Only a few years back Cadillac announced its "El Dorado Brougham" as having anti-dive control, outriggers, pillarless styling, projectile-shaped gull-wing bumpers, outboard exhaust ports, and various other exotic features borrowed from the non-motorcar world. We were invited to associate it with Hawaiian surf riders, with gulls soaring like sixteen-inch shells, and with the boudoir of Madame de Pompadour. Could MAD magazine do any better? In the TV age, any of these tales from the Vienna woods, dreamed up by motivational researchers, could be relied upon to be an ideal comic script for MAD. The script was always there, in fact, but not till TV was the audience conditioned to enjoy it. To mistake the car for a status symbol, just because it is asked to be taken as anything but a car, is to mistake the whole meaning of this very late product of the mechanical age that is now yielding its form to electric technology. The car is a superb piece of uniform, standardized mechanism that is of a piece with the Gutenberg technology and literacy which created the first classless society in the world. The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse and armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile. In fact, the American car did not level downward, but upward, toward the aristocratic idea. Enormous increase and distribution of power had also been the equalizing force of literacy and various other forms of mechanization, The willingness to accept the car as a status symbol, restricting its more expansive form to the use of higher executives, is not a mark of the car and mechanical age, but of the electric forces that are now ending this mechanical age of uniformity and standardization, and recreating the norms of status and role. When the motorcar was new, it exercised the typical mechanical pressure of explosion and separation of functions. It broke up family life, or so it seemed, in the 1920s. It separated work and domicile, as never before. It exploded each city into a dozen