In his 1936 essay “Farewell, My Lovely!,” E. B. White humorously and poignantly mourns the bygone heyday of the Ford Model T. Introduced in 1908, the car quickly “enthroned” an eager American populace, then ran out of road within 20 years. The vehicle succeeded in ways that today seem unworkable. It was stylish, accessible, technologically revolutionary, and above all, affordable. “It was the miracle God had wrought,” says White.
At the start of his forthcoming book, The Atlas of Car Design, automotive journalist Jason Barlow notes that White, affectionate as he was for his Tin Lizzie, may have lagged a few years behind the times. “By the 1920s,” Barlow writes, the Model T was “derided as a farmer’s car.” But perhaps what “Farewell, My Lovely!” falls victim to is an affliction felt by so many car enthusiasts—that tenderness for the vehicles of our past.
Barlow himself recognizes the sentiment. He offers The Atlas of Car Design as an antidote to longing as well as an homage to innovation and its forward drive. “The automobile must change or it will die, and this is an existential moment, for sure,” he writes. “But the world of automotive design has never been less than fascinating … and only a fool would bet against it continuing to be so.”
A fool indeed. The Atlas of Car Design, written by Barlow alongside Guy Bird, begins with the 19th-century Duryea brothers’ Motor Wagon and continues up to Elon Musk’s Cybertruck—to speak only of the North American chapter. The book covers vehicles from more than 30 countries, produced by almost 200 different manufacturers. It describes each car’s place in its era and wider world while emphasizing the technical intricacies that differentiate it from predecessors and competitors. The photographs of early and contemporary German, Japanese, and Italian models are especially fascinating, and often entertaining (see 1955’s BMW Isetta).
Thinking of his old love, White reminisced that “the days were golden, the nights were dim and strange.” The Atlas of Car Design honors such golden days. As for the strange, unknown nights of car production ahead, the book makes it abundantly clear that they may become golden themselves. —Jack Sullivan
The Atlas of Car Design: The World’s Most Iconic Cars, by Jason Barlow, will be published on October 4 by Phaidon
Jack Sullivan is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL