Autopia: cars and culture by Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr (editors)<br></br>Drive On! A social history of the motor car by L J K Setright

At this time of year, the charms and curses of the car loom large. But Stephen Bayley wonders why the glorious - and infernal - machine has spawned such an under-powered literature

The magnificent motor car – cheap, fast, tireless, efficient, often beautiful – may be the most complete expression ever of human ingenuity. The horrors it produces – pollution, congestion, urban psychosis, rural desecration – may be the most complete expression of human folly. And the automobile phenomenon is defined in bi-attitudes such as these: the machine that set us free strangles our cities; the economic wealth that car manufacturing generates (still Britain's third largest export) is won at a terrible cost to man-made townscape and natural landscape.

The effects and benefits may be debatable, but there is no arguing about the car's influence on our lives. Automobile production is the industry of industries, a global university of consumer disciplines, ratcheting themselves into ever higher gears of creativity with each successive new-model year. More research, development, technology, marketing, art, cupidity, psychology and finance goes into the creation of a car than any other product. Compared to the complexities of designing and making and selling, say, a base model Toyota Yaris, great architecture such as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters in Hong Kong seems weakly one-dimensional.

The car is the machine that changed the world. By making suburbia possible, the car altered our conception of the city. Universal personal mobility led to ubiquitous demand and ubiquitous supply soon followed. Supermarkets and malls became possible. Michelin cleverly realised you could sell more tyres if you encouraged people to eat out.

Tourism was invented. City centres became residential deserts: if we had no cars, we would all be living in downtown flats. The car has brought all horizons closer, at the same time possibly making all brows lower. For many people, possession of a new car is a (tragically brief) flirtation with a sort of consumerist perfection, a nirvana brought about when the shiny materials of industry become tools of woozy expression and desire. That lad in the H-reg Uno is living a dream. Despite the effort of traffic-despots everywhere, he is not going to give it up. Nor is the car going to go away. Best try to understand it.

There were three geniuses in the early history of the car. The first was Carl Benz, who made the first petrol-engined self-propelling vehicle that farted and spluttered its way around Mannheim, frightening the horses, in 1886. But Benz was an engineer, not an entrepreneur. The democratic – some would say commercial – possibilities of the car were first demonstrated by Henry Ford, a restless Michigan Irish farmboy. Ford was so successful in satisfying the fundamental human demand for mobility that by the Twenties, every American who needed a car had bought a Ford.

Demand slowed, so it was left to Alfred Sloan, who assembled General Motors from a rag-bag of garage businesses, to exploit the idea that if you made cars look desirable – paint them in colours, add features – then people would be excited into new patterns of consumption. When General Motors set up its Art and Color Division, under Cecil B DeMille's neighbour, Harley Earl, in 1927, an amazing new episode in man's aesthetic adventure had begun.

The automobile has had its intellectual champions: perhaps most notably Roland Barthes, whose famous "cars are our cathedrals" observation may be the most succinct ever statement about the significance of industrial design. But it has powerful detractors, too. The explorer Wilfrid Thesiger is typical: "Looking round me, I feel there will be no human life at all on our planet in 100 years. Once every Chinese has a car, we're finished. The internal combustion engine has been a profound misfortune. What have we gained from it?"

The answer to that question is, of course, wealth and freedom (or, at least, a pleasing delusion of it). I would not be willing to tell all those hundreds of millions of Chinese that their hard-won freedom is to be denied them. This notion of freedom is closely related to the senses of self-expression and social competition that make the car such a psychologically powerful tool.

This was what Tom Wolfe noticed when he first visited a hot-rod meeting in California. "Cars mean more to these kids than architecture did in Europe's great formal century, say, 1750 to 1850. They are freedom, style, sex, power, motion, colour – everything is right there."

I would not say that cars, even great cars, are art, since their design is a collaborative rather than a singular activity, but they have usurped art as a focus for the consumer's aesthetic instruction. Today, people learn about expressive form, about light falling on complex surfaces, about colour, shape and telling details, from looking at cars, not from enduring the inane antics of the Turner Prize. "No dignity without chromium/ No truth but a glossy finish," as William Carlos Williams mused.

Here is a very big fat subject indeed, yet the literature of the car is very thin. One reason for this is the entrenched Philistinism of the auto industry. I mean – fundamentally, this is the garage trade, not scholarship. When I was researching Harley Earl, Alfred Sloan's wizard of kitsch, I visited General Motors' Tech Center at Warren, Michigan. In this magnificent complex, designed with a full-throttle view of the future by Eero Saarinen, they kept no formal records (or, at least none to which a researcher had access).

Thus the world's largest manufacturing organisation was not able to show you what it made in, say, 1955. Drawings, models, briefs had all been destroyed. Neither are examples of the cars systematically preserved.

Another reason for this is the entrenched Philistinism of the book trade. When my book on Harley Earl was published – a bright, elegant essay in cultural history, in my view – I found it on the shelves of the Putney High Street W H Smith next to copies of the workshop manual for the Morris Marina.

Two new books make a big effort to break out of the ghetto. Autopia is a collection of essays edited by Peter Wollen, who teaches at UCLA, and Joe Kerr, who teaches at The Royal College of Art. Although Reaktion is a left-leaning publisher with something of a knack for bafflement, the editors have made a real attempt to be even-handed in their treatment of the car. The fine illustrations of this handsome book demonstrate the irresistible appeal of the car as an icon. A haunting photograph of, for instance, a wrecked Pontiac in a Havana backstreet is an image with at least three layers of meaning. The cover shows a proud Florida couple with the Mercedes and, when you see it, you will appreciate that no caption is necessary.

Yet an essay written by (and I am not making this up) the Visiting Professor of Post-Colonial Studies in a Department of Arts Policy and Management is connected to the Zeitgeist in a way that, say, car designer Fabrizio Giugiaro (not mentioned in this volume) is not. Other material includes historical stuff from Jane Jacobs and Marshall Berman, as well as our old friend Barthes, together with original essays of mixed quality. Autopia is an uneven, but friendly and diverting, assemblage with pleasingly original pictures.

Completely different in character and content is Leonard Setright's Drive On! At 71, Setright is easily the most distinguished British motoring journalist, although even to describe him thus is demeaning. Closer on the scale of human potential to Isaiah Berlin than to Jeremy Clarkson, Setright is a rabbinical scholar, polymath, lawyer, contrarian and musician: he was a founder member of the Philharmonia Chorus. This social history of the car is as eccentric and diverse and as elegant, if occasionally perverse as its author. The dedication, in Hebrew, is "With the Help of Him by whom all history is postulated".

Setright establishes the Austrian Jew, Siegfried Markus, as inventor of the petrol engine; his footnotes include references to Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins (1847) and there are digressions about the best hi-fi speakers. Given the space that Setright allows for some of his familiar preoccupations (the Bristol motor-car, the relationship of rim to tyre) I was surprised not to find a chapter on "The History of the Bandwagon". And I was disappointed, in a book of such scholarly richness and boggling intellectual bandwidth, not to find a bibliography.

In their different ways both Autopia and Drive On! show how difficult it is to write well about cars. Each is appealing, but neither will change our understanding. Autopia because, while attractive and thought-provoking, it is a partial anthology; Drive On! because it is so endearingly odd (not to mention expensive). The great history of car design has not yet been written. I know: I am still working on it.