we always have a hard time. We talk about what Americans wanted, what Americans didn't want. What's fascinating is that, yes, that's the narrative. But almost as soon as these highways reached places where people actually lived, the people who lived there said, no way, let's stop this. Right. So, for example, Interstate 95 was supposed to go straight down through Washington, D.C. through Washington, D.C.

A group that called themselves the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis formed about 1965 when this highway plan was coming in, and they stood up to stop it. And they went to public meetings and they rallied in Congress and so forth.

And their motto, their rallying cry was no more white men's roads through black men's bedrooms. Wow. So now we get to 1968. There are riots in several cities. Martin Luther King is killed.

And race is very much a part of it. It's worth noting, though, that the people standing up against Interstate 95 and other highways just cutting up the District of Columbia were both black and white. What brought them together was that they lived in the city. And again, this happened everywhere. This happened in cities all across the country as soon as those highways showed up. Again, from my reading about Robert Moses, that so many of those expressways going through New York went right through neighborhoods.

Buildings were demolished. Thriving neighborhoods were cut in half and destroyed. And it wasn't just the neighborhoods of people of color. It was white neighborhoods as well. The one thing they all had in common was that it was all poor neighborhoods. They weren't putting any highways through rich folks' mansions on the Long Island Sound. That's right. And there's two parts to that.

One is it's expensive to put a highway on Waterfront and Long Island Sound, right? So, you know, there's a certain engineering logic. You put it into the poorest neighborhoods. But there was also this belief that they were doing people a favor, or at least that was what they were claiming. But, you know, again, this was fought everywhere it happened. Camden, New Jersey, you know, people went up and they tried to stop it. Most places they were unsuccessful. Some places they were successful. We're now seeing, by the way, that Boston buried its elevated highway. Seattle just buried its waterfront highway. So we're moving forward. We still have highways, but we're restoring some of the city to what it once was.

It makes you wonder what we're doing today that we think we're doing in order to help people out, but which is actually hurting them and will hurt people into the future. Like there must be manifold things. I'm sure the audience listening can think of a couple. What I noticed about towns up there, and this is true of towns all across the country, except for the very lately colonized parts of the country out in the West. But I think this is true down to the South as well, that every town would always say have a central crossroads part of the town, right? Where there's a post office and there's a city hall and there's a lot of businesses that are close together. And usually those parts of town are still very nice and there's some nice restaurants and things. a lot of businesses that are close together. And usually those parts of town are still very nice. And there's some nice restaurants and things. That's everybody's favorite part of town. But nobody lives there.

Everybody lives out in the outer lying areas. And those parts of the town are very ugly because there's, you know, four lane roads going by Home Depots and Walmarts and strip malls and things like that. And it always struck me that that older pattern of development, right, that those, that first crossroads, this is my guess. You can tell me you're the expert. But that earlier crossroads was built, you know, in the older, you know, in the 19th century when the town was first founded and everything else was built around it. And the strange bit is that we all like that older pattern of development better. It feels better to us. That's where we'd rather spend

our Friday nights, not on the highways and major roads that we built later, but which were at the time considered symbols of modernity. You have to understand, though, that, you know, people were escaping things when they were escaping those downtowns back in the day. So it was housing stock that was becoming dilapidated. It was people moving into town that maybe they didn't want to be near. It was not nice restaurants. At certain points, it was, you know, the gas station, the butcher, and so forth. We all like that now. But the idea of economic efficiency, the idea of the American dream of a quarter-acre lot and a single-family home, all of that, you know, those people honestly came to that. This kind of new urbanism is in some ways a fantasy about the past. You know, one man's old junk is another man's antique, I guess is the way to put it. Yeah, that's a fair point. And I'm certainly as guilty as anyone of romanticizing a past that I would like to see in the future.

I think that's a pretty universal human characteristic, and I think that's what I was doing in that last monologue. Thank you for calling me on it. Oh, I didn't mean to be. I didn't mean to be. It's just you called me an expert, and that always puts me on my toes. Well, let's talk about this. Just talking about – we've talked about the past of cars. Let's talk about the future of cars.

Obviously, the big change that everyone is anticipating is autonomous, driverless, self-driving cars. A lot of people have sort of preconceived notions about what that future is going to look like, that it's going to make everything more efficient and safer, and, oh, it's just around the corner and every problem will be solved once we reach it. and, oh, it's just around the corner and every problem will be solved once we reach it. What do you think about that idea from the perspective of someone who has a deep historical knowledge about our relationship with the car? I have to say I'm not impressed. Okay. Tell us why.

So the real time I think about is the 1970s. The end of the automobile is here. I'm going to remember, I was thinking about it on the, I have to say it, on the train on the way down to talk to you. A guy named John Jerome, he was the managing editor of Car and Driver, of all publications. And he wrote a book called The Death of the Automobile. And in the introduction, he says quite precisely, the premise of this book is that the automobile must go. And then what he does is take us through his imaginary, you know, better car. It's super safe.

It operates for 100,000 miles with no trouble. It's got a little electric motor you can plug in and unplug if it has a problem. But he says in the end, we shouldn't even build that super created is like building more highways to reduce traffic congestion. 30 years of building more highways, this is the 1970s, has only showed us that building more highways makes the problem worse. Yeah. So in reality, right, these are cars entering an automotive landscape. This is a way to make automobile travel safer, easier, cheaper. Anytime a product becomes safer, easier, cheaper, more convenient, we use more of it. So the only thing I expect out of driverless cars is more cars.

That's really fascinating. It makes me think of a piece I read a year or two ago about how everyone thought that the LED light, which is a huge technological advancement to go from incandescent light to compact fluorescent, we had a brief period, but then to LEDs, which use a fraction of the energy of incandescent lights. Everyone thought that would be a huge increase in the amount of energy we're using so that we'd use a lot less energy, that we'd go much greener. But the result is now that light is so much cheaper and greener, we're just using a lot more of it. We put LEDs everywhere. We're blasting far more light than we did before because the cost has gone down so much. That always stuck with me as a dynamic. And you're

saying you think the same thing would happen with an automobile. If we make it cheaper and easier and simpler to use, well, we're just going to use more of these things. Right. And why wouldn't we? You know, a fellow named Dan Sperling, who's just a great transportation advocate and engineer in California, has written a book about this and said the solution is not electric cars or driverless cars or any of these other things. It's pooling. Pooling is the answer. Right? What does he mean? He means carpooling. Now, carpooling is not a new technology. And yet, right, we haven't done it. You know, during the war, there was a famous poster that was car sharing is a must.

And the line was, it was a great poster. It showed a guy driving and there sitting next to him, even though he doesn't notice, is Adolf Hitler. And the tagline is, when you drive alone, you drive with Hitler. You drive with Hitler, yeah. And, you know, that kind of worked. People carpooled a lot more than they had in the past. I love it.

So blunt and to the point, you know. We don't need nuance in this. Let's just straight up, you're driving with Hitler. You're doing the devil's work. Yeah. I go back to John Jerome, 1972. We've been fighting this fight for half a century. People have been coming out of the woodwork since the 1960s, at the very least, saying this is madness. And instead of fewer automobiles and less automobile travel, it has metastasized. We're doing 3 trillion miles a year as a country. It's nuts. And people talk about with driverless cars, the issue is, well, if you have an electric driverless car, so it costs you less dollars and has less emissions to get around.

And you don't need to drive it yourself. Well, why wouldn't people literally just have their cars circling the block waiting for the, you don't need to find a parking space. You can just have your car circle and come pick you up later if it doesn't cost you very much to have it be on the road. These all seem like means for us to fill up the road with even more cars. And just because a car is electric doesn't mean that it has no emissions. It just has less, but that's not counting the emissions that go into making the car. So I can see that point how a technological improvement in the car isn't going to solve the problems created by cars. It could actually exacerbate them.

Yeah. Now, there's one other element to this with driverless cars. It does change the business model. Yeah. And so now we've got to get down into the weeds a little bit, I guess. One of the earliest business models for the automobile was with a company called the Electric Vehicle Company. And they were in New York City. They were in Chicago and Philadelphia and Boston.

And they had fleets of electric vehicles. You could get them on a long-term lease. You could buy them. They were fairly expensive. But you could also, they ran them as a taxi fleet. And that worked. And that was mobility as a service. That's what Uber and Lyft and the others are now now we're going to sell you by the mile right yeah and these things could stay on the

road forever because they had a battery swapping station 90 seconds to swap the battery out for a new one uh and this is what uber and lyft are all about problem with uber and lyft anybody that's followed the stock knows that they don't seem to have a path to profitability. Yeah, at least not without doubling their prices. They've got to either double their prices or fire all their drivers. Right. So their solution is driverless cars.

And Kalanick, who was the head of Uber, said it was an existential problem, not coming up with driverless cars. And in the early days of the Uber driverless car, I just learned this from a good book by Mike Isaac called Super Pumped, all about Uber. He said the internal code name for their driverless car system was a dollar sign. Well, then it killed a person. So that put the brakes on their plans a little bit, right? Their driverless car system in testing literally led to someone's death, which is, you know, that's my final concern about driverless cars is that once they come in, we already have organized our cities so much preferentially around what will around the needs of the car.

Right. That we have these rules. You can't step out into the street. You know, if you if you get hit by a car, it's your own fault. Therefore, you know, we're going to privilege the car itself. You know, all the laws favor the car and everyone else has to sort of stay in their little box while they wait for the cars to pass, right? And once we're in a world where, okay, driverless car technology works pretty well, but oh, well, the algorithms aren't that great. So you have to make sure that, you know, we've got to redesign all the roads so that driverless cars won't make any mistakes and to reduce the amount of random chaos that can happen. So that is where I really

started to get worried. Like I literally saw a piece where a driverless car executive speculated that, well, we should just build cages around sidewalks that opened at predetermined intervals so pedestrians can't walk out into the street and and that'll solve the problem. And that's a real concern for me, is that we're going to, once humans aren't behind the wheel, well, now we're just going to make the road safe for algorithms to drive, basically. I saw that same piece and I found it hilarious. One of the premises of the driverless car is that we are horrible drivers. And 40,000 people are dying a year because we're such horrible drivers. Yeah.

The reality is, and of course, as you know, now they're finding that actually we may have to wait a while on these driverless cars because they're not working all that well. Yeah. It turns out, right? It turns out we're not so horrible. It just turns out that driving is really, really hard. And it's not hard. You know, if you're on a NASCAR track, it's not so horrible. It just turns out that driving is really, really hard. Yeah. And it's not hard because, you know, if you're on a NASCAR track, it's not hard. You just go around in a circle. There's nothing to bump into. If you're on an interstate highway system, it's not that hard to do. It's really, really hard in the city or in a congested area or even in a small town. Why? Because you're being asked to drive on a system, on a set of roads and in a social environment where it's incredibly complicated. You have to make all kinds of decisions all the time. Be aware of this, be aware of that, watch out for this and worry about where

you're going tomorrow night for your dinner with so-and-so and oh my God, I overslept. It would be really nice if we simply fixed the world now. We don't have to put people in cages on the sidewalks. We do have to reorganize our physical environment for cyclists, for walkers, for people who are not in two-ton cages of their own. So that actually it becomes easier to drive and it becomes easier for driverless cars to negotiate the world. Right. Do you think that, I mean, you're a self-described car guy, right?

Which is different than how a lot of urbanists or people who hope to see the death of the car, people would describe themselves. Do you feel that, you know, we've had about a hundred years of car culture. Do you feel that there are good qualities about American car culture that we should do well to preserve? You know, I mean, I sort of jokingly make fun of car culture and, you know, espouse my rejection to it, but I'm not intolerant of it. And when I meet someone who really loves their car, I think that's a really cool, wonderful thing. And yeah, I mean, what's worth saving and protecting? barely put gas into the minivan right but she loves to get in that minivan and drive yeah and when she and when she does the iphone is not in her hand she's not allowed to have it in her hand

she's not at work she's not on uh social marketing i call it you know social media getting advertised to um she is really in the now and she will literally go out and we'll be like, where were you? Oh, I was driving. Where'd you go? Boston. Boston. Why'd you go to Boston? It's relaxing. And it's that, right?

So it's that driving as that, I'll call it interstitial space. You're sort of not at work. You're not susceptible to commoditized leisure. And you have to pay enough attention, one would hope, so you're not crashing into people, but not so much attention that your mind can't wander and you can't really think about other things. And people talk about this, right? You know, if I'm at home, the kids are bugging me. If I'm at work, well, it's work. But when I'm in the car, I am alone. And it's that experience of

driving. Now, does it have to be driving? I don't know. I don't think so. I get that out of walking and taking public transportation. I feel I have that same time. I look forward to that time. And for me, it's simply I just don't enjoy the activity of driving the way other people do. But yeah, that sort of time is really valuable to us. Yeah, I think so. And I agree with you. To be able to go out on a walk and to be able to ride on the bus and meditate and look at the – people watching is the best thing to do on the bus. All of that is – yeah.

All of that is there. Watching is the best thing to do on the bus. All of that is, yeah, all of that is there. I think what scares me, even with a driverless car, is you're basically going from a screen at work to a screen in the car to a screen at home. Right. And that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about losing that, and anything where you lose that interstitial space, I think, is lost. I think is lost. And then as you say, people do love their cars for whatever reason, for that sense of freedom, for that road trip, for those experiences we have with one another in the car. You know, I think a lot about the relationships people have through cars. And I think that's important. Teaching a kid to drive, that's a really unique experience. You know, your kid has certainly since puberty not wanted to learn anything from you or pay any attention to you. And suddenly they have to, right?

And suddenly they have to be with you and they want to be with you because you actually know something they don't know. And that remains, I found, and I think other people have spoken to it, a unique and pretty interesting experience. Yeah. And that experience of the road trip, when me and my partner Lisa started dating, the first thing that we did, she moved from Los Angeles to New York where I was living. And I flew to Los Angeles and we road tripped across the country in her little old Ford Ranger pickup truck. And, you know, we took two lane highways and went down through the South, went through Arizona and Texas and, you know, Louisiana up through the Mississippi Delta and saw the country. And it's still one of the most, my happiest memories and profound experiences I've had. And it's not an experience that, you know, I love long train trips too.

And I have great memories of long train trips, but there's a different quality to a road trip that you can only get in that way. And so I hope that, you know, my main beef with the car is as a means of commuting, as a way of getting to work and around your own community. But that doesn't mean that we need to lose all those experiences altogether getting to work and around your own community. But that doesn't mean that we need to lose all

those experiences altogether in every aspect of our lives. It just means that, hey, if we could get rid of the most harmful 80%, we'd be in much better shape. I wonder if you have, as my last question, you said that you've been feeling that the end of the American car is coming for decades now. Do you still feel that way? And what do you think the future holds for the car and American life? I want to tell you that my happy vision of the future is a world in which we all have our own automobiles, where we can turn off the GPS and do as you've just described, take that road trip, wander the back roads, get lost, and have new experiences,

but where we don't actually need to use the automobile for 80% of what we do with it. When I said I've been expecting the end of the car for a long time, I really feel like I'm once burned, twice shy. I really did, in the 1970s, expect the end of the automobile. We had movies about it. We had books about it. Serious people were talking about it. The D.C. Metro was built.

I really, really expected this beautiful new world of bicycles and mass transit. And then the 80s. And ever since then, it's just gotten worse. Bigger cars, more cars, driving faster, more aggressively, more highways, more sprawl. And so do I expect the end of the automobile? Oh, I hope so. But not in my lifetime. I hate to say it.

Well, but there are still positive signs. I mean, in Los Angeles here, they're building new subway lines. Now they are. They also just cut bus service a little bit. So maybe it's, are we going one step forward, two steps back, or the reverse? It's a little hard to say, but you do see in cities the awareness of mass transit and walkability as being virtues that we want to cultivate. You do see that growing, I feel, although I might be living in a bubble. I don't know. What do you think?

No, I think you're absolutely right. living in a bubble? I don't know. What do you think? No, I think you're absolutely right. And, you know, young people who grew up in the suburbs and became grownups, they want their kids to live in communities like that. I think we're far more conscious than we once were of the inequality created by an automobile-dependent landscape. And then, obviously, climate change, health consequences, all of those things are now mainstream. So I do think we are trying to move in a lot of places and in a lot of ways away from the automobile. I know, I think you're absolutely right. It is a very long road, no pun intended. We sell 16 or 17 million cars a year. About 20% of cars are over 18 years old. The average car is 12 years old. So if you said tomorrow we would stop selling cars entirely, we're still looking at a very long time before the car is gone.

Well, I thank you so much for coming on to walk us through that past and our possible future. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Dan. Well, Adam, it was great to be invited. I love talking about cars and I would be happy to talk with you again. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you again to Dan Albert for coming on the show. His book is Are We There Yet? The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless. Check it out. That is it for us this week on Factually. I'd like to thank our producer Dana Wickens, our researcher Sam Roudman,

and Andrew WK for our theme song. If you'd like more interesting information from me, check out my website adamconover.net and sign up for my mailing list. Until then, that's it for us this week on Factually. We'll see you next time. That was a HeadGum Podcast.