Speed And Luxury
by David Finlay (10 September 2008)
We are in a period when cars are unquestionably better than they have ever been before. It is always the way. Remove nostalgia from the equation - because nostalgia is not helpful here - and you can not argue against the fact that the cars of today are faster, safer, more economical, more comfortable, quieter, just plain superior to those of twenty years ago. And they were wondrous machines compared with what had been devised twenty years before that. And so on, for more than a century.
But does luxury improve at the same rate as everything else? I'm not so sure. Not after reading Dennis Adler's book, Speed And Luxury. If you read it too, you might, as I did, begin to suspect that the designers of previous eras knew every bit as much about that subject as those of today, even if the cars they designed can now be considered technically primitive.
Speed And Luxury deals with the ultimate cars - largely American, which is right and proper because this is an American book and the US created a remarkable proportion of such machines - built between 1910 and 1948. It is worth buying for the pictures alone, thanks to the following wonderful process: utterly astonishing cars were manufactured during those years, they have been restored by masters of the art on the whim of owners whose personal wealth can only be guessed at, they have been brilliantly photographed, and their images have been printed on paper which does them justice.
For a book which costs just £16.99, the effect is amazing. I can't remember being more impressed by a set of pictures since the day I discovered that the underwear pages were the most fascinating part of my mother's mail order catalogues rather than, as I had previously thought, the toy section.
There are beautiful cars here. I must admit that, for my taste, the business of devising dramatic bodywork fell into a decline when headlights were incorporated into front wings, and the models built in the 1940s are less pleasing to me than what went before. But that still leaves page after page of delights, such as the 1914 American Underslung, the 1929 Duesenberg Murphy Convertible Sedan and the 1930 Cord L-29.
You've never heard of American, Duesenberg or Cord? Their stories, and those of many other long-dead manufacturers, are told in Adler's text, where you will also read about William Randolph Hearst's Duesenberg, which covered more miles in the holds of transatlantic ships than it did on tarmac; about early steam and electric cars (the latter not noticeably less practical than many similar models on sale today); and about the 1932 Franklin, whose supercharged 150bhp 6.8-litre V12 was the largest and most powerful air-cooled engine ever used in a car.
This book also takes you back to an era when automotive luxury was achieved not simply by buying an expensive car and asking for a long list of optional extras to be fitted. In many cases the manufacturers produced the basic vehicle and then the coachbuilders got to work, creating fantastic shapes and even more fantastic interiors. Some of these cars were almost literally living rooms - private clubs, even - on wheels.
They don't make 'em like they used to - they really don't. We may think we know a thing or two about conspicuous consumption these days, but Speed And Luxury suggests that we lost the knack more than half a century ago. And whatever your political views on that, surely you'll agree that magnificent work was done by richly talented people, and that there is reason to celebrate the fact? I recommend the book thoroughly, not just because it tells the story of an automotive world which has entirely gone, which may be good, but because it shows through modern photography that the products of that world are still with us, which is better.
Speed And Luxury: The Great Cars, by Dennis Adler, is published by Motorbooks at £16.99. ISBN 978 0 7603 2960 3. More details at www.motorbooks.com.
