TRANSPORTATION: The Bridegroom’s Lament

The U.S. citizen’s infatuation with his flashy, curvaceous, chromium-loaded postwar car was wearing a little thin. Once he had been madly certain that she was the only girl for him. Now he was discovering that she was a trifle touchy and craved expensive beauty treatments. Automobile clubs in various cities and the American Automobile Association were hearing his sputtering complaints.

His biggest gripe was over maintenance. In 1939 the cost of repairing, greasing, parking, storing and washing the private motorist’s automobile had totaled $462 million dollars. It rose to $577 million in 1941, sank to an average of $490 million a year during the restricted war years. But in 1946, hand in hand with other costs, it jumped to $814 million, in 1947 to $995 million and seemed certain to be more than a billion dollars in 1948.

Many a car owner cried that postwar models seemed to have been purposely constructed to “damage easy and repair hard.” On several new cars the whole engine had to be unbolted and lifted before the crankcase pan could be removed. Fenders had become wholly or partly an integral part of body panels: before smashed fenders could be replaced, the whole panel had to be removed. A Denver dealer who sold and installed a rear fender on a 1948 model for $20.75 charged $85 for the same job on a 1949 model of the same car.

Widening bodies to the fender line had made the cars roomier, but had also made the whole automobile, including doors, more susceptible to traffic damage. Parking-lot operators complained that they could store only two postwar cars where three earlier models had stood.

And the streamlined look of the new models had not been accomplished without certain annoying disadvantages. Some roofs were so low that a medium-sized man had to take off his hat to sit down—a phenomenon which caused Manhattan Designer Raymond Loewy to dash off a critical cartoon for the benefit of the Society of Automotive Engineers.

The automobile clubs reported other gripes: angled windshields gave more vision in many directions, but they also admitted more glare. Short drivers had difficulty in seeing over the hood. Slanting rear windows looked pretty but they collected snow in winter. Almost all the new cars were bigger or more powerful than their earlier prototypes; they rode easier, had a faster pickup and greater speed. Compared to prewar models they looked like custom-built guided missiles. What was worrying their owners was the job of keeping them that way.