It's Been a Bumpy Ride

Blame Motor Trend.

1958 Cadillac

The next time you hit a speed bump or a pothole and it knocks your spare glasses off the dashboard, loosens a filling and irritates the hell out of you, thank all the boys at the car magazines—you know, Road & Track, Car and Driver, Motor Trend. They’re the ones who caused all this.

Of course, not directly. If they had run around saying “These cars aren’t rough enough!” People might have gotten suspicious. What they did was a lot more insidious than that. To understand, you have to go back 70 years to when all this began.

Back in the late 1950s cars had soft suspensions to soak up the bumps before they got to you. Cars were also longer, making any pothole less of a jolt because the angle of change was less when you hit a dip.

That’s because cars were made for American roads and American drivers. Our highways were smooth and straight; gasoline was cheap. People wanted smooth rides and they got them.

But that wasn’t what the car-mag boys wanted, for two reasons. One, what would they have gained by saying, “These cars are great, Detroit! Keep it up!” Second, the car-mag boys didn’t like driving smoothly in straight lines or gradual curves—they wanted to be racers!

1959 Plymouth Fury

And they especially wanted to be racers like the ones in Europe, where cars went around on tracks with various corners and curves, not like the Indy 500 where you just turned left all day. What they didn’t think about was that European races descended from European roads—tracks that dated back to Roman days, with abrupt changes often based on where cattle or sheep turned for centuries.

European cars were smaller to fit smaller roads (and higher gas prices) and made to take sharper turns because that’s what European roads had. It might have seemed exciting to the Road & Track guys, but mostly because it was different, and different in a way Europeans couldn’t control.

From about 1960 on, car magazines in this country complained if an American car couldn’t take a corner at three G’s. They gave the highest rankings to cars that seemed more European. Which would have been fine in Europe, but not on a Nebraska interstate. Still, we got the cars the car-mag guys wanted because they ranked their desires highly and people bought those cars, The “energy crisis” of the 1970s pushed people into smaller cars, but Americans never really liked them. Today gasoline is as cheap as it ever was, adjusted for inflation, and people are back to big SUVs and pickups.

1955 Packard (ask grandpa)

But the bumps are still there because the car-mag guys want to feel them. In reality, the cars of the late 1950s and early 1960s did their jobs just fine, since people either used their cars to go to work in slow traffic or to take nice relaxing road trips. We didn’t want or need to travel skinny European goat tracks.

The technology now exists to make a car that you NEVER feel the bumps in. Cameras could see bumps or potholes approaching and adjust the wheels to match them, resulting in no pain at all—but that wouldn’t fit the Formula One dreams of the car-mag boys, so the bangs and bumps continue. Hope you enjoy them.

NOTE: I put “energy crisis” in scare quotes because it wasn’t about energy, it was about money. Richard Nixon took our dollar off the gold standard in 1971. Three-dollar-a-barrel oil from Saudi Arabia was okay as long as fourteen barrels could equal an ounce of gold for the exporters, but once it became funny money, no. In addition, Nixon had instituted a wage-price freeze in 1971 that was hugely unpopular, so he dropped it except for the controls on gasoline prices. So, amid 1970s inflation, the Arabs couldn’t get higher prices for their oil and they couldn’t exchange it for gold, so they shut it off. Our government lied to us and called it an “energy crisis.” Notice that 50 years later, we haven’t run out of oil. There’s no crisis for energy, just money.