Do you ever wonder why American automotive history can have such a dumbed-down quality? I would argue that a big reason why is that the subject has never gained much traction in the scholarly realm. A few years ago H. Donald Capp, the now-former president of the Society of Automotive Historians, described the problem in a more diplomatic way than I just did:
“By the end of the twentieth century, the automobile helped transform the century in ways that might have been difficult for those at the beginning of that century to imagine. . . .
“Yet there seems to be something of a serious case of ‘autophobia’ within the hallowed groves of academe. Courses being offered at the college and university level regarding the automobile and its history and culture are, to be polite, very few and very far between. . . .
In essence, this has led to much of the work and interest in the history and the cultural aspects of the automobile being essentially ‘contracted out’ to those dwelling outside those hallowed groves. . . .” (Capp, 2020; p. 3)
In using the term “autophobia” Capps was playing with words because its standard definition is a fear of being alone (Wikipedia, 2025). However, that meaning arguably works because to be an academic who specializes in automotive history can be an exceptionally lonely task — so many avoid it.
As we have discussed here, this is not a subject that has its own academic programs, scholarly associations and peer-reviewed journals. So if you want to advance your career as a scholar, automotive history is a bad specialty choice.
Why the scholarly avoidance of automotive history?
Scholars have traditionally studied all kinds of obscure subjects, so why do they tend to avoid automotive history when it is arguably so central to American life since the dawn of the 20th Century?
I suspect that the key reason is economic. There isn’t a natural market for automotive historians like there is for auto repair technicians or automaker executives. Thus, the field has arguably needed philanthropists to help build the scholarly infrastructure needed for a market to develop. That apparently hasn’t happened — at least not in a coordinated enough way to give the auto history field the boost it needed to stand on its own two feet.
Also see ‘Wheel spinning happens when car buffs and scholarly historians don’t collaborate’
This strikes me as an institutional failure on the part of the major auto-related foundations, museums and individual big donors. I suspect that these folks have a phobia — not about cars, but regarding the value of scholarship. Why? Because they may see it as pointy-headed malarky or antithetical to corporate interests.
Whatever the reason, the result is that our collective understanding of the automobile’s role in society is strikingly superficial. And that can undercut our ability to use the lessons of the past to make smart decisions about the automobile’s future.
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Capps, H. Donald; 2020. “President’s Perspective.” SAH Journal (membership required). May/June issue, No. 304: p. 3.
- Wikipedia; 2025. “Autophobia.” Page last modified February 12.
PHOTOGRAPHY:
- Banner image of “The Thinker” sculpture by Auguste Rodin at the Maryhill Museum of Art.
I think autos and the auto industry receive more or less appropriate attention in academia. Auto enthusiasts, historians included, have an inflated view of the subject. We also tend to blind ourselves to all the damage automobiles have done to our environment, our cities, and our society. Americans got over their so-called love affair with the automobile a while ago, but we enthusiasts tend to cling.
How you land on this question may be partly influenced by what you consider to be “automotive history.” There is a big difference between the historical pieces posted on pop-culture websites that emphasize names, dates and product features and scholarly studies that delve much more deeply into a topic — and may develop theoretical frameworks to explain their analysis.
Let’s be honest: A primary motivation of pop-culture writers is to make that cash register ring. So stories tend to be short, breezy and have lots of imagery. In contrast, the primary motivation of the serious scholar is to “add to knowledge.” I would argue that a big reason why American auto history has advanced so slowly is that it is too heavily dominated by pop-culture media.
You rightly complain that we “tend to blind ourselves” to the automobile’s negative impacts. This is partly caused by pop-culture media, which are less likely to address those impacts than academics. However, another factor is that the lack of a critical mass of auto history scholars can result in research that is not as comprehensive and rigorous as it could be.
For example, what is arguably the leading scholarly book on the automobile in American life was written by John Heitmann. The second edition of this book was published relatively recently – in 2018 — but it did not meaningfully address climate change. I would suggest that if Heitmann had written the equivalent book in a larger field such as political science, the likelihood of that oversight would have been greatly diminished because of a more robust peer-review process.
In regard to the U.S. auto industry over the past 50 years, is there a particular area of study that we feel has been missed? Or just a general feeling that the subject should get more attention?
I just hinted at one example — how the development of an auto-centric society here in the U.S. has impacted an environmental issue such as climate change. The automotive press — both industry- and buff-oriented — has routinely downplayed or ignored this topic. You can certainly find plenty of more general climate change research in the scholarly realm, but there isn’t enough that explores management decisions of automakers and how they have impacted public policies at the federal, state and local levels over the years.
Another example: Auto manufacturer histories written by scholars tend to have more analytical depth than those by non-scholar car buffs but can suffer from factual errors and questionable analytical judgments. I have written about this in reviews of some scholarly books (e.g., go here, here and here). This arguably reflects the lack of a well-developed peer-review process with specific expertise in the auto industry. Here is why it would be hugely valuable for American auto history to develop its own academic programs, scholarly associations and peer-reviewed journals. The more scholars you have working in this specialty area, the better quality the research will be.
In a way it’s like the car-buff media — the more competition we have, the more we as individual media outlets are pushed to up the quality of our content. While arguing about auto history can sometimes slip into unproductive dead ends, in general it helps us uncover and test our assumptions (at least if we are willing to be self aware).
Given the absolutely ghastly impact that the automobile industry had on urban planning in the US, with the passenger car passing from being a device for freedom to a financially burdensome necessity (and one of the thousands of pockets into which the on average high (compared even to EU countries) salaries in the US are wasted), I infer that academically in the US the automotive industry has only been treated as a nuisance.
The problem with social sciences is that data is scarce when going back in time by many decades, or it’s not digitised and hard to come by. I also add that, even having data, a professor told me that data can be manipulated indefinitely until it tells the story the researcher wants it to tell (the power of misguided econometrics!), which is also one of the reasons the “trust the science, trust the data!” mantra should be confined to hard sciences, and always with a mind open to change.
I don’t have much experience with European scholarship but do not get the sense that research fraud is an unmanageable problem here in the United States. However, the larger the field of study, the more potential for rigorous checks and balances during the peer-review process.
Regarding the “hard” versus “soft” sciences, I don’t think it is true that the former is more credible than the latter. Of course, I have heard more than one scholar from, say, a natural science get up on his hind legs and howl that quantitative analysis is superior to qualitative analysis. And in a sense it is true that it is easier to double check whether 1 + 1 = 2 than to assess the accuracy and astuteness of a qualitative theory. However, I still think it comes down to the quality of a field’s peer-review process.
Where I see the biggest problems with the quality of U.S. scholarship is with the intrusion of pseudo-science. This is where industries and activist groups fund research designed to undercut legitimate science by “flooding the media with shit.” This is why, as a news consumer, it is important to wonder where a study came from — and who funded it — if its findings are controversial.
There’s a big Venn Diagram of sorts where the study of the automobile intersects with so many other disciplines… engineering, urban planning, the study of labor and the workplace, art and style, environmental studies, etc. just to name a few. Probably the closest we ever got to it in college was learning about the demise of LA’s red cars (urban streetcars.) Just for kicks, I searched my Alma mater’s website for Urban Planning and the various emphases reflected a bias towards a post-car society. I see studying the automotive industry a little bit like studying the film industry… moguls, stars, craftspeople, unions, technology, dealing with the threat of being a monopoly, controlling distribution, and that’s just scratching the surface. It’s impossible to understate the influence of the automobile in shaping our nation. (In the early 1900s, you probably did marry the boy next door.).
I like the idea of using a Venn Diagram to show how the automobile tends to be addressed in American scholarship. What I have noticed is that each discipline that studies an aspect of the auto industry does it through its own theoretical frameworks and priorities. So even though there is a body of research at the center of the Venn Diagram, I would not be surprised if a goodly portion of it could have been improved if it had gone through a peer-review process with scholars with specific expertise in the auto industry.
In the economic field there is a handful of case studies related to the US Automotive industry, in particular when it comes to market structure (the Big Two especially caused the car market in the U.S to attain very high HHI Indexes and concentration ratios) and behavioural economics.
For the latter, the typical case study is GM’s gradually integration of Fisher body in the first half of the 1920s, which also symbolised the principal-agent interaction model and information asymmetries.