The Car: The rise and fall of the machine that made the modern world

The car that we know - petrol or diesel-driven and operated by a human - will soon be replaced by electric cars which, in turn, will become self-driving. The reign of the car, which began in the late nineteenth century, will have lasted at most 150 years. More than any other technology - more than television, mobile phones, more even than the internet - cars have transformed our culture. On the streets we notice people talking on their phones, but custom and habit have blinded us to the more astounding daily spectacle: the sound and smell of billions of tons of motorised metal, rubber and glass. Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their limitless power and their complex systems of meanings. Bryan Appleyard's brilliantly insightful book places the car where it belongs: as the central technology of our lives, cultures, politics and history. It is a narrative-led evocation of how this momentous invention has produced equally good and bad outcomes, both freed us and imprisoned us. It is intended to make us notice the car, to see its extravagance and its genius, in its dying years as the crucial machine of modernity.

About the Author :
Bryan Appleyard was educated at Bolton School and King's College, Cambridge. He was Financial News Editor and Deputy Arts Editor at The Times until 1984. He has subsequently written for many publications including the Sunday Times, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Spectator and the New Statesman. He has been Feature Writer of the Year three times at the British Press Awards and Interviewer of the Year once. In the 2019 Birthday Honours list he was appointed Commander of the British Empire for services to the arts and journalism.

Review :
The car has totally changed our society. Bryan Appleyard is just the writer to get to the heart of this phenomenon. As cars undergo their latest electro-smart evolution, Bryan Appleyard's extraordinary cultural history of them explains how they changed our everyday experience. This is a brilliantly written and thoughtful account of the machines which made our lives recognisably modern. An entertaining and superbly researched story about the industrial age's most astonishing and enchanting creation. Very few people could do justice to this extraordinary story - and with this book Bryan Appleyard sets the bar impossibly high for anyone else. An exhilarating spin through the history of the machine that transformed our culture from its earliest incarnation to its imminent demise. The prose is sharp, well organised and well researched. Bryan Appleyard is well known to readers as a thoughtful interpreter of our frets and anxieties... a thinking man's Clarkson. This engaging history of the motor car is full of rich anecdotes and detail. This fond look at the history, development and significance of the automobile is supercharged by wonderful writing... As sharply as he draws portraits of the key players, Appleyard, one of the liveliest minds in journalism, is at his most acute when musing on the cultural effects of the car. Appleyard, an unashamed petrol-head, rightly celebrates the pleasures of driving and the freedoms that the automobile has brought us... immensely readable. [Audio edition review] An enjoyable ride through the history of the automobile ... This is a romp of a book. After a provocative introduction on the social significance of the automobile, Bryan Appleyard takes us through a motorcade of inventors ... John Sackville has one of the most taking voices in the audio industry, sounding enthusiastic and endlessly interested in a way that makes it impossible not to keep listening. Appleyard draws upon a vast knowledge of science, mechanics and cultural lore as he successfully supports his thesis that the car didn't merely influence the modern world - it created it. An encyclopedic retrospective of how the car came to be, how it has evolved over the past century and how, as the subtitle suggests, it has shaped the world we live in.