If you are eagerly looking forward to freeing yourself from the hell of driving, you might want to pick up “Are We There Yet?,” Dan Albert's engaging study of national automobility. He answers one sense of the book's questioning title this way: “No matter what automakers, futurists, and journalists may proclaim, true self-driving cars remain experimental.” In short, you won't be seeing a marketable robot car anytime soon.
Mr. Albert, a historian and a contributor to the magazine n+1, traces the path that the American automobile has taken over the decades and that it may take in the decades to come. Along the way he shares personal tales of the cars he has owned since his teenage years—most of them laughable clunkers—and describes the ways in which cars eased his male growing pains and now affect his life as a father.
The road we've traveled so far may be familiar, but it is worth revisiting in Mr. Albert's deft overview. Henry Ford's Model T, of course, began the American love affair with cars. Tin Lizzies might have all looked the same, Mr. Albert notes, but you could customize them—studded wheels to plow fields, a hitch to pull a hay cart, front skis to traverse snow. You could race them, too. They quickly inspired affection in their owners. E.B. White wrote of his Model T: “I can still feel my old Ford nuzzling me at the curb, as though looking for an apple in my pocket.”
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