Drive (11 page)

Flying the flag isn't always free of controversy, though. GM may have gone too far when it created a commercial for the 2007 Chevy Silverado that flashed images of Rosa Parks on a bus, Martin Luther King, Jr., preaching, the Vietnam War, Nixon's resignation, the Towers of Light memorial in the Manhattan skyline and Hurricane Katrina while John Mellencamp's “Our Country” played in the background. Finally, a truck appeared from out of a wheat field as the voice-over announced, “This is our country. This is our truck.” Some people were upset that GM exploited Parks and King to sell trucks. Others were appalled at the inclusion of September 11 imagery. Still others bristled at the apparent parallel between the country's darker moments and the company's financial struggles. The suggestion seemed to be that once again what was good for GM really was good for America and vice versa. But it didn't matter: the market share for America's Big Three automakers continued to decline.

THIRTY-TWO PEOPLE
in a sleepy Swedish seaside town bought Volvo S40s on the same day in 2003. Director Spike Jonze, best known for films such as
Being John Malkovich
and
Adaptation
, even made an eight-minute documentary about it. As hard as it is to believe that anyone would fall for such a hoax, the campaign—which featured an ad, the documentary and a spoof website that purported to debunk the story with a second documentary—worked, and more than half a million Europeans visited the Volvo website.

If car ads on television are increasingly stodgy and predictable, at least the internet offers hope for more innovative campaigns. And with new technologies such as TiVo that make avoiding commercials even easier, the carmakers and their ad agencies have little choice but to try going online to reach existing and potential customers. In what may have been an act of desperation as much as anything else, a floundering Ford launched its “Bold Moves” campaign in 2006. Along with broadcast and print ads, it included a website showing a thirty-part “behind the scenes” documentary series about the company's turnaround attempt. Ford also announced plans to “develop and produce a new reality-driven TV series” that could include “anything from the design of a concept car to the development of a new high-performance Mustang, with unlimited opportunities for everyday customers to participate at one level or another.” If auto and ad industry blogs were any indication of the general reaction, most people would rather the company actually built bolder products than create bolder marketing campaigns.

While Ford may not have generated much excitement, at least it didn't face a backlash. Volkswagen was embarrassed when an online British ad that appeared to be for its Polo created a stir early in 2005. The spot showed a man wearing a black-and-white kaffiyeh scarf—obvious shorthand to indicate he was an Arab— who stops his car beside a crowded restaurant patio. When he presses a detonator button, the explosion remains contained within the vehicle. The screen shows the VW logo and the words
“Polo. Small but tough.” The video quickly became popular on YouTube, but Volkswagen denied any involvement in the creation of the ad and it soon came out that the spot had been made by an agency hoping to make a name for itself with an impressive show reel.

Volkswagen may have felt burned by the loss of control inherent in online sharing, but others keep trying. In 2006, Chevrolet unveiled a website that offered prizes for creating the best thirty second commercials for the 2007 Tahoe using the company's video and music. The company hoped the user-generated ads would spread around the internet through email and on video-hosting sites. But many of the homemade ads mocked the SUV as a gasguzzler. Perhaps GM understood viral marketing well enough to expect the negative ads and didn't care, especially since the campaign generated plenty of publicity in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere. On the other hand, the campaign didn't do much to improve the brand's reputation with the very audience it targeted: young people. Either way, carmakers will likely keep trying to take advantage of the internet, even if it means their ads become more scandalous and offensive—and risky.

IN 1915, TWO MEN
on a cliff admire the beautiful gorge below while their car perches beside them and the copy reads, “The Hudson stands at the peak place in its class. It took four years to get there.” A 1949 Willys Jeepster ad urges: “Take off from the crowded highway, the mob is not for you. See the unspoiled spots and strange scenes.” Cars have always offered the promise of getting away from it all, even if we rarely do. In what must be a bitter irony for many environmentalists, automakers have long sold their products as a way to escape to nature. And now SUV commercials that show the ecologically ruinous behemoths in remote spots, including atop buttes or on the edge of mountains, are common. One spot ends with the driver sitting in front of a waterfall, his Tahoe beside him, while a 2006 Hummer H3 ad—a takeoff on the
Steve McQueen film
The Great Escape
—shows three friends breaking out of their office cubicles and driving around rugged country; the tag line is “Escape Greatly.”

I'd escaped the Detroit suburbs—and was happy about it. The fall colours were starting to appear and there wasn't a cloud in the sky, so it was a great day for a long-distance drive. I headed west on Interstate 94, but was soon reminded that rather than freeing us to escape to nature, cars frequently collide with it. I stopped for gas near the town of Parma and exchanged pleasantries with the man behind the register. He seemed slightly awkward or unsettled, and I understood why when he said, “I hope my day ends better than it started.” Turns out he'd hit a deer on the way to work, crumpling his front end.

Large animals such as deer are a danger to cars and drivers, but most wildlife doesn't stand a chance. Sprawl and road building destroy their habitats, and pollutants slowly poison their bodies. And if they survive all that, they may end up as one of the estimated one million mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians killed every day on American asphalt. Sure enough, I began to see a lot of roadkill: people pulled bloody deer to the gravel shoulder, but most of the other lifeless creatures—smushed squirrels and raccoons, for example—just stayed where they had died.

If I was going to spend the next couple of months on the road, I wanted to avoid two things: accidents (with animals or ditches or other cars) and speeding tickets. I've heard so many Canadians, especially those who've driven down to Florida, complain about getting tickets in the United States, and fear of speed traps always adds a smidgen of stress when I drive (though apparently not enough that I'd actually slow down). But with a posted speed limit of seventy miles per hour, and the flow of traffic at eighty or so, I leaned back and cruised down the highway. I was enjoying myself—even if I wasn't a professional driver on a closed course or even riding in a shiny new set of wheels.

5
Indianapolis
Road Trips,

Pilgrimages and Other Journeys

MY CAR'S ODOMETER,
which I'd switched from metric to imperial as soon as I'd crossed into the United States, hit 100,000 about 25 miles north of the Indiana border. As a little kid, I loved to watch when several of the numbers rolled over at the same time, and seeing 99,999 become 100,000 would have been a rare treat. But with the digital readout on today's cars, most of the charm of that experience is lost.

Twin racing stripes running through the vast, flat land, Indiana's part of Interstate 69 is not particularly scenic, so I'm sure many people who often travel it complain of boredom, but it was all new to me and the cornfields, barns and farmhouses, richly lit by the afternoon sun, had a certain bucolic appeal. Having left Detroit and entered the Midwest and a state I'd never been to before, I was starting to feel like I was really on my road trip.

Just one of many rituals, rites of passage and other momentous events in our lives that take place in cars, the road trip is one we're likely to repeat again and again. After all, we can only lose our virginity in a car once. Perhaps the best thing about a road trip is that it's not always clear what's more important or more fun: the destination or the journey.

In some ways, that was true of my current trip. I was on my way to Los Angeles, but I wasn't sure of my exact route or what adventures I'd get into along the way. For now, I was solo, though several friends had promised to join me; in fact, I would be meeting the first one in St. Louis in a few days. But as I sped south, I imagined that many people had travelled this same
highway on what were pilgrimages as much as road trips because, for many American race fans, Indianapolis is holy ground.

ABOUT AN HOUR
north of Indianapolis, I passed a billboard that proclaimed, “James Dean Country: Where Cool Was Born.” Dean, who was born in Marion, Indiana, and grew up in nearby Fairmount, was the poster boy for living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse. After playing small parts in a few films, he starred in just three—
East of Eden, Rebel without a Cause
and
Giant
—before he crashed his Porsche 550 Spyder and died at the age of twenty-four.

Certainly death by car is not rare, and famous people don't get any special treatment. Big names who've died on the road include author Albert Camus; journalist David Halberstam; painter Jackson Pollock; General George Patton; hockey players Tim Horton, Pelle Lindbergh and Keith Magnuson; musicians Marc Bolan, Eddie Cochran and Harry Chapin; actress Jayne Mansfield; actress-turned-princess Grace Kelly; and the celebrity that our celebrity-obsessed society still mindlessly obsesses over, Princess Diana.

Rebel Without a Cause
hadn't even hit the theatres when Dean died on his way to Salinas, California, where he planned to race his sports car, nicknamed “Little Bastard.” This was little more than trivia to me when I was younger and going through my James Dean phase, because I was never a race fan. As a thirteen-year-old, I went with a friend and his father to the Canadian Grand Prix at Mosport, where the Flying Scot, Jackie Stewart, won. I enjoyed myself, but watching cars roar around a track was no threat to my love of hockey. In fact, it seemed a bit pointless and I never attended another race. And given that a weekend of stock car racing means burning six thousand gallons of leaded 110 octane racing fuel in machines without emissions controls, hurtling cars around in circles now seems worse than pointless.

Not everyone feels that way. The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (better known as NASCAR) is the top spectator sport in the United States and ranks behind only the National Football League in television ratings, while Formula One is an obsession in Europe and elsewhere (just about everywhere in the developed world, except North America). Auto racing has many fans in Canada—I know a few—but it is really just a subculture, so I had little sense of its seminal role in the love of the car around the globe.

Humans have always competed to get there first—either on our own (running or swimming or skiing) or in some kind of conveyance (chariot, sled, canoe)—so it was only natural that we would test each other in cars too. Initially, auto races were performance tests to determine who'd come up with the best design, so durability was as important as speed. The first race took place in France in 1894. A year later, Frank Duryea won on a 54-mile course in Chicago. With an average speed of 7.3 miles per hour, he beat three other gas-powered cars and two electrics in ten hours and twenty-three minutes.

Early on, just finishing was an accomplishment, but before long that wasn't enough. From 1900 to 1905, national teams vied for the Gordon Bennett Cup in races between European cities. France won four times and auto racing became a popular spectator sport in that country. So popular that in 1906 the Automobile Club de France held a Grand Prix race at Le Mans. Today, many countries—including the United States—host Formula One races (F1 is the designation of the class of open-wheeled cars in Grand Prix racing) and the cars exceed two hundred miles per hour. Stateside, the first major trophy for auto racing was the Vanderbilt Cup. The inaugural race, held on the dirt roads of Long Island in 1904, attracted a large crowd. The Indianapolis 500, which started in 1911, is a two-hundred-lap race held every Memorial Day. It became a phenomenon of American culture and one of the most popular sporting events in the world,
with more than 250,000 fans in the stands on race day and millions more watching on television. Despite that heritage, infighting led to a split within the racing class, and the subsequent dilution of competition means the Indy 500 is no longer the biggest spectacle on the racing calendar.

While many auto sports—ranging from road racing to drag racing to demolition derbies—have their fans in the United States today, none can touch NASCAR. The roots of stock car racing can be found in the bootlegging business that flourished during Prohibition. The moonshine runners tuned their cars so they'd go faster and handle better on the winding Appalachian mountain roads and, if need be, to outrun the cops (and after Prohibition, the tax agents). Inevitably, they started racing these cars. By the early 1950s, stock car racing was catching on with Southern spectators. In “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” a 1964
Esquire
story about the legendary whiskey runner turned racer, Tom Wolfe writes: “Here was a sport not using any abstract devices, any bat and ball, but the same automobile that was changing a man's own life, his own symbol of liberation, and it didn't require size, strength and all that, all it required was a taste for speed, and the guts.”

At first, the rest of America paid little attention to country boys wildly racing old cars on dirt tracks. “It was immediately regarded as some kind of animal irresponsibility of the lower orders,” observes Wolfe. “It had a truly terrible reputation. It was—well, it looked rowdy or something.” But once Detroit automakers saw an opportunity to build brand loyalty with this crowd and started pumping money into the sport, stock car racing took off nationally.