The mere obsolescence of the wheel does not mean its disappearance. It means only that, like penmanship or typography, the wheel will move into a subsidiary role in the culture. In the middle of the nineteenth century great success was achieved with steam-engined cars on the open road. Only the heavy toll-taxes levied by local road authorities discouraged steam engines on the highways. Pneumatic tires were fitted to a steam car in France in 1887. The American Stanley Steamer began to flourish in 1899. Ford had already built his first car in 1896, and the Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903. It was the electric spark that enabled the gasoline engine to take over from the steam engine. The crossing of electricity, the biological form, with the mechanical form was never to release a greater force. It is TV that has dealt the heavy blow to the American car. The car and the assembly line had become the ultimate expression of Gutenberg technology; that is, of uniform and repeatable processes applied to all aspects of work and living. TV brought a questioning of all mechanical assumptions about uniformity and standardization, as of all consumer values. TV brought also obsession with depth study and analysis. Motivation research, offering to hook the ad and the id, became immediately acceptable to the frantic executive world that felt the same way about the new American tastes as Al Capp did about his 50,000,000 audience when TV struck. Something had happened. America was not the same. For forty years the car had been the great leveler of physical space and of social distance as well. The talk about the American car as a status symbol has always overlooked the basic fact that it is the power of the motorcar that levels all social differences, and makes the pedestrian a second-class citizen. Many people have observed how the real integrator or leveler of white and Negro in the South was the private car and the truck, not the expression of moral points of view. The simple and obvious fact about the