American Men and Their Cars

Around 1960, my friend Kenny told me that his dad had bought an unusual car, a Volkswagen Karman Ghia. He explained that his dad had questioned the new car salesman extensively about the car’s reliability and that the salesman had convinced him that the car could make it from Oklahoma—apparently where Kenny’s dad’s parents lived--to Dallas without any mechanical problems.












At the time I thought it was an unusual purchase. In reading Ernest Dichter’s Handbook of Consumer Motivations (1964), I found an explanation that makes sense to me:

The foreign car as a social introduction. Interviews with the owners of small foreign cars show that they welcome the many opportunities their car present for them to relate with other people. They like attracting attention, having people stop them and talk to them. They like being singled out and in such a way that the establishing of a personal relation, however brief, seems worthwhile. . . .They like the feeling of being members in a fraternity of foreign-car owners and drivers.

Mr. Jones, a college-educated man, made his fortune as a paper salesman. I think he enjoyed the attention he got from making sales calls in his Ghia—a not too dissimilar motivation from what likely prompted Mr. Goldstein to drive a station wagon with a machine gun mounted on the roof.

Ernest Dichter explains in The Strategy of Desire (1960) that American men treasure, nearly above all else, their memories of the first cars, and also, if it ever happened, their first new cars.

Here’s a video clip shot 25 years ago of my father describing his first car and his first new car.


Oh, I loved my first car—a 1961 Austin Healy bug-eyed Sprite. Without a girlfriend to distract me, I tenderly disassembled every piece of the engine. I soaked the carburetor in carburetor cleaner and forcefully injected every hole and crevice with a cleaning spray, then used a screwdriver to fine tune the engine so that it made a deep blah, blah, blah through the glass pack muffler.















My friend Jim soon gained a Sunbeam Alpine, and Tom rounded up an Austin Healy 3000 before stepping up to a U.S. muscle car—a new GTO. Unfortunately all three of us boys had wrecked or had blown up our loves within months of latching onto them.










By the late 1960s, I had been sucked in to the idea promoted by Doyle Dane Bernbach's advertising campaign that the VW bug was an anti-car, the "people's car" (yeah, of Nazism), and I remained loyal to that brand for several years.