The Weekly Screed (#708)

My car, the mother… board
by David Benjamin

PARIS — Over the past few months, I’ve been conducting an informal survey, asking friends and strangers this question: “What’s the best car ever made?”

My dad’s choice was a ’55 Chevrolet Bel Air in which he used to kick up gravel and raise hell in Tomah. Mine was also a Chevy, the ’57 Bel Air driven by Dick Albright, my best friend in high school. Other selections I gathered along the way included, of course, the ’65 Mustang, the ’73 slant-six Plymouth Duster, the ’63 Citroen DS, the ’56 Chrysler New Yorker, the ’64 Olds Toronado, the ’66 Alfa Romeo Spider, the ’64 Lincoln Continental, the ’78 Pontiac Trans Am, the ’64 Jaguar XKE, the ’83 Mercedes-Benz turbo-diesel, the ’69 Beetle and the ’71 Dodge Charger. A homeless guy on the Strip in Las Vegas just said to me, “Studebaker. Any Studebaker. They were made of steel.”

Notably common to all these choices is that none of them even remotely reflects 21st-century automotive genius. The closest was the ’95 Hummer, which a post-Boomer regarded as kind of nifty.

I’m not a car guy. I wasn’t curious about this question until the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas was invaded by every auto manufacturer on earth, each promoting what they call the “center stack,” that blinking, beeping multimedia tumor that has swollen up between the driver and passenger seats. Your typical “center-stack” — which has nothing to do with transportation — has an eerie resemblance to a Roswell alien and includes controls for communications, emergency services and global positioning. But its main purpose is what the industry calls “infotainment” (a term that rivals “webinar” as the ugliest biz-lingo coinage ever conceived).

In Dick’s beautiful ’57 Bel Air, the “center stack” consisted of an AM radio with five buttons to pre-set favorite stations. Closer to the steering wheel, there were buttons (or “touch-pads”) to control the heater, the fan and a windshield defroster that took five minutes to melt an area the size of a quarter. There was also a cigarette lighter. This wasn’t much but the result was a dashboard with an elegant simplicity and a space-age aesthetic that stands the test of time. That old dash still looks way cool after 58 years.

Dick’s Bel Air, bless its heart, had broad sprawlable bench seats, front and back. It was built before the unfortunate advent of the bucket seat, a pernicious Puritan regression that ended the era of front-seat sex — even the head-on-shoulder snuggling depicted in countless Fifties lithographs and car ads in Look, Life and The Saturday Evening Post.

No mass-production vehicle since 1957 has improved significantly on the Bel Air’s roominess, sturdiness, mechanical integrity, power, comfort, design or ability to pick up girls. In many respects, cars were pretty much perfect by 1960. Nothing more needed to be done.

Certainly, there have been advances since then, with better production technology, quality control, safety and fuel economy, smaller engines with equivalent power, pollution reductions, lighter materials, air conditioning, cup-holders, FM radio, etc. But this is all engineering. A lot of stuff got better inside the car while the exterior up and lost its mojo.

When you think about cool-looking cars, you think classic Porsche or James Bond’s Aston Martin. You think of the Beach Boys ’62 409, Johnny Bond’s Hot Rod Lincoln, Steve McQueen’s ’68 Mustang, or that wonderfully weird-looking ’51 Le Sabre that Buick was afraid to manufacture. “Cool” is not a word that springs to mind today at the sight of a four-wheel lozenge-with-headlights that looks like GlaxoSmithKline designed it to fit less painfully into snug orifices for laxative purposes.

My current car is an ’01 Sentra. Its moving parts date back pretty much to ’57 and it works fine — as long as I submit it regularly to mechanics who know what to tighten, where to lubricate and how often. Since I got it (used), my only major repair was replacing the electronic control unit (ECU). It died at 70,000 miles and rendered the car instantly inert. My new ECU cost $2,000. The dealer told me he’d had six similar failures — which doesn’t sound like many ‘til you multiply by Nissan’s 1,100 dealerships in just the USA. That’s $2.2 million in one model year for replacing a motherboard that can keep a car from running but can’t make it run.

When I look at my survey, I notice that everybody’s idea of a great car doesn’t have a motherboard.

Luddite though I seem, I’m not opposed to automotive progress, even under the hood. Eventually, I believe, all cars will be electric or hydrogen- powered. The question is, should they continue to look like half-sucked cough-drops? Or might it be nicer if they resembled that ’55 T-Bird my uncle Herb drove into town one day? Or that truly cherry ’61 ‘Vette (later updated to a ’63, then a ’64 Sting Ray) that Martin Milner and George Maharis used to tool around America in “Route 66”?

(Of course, there will still be ugly cars on the road. Always have been — the Edsel, for example. The AMC Pacer was an aesthetic travesty. And every Oldsmobile in the 1980’s should’ve been driven to the nearest quarry and torched by juvenile delinquents. The ugliest of future cars will be the “autonomous,” or “self-driven” variety. They’ll look like stretch sedan-chairs and they’ll have their own lane on the road. Inside, without drivers — whipping along at 18 mph — will be the blind and the halt, the unlicensed and the DUI-disabled, and thousands of geezers who had their licenses revoked. I picture them in there napping, watching “Wheel of Fortune” re-runs on the Game Show Channel, playing canasta.)

I’m not opposed to progress but I recoil at useless complexity. I know that computers in cars are here to stay. But why so many so fast? Neither my old ’66 Ford Econoline (Rosemary) nor my ’94 Dodge Lancer (the Beige Bomb) contained a single CPU. Now we’re making cars with 300 CPUs requiring a fussy network of operating systems, links, buses and bypasses to keep from shorting each other out and frying the magneto. Senator Edward Markey has just issued a report about the vulnerability of car computers to being “hacked.” Someone far, far away, he warns, can now seize control of your Beamer and run you remotely into a not-so-remote bridge abutment. Don’t laugh. Sen. Markey’s nightmare was the thoroughly credible plot last year for an unfunny episode of “Person of Interest.”

Cars don’t need to be laptops on wheels. They don’t need to be smartphones that can go ninety while scheduling Junior’s piano lessons, monitoring Suzie’s soccer practice, surveilling Dad’s lunch meeting and superimposing “Game of War” in transparent 3D on the windshield.

Oncoming traffic ought to be the only thing visible in, on or beyond the windshield — even though it’s boring. The steering wheel ought to be the only thing the driver controls by touch. People don’t need to be convinced by advertisers that careless, discourteous and distracted driving is OK now because technology can take over and steer the car and hit the brakes and veer across three lanes while you text sweet nothings to your cutie or try to find the burning cigarette in your lap.

A car can be beautiful, as has been proven a thousand times. A car can be fun, as Burt Reynolds demonstrated perhaps more convincingly (and recklessly) than any other driver. A car can be simple enough to be kept in flawless repair by an East L.A. high school dropout with a six-drawer toolbox and a manual grease gun.

Over its more than two centuries of existence, the car has become far more than its inventors — Cugnot, Rivaz, Karl Benz and even Henry Ford — ever imagined. Depending on what a person makes of it, a car can play many roles. A car can be bedroom or playroom, dining room or barroom, boardroom or hangout, or even — in a pinch — a household. It can be a sidekick, a spouse, a shrink, an adventure, an escape, a phallic facsimile, a feminist flying-carpet, a lifesaver, a murder weapon and a coffin. A car can be a cash cow for automakers, especially if it’s glutted with features, options, gimcracks, doo-dads, tweeters, woofers, undercoating and a “center-stack” packed with HD, Netflix, killer apps, satellite maps and dancing colored lights. But, for all that, a car is nothing but sheet metal and noxious fluids if it doesn’t get you from here to there.

A car still has to be a car.