‘Engines of Change,’ by Paul Ingrassia

Mr. Ingrassia, the deputy editor in chief of Reuters, is a former Detroit bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal (and the brother of Lawrence Ingrassia, the business editor of The New York Times). In this book he draws upon his expertise covering the car business to give us a highly informed but breezy narrative history of the vehicles that have shaped and reflected American culture.

Along the way he also gives us some sharp snapshots of the engineers, businessmen and ad people who helped design and promote these automobiles, men like Harley Earl, who led General Motors’ design department for three decades, “from the Jazz Age to the Space Age,” and John DeLorean, the fast-living engineer and executive behind Pontiac’s GTO, “the meanest street-legal car in America,” and behind his own company’s DMC-12, the stainless-steel roadster with gull-wing doors better known as the magic time machine in “Back to the Future.”

It would be easy to argue that Mr. Ingrassia’s selection of cars is arbitrary and subjective — the Thunderbird and the Camaro, for instance, are mentioned only in passing — but he makes a strong case that the automobiles in this book “either changed American society or uniquely captured the spirit of their time.”

Henry Ford’s Model T clearly transformed the United States into a mobile nation. It “begat mass production, which begat the $5 day,” which “begat the middle class, the suburbs, shopping malls, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, drive-through banking and other things beloved of the modern-day philistines.” Other cars cited here, like the 1959 Cadillac, the Volkswagen Beetle and Microbus, the Corvette and the Chrysler minivan, serve more as mirrors of changing tastes, fashions and mores.

As Mr. Ingrassia explains, the cars he has chosen illustrate the yin-and-yang tug of war in modern American culture between the practical and the pretentious: “the frugal versus the flamboyant, haute cuisine versus hot wings, uptown versus downtown, big-is-better versus small-is-beautiful, and Saturday night versus Sunday morning.” Case in point: Whereas the Model T was simple, versatile and affordable (in 1912 the basic two-seat Torpedo Runabout model cost $590), General Motors’ stylish La Salle (which had its debut in 1927, only weeks before the demise of the Model T was announced, and cost nearly seven times as much) pointed to Americans’ growing appetite for status and sex appeal, tastes that would be curbed during the Great Depression.

For that matter, there seems to be a direct correlation, Mr. Ingrassia suggests, between the economy — or at least gas prices — and the kinds of cars that zoom up the best-seller lists. Chrome-slathered cars and big land sharks with big engines and big fins flourished in the late 1950s, which Thomas Hine has referred to as the start of the populuxe era, when Americans, buoyed by postwar prosperity, went on a huge shopping spree.

The sleek, sporty Corvette got off the starting blocks around the same time — in 1953, the year Elvis Presley and Playboy magazine began their careers — and roared into the ’60s, though at the end of that decade the power of its engine shrank.

“The Corvette’s horsepower, like the length of women’s skirts,” Mr. Ingrassia writes, “proved a reliable indicator of America’s economic and psychic strength. In the years between 1969 and 1975, when America endured the Vietnam War and Watergate, came the emasculation of the Corvette. The car’s basic Corvette engine shrank from 350 to 165 horsepower,” about “the same as four-cylinder compact cars today.”