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There was another vision of the automobile evolving in America, one that ultimately came to dominate the industry. The Ford Motor Company was all about functionality—making cars reliable, available, and affordable to the masses. It focused on technology and manufacturing challenges, with the goal of putting a standard car model into widespread use. “The customer can have any color he wants,” Ford famously said, “so long as it’s black.”

Ford’s chief competitor, General Motors, run by Alfred Sloan, was all about style. The GM focus was on selling consumers cars not for their mechanical performance but for the social status and sense of identity they conferred—car designs in great varieties, gussied up with grilles, fins, medallions, chrome detailing, stereo systems, leather interiors, and fanciful names like Le Sabre and El Dorado. The focus wasn’t under the hood but on the packaging. Sloan didn’t just want to put cars into use; he wanted to put them into the hearts and minds of Americans.

The 1950s, you could say, was the dawn of car fetishism, an era that forged an emotional relationship between consumers and cars that is still very much alive today. Alfred Sloan was an unlikely catalyst for such a trend. A sharp, austere, by-the-books executive, he had studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and by the age of twenty-four had become president of Hyatt Roller Bearing, a company that made ball bearings for machinery. Sloan rarely strayed from his monochrome business uniform and scarcely looked the part of a legendary tastemaker. He was concerned about one thing only—growing General Motors into the world’s most powerful company. “The primary object of the corporation,” Sloan wrote, “was to make money, not just to make motor cars.”

Sloan’s emphasis on design was driven by two beliefs. First, he viewed cars as technologically mature, arguing that little more engineering was needed to improve vehicle performance (an attitude that pervaded Detroit until very recently). Second, Sloan felt that the market for cars was already saturated. In 1950 there were just over 150 million citizens in the United States and almost 50 million cars on the road—more than one for every household. To Sloan, this meant that consumers needed a new incentive to buy cars—functionality alone wasn’t enough. He wanted to offer consumers variety, a goal he trumpeted in his motto “A car for every purse and purpose.”

Sloan devised a strategy to make car owners quickly tire of their car models and desire upgrades. He believed the American car market could be broken down into status categories, wherein car models were equated with personal achievements and income brackets. In his book The Fifties, David Halberstam summed up GM’s automotive class structure:

The Chevy was for blue-collar people with solid jobs and young couples just starting out who had to be careful with money; the Pontiac was for more successful people who were confident about their economic futures and wanted a sportier car—one thinks of the young man just out of law school; the Olds was…for the white-collar bureaucrat or old-fashioned manager; the Buick was for the town’s doctor, the young lawyer who was about to be made partner, or the elite of the managerial class; the Cadillac was for the top executive or owner of the local factory.

Sloan wanted consumers to aspire to new, more expensive car purchases just as they aspired to new stations in life. He wanted the car to be seen not as a long-term possession but as “an economic benchmark on life’s journey to the top,” as Halberstam put it. If you got a new wife, a new kid, or a job promotion, the thinking went, it was time to trade up your car model, even if your current one was perfectly functional. Sloan called his philosophy “the constant upgrading of product.” Easing the financial burden of frequent new car purchases was GM’s consumer credit program—the first of its kind, which allowed customers to pay for their vehicles in installments over time.

The General Motors business model was directly at odds with Henry Ford’s philosophy of offering consumers one basic, static car model at an ever-shrinking unit price. The strategy of rapidly outmoding products has become all the more pronounced today, when merchandise from blue jeans to iPods is often viewed as obsolete in mere months. Sloan’s emphasis on both style and product variety became so expensive from a production standpoint that it drove many smaller auto manufacturers out of Detroit, paving the way for the reign of the Big Three.

Sloan left the razzle-dazzle part of his strategy up to his wingman, Harley Earl. Also known as “the Cellini of chrome,” Earl did look the part of a style maven. He wore boldly colored suits, flashy silk ties, and blue suede shoes, and had a cavernous closet in his office filled with freshly pressed clothes in case he found himself wrinkled before a meeting. Over six feet five inches tall, with broad shoulders, slicked-back hair, and a high forehead, Earl reportedly never hired anyone who exceeded his height, in order to maintain his dominant stature.

Sloan imported Earl from Hollywood, where he had made his name designing customized cars for the rich and famous—including a car body with a saddle on its hood for “the king of cowboys,” Western movie star Tom Mix. (In The Beverly Hillbillies, Jed Clampett moves to Hollywood so that he can live next to his hero Mix.) Earl charged top dollar for this work: Fatty Arbuckle reportedly paid him $28,000 (the equivalent of $350,000 today) to build a custom car with specialized lights, body design, and leather detailing.

Earl was the first to use modeling clay to render car designs in 3-D, a method he had seen the movie studios use in designing their props. He drew inspiration from offbeat sources, most famously World War II’s Lockheed P-38 fighter plane. With their curved windshields and pointed hoods, Earl’s auto designs echoed the plane’s stealthy, aerodynamic lines and gave the illusion of motion even when the cars were parked. “True innovation is like beauty,” he often said, “hard to find, but easy to recognize when you see it.” Sharks were another one of Earl’s eccentric inspirations, making their way into his designs in the form of fins. Jutting above the taillights, these fins quickly became the top design icon of the 1950s. Such decorative details, said Earl, gave customers an “extra receipt for their money in the form of a visible prestige marking for an expensive car.” They symbolized an age of “too-muchness,” of “no-expensespared largesse,” wrote historian Karal Ann Marling, a “doctrine of luxury for all.”

The name of the game under the Sloan-Earl regime at GM was non-functional styling, and perhaps least functional of all their cars’ style elements was their size. “Bigger is better” was the logic behind most things built in the 1950s, and cars were no exception. To Sloan, bigger meant pricier: increases in the size of his car models every year enabled him to ratchet up the unit prices on the same basic designs, yielding sizable growth in profit margins. As for Earl, bigger meant a broader canvas on which to hang his glitzy design details and more room for luxury add-ons. According to James Flink, the average wholesale price of a car jumped nearly 50 percent between 1950 and 1960, from $1,270 at the beginning of the decade to $1,822 at the end. Far from discouraging consumption, these price increases accompanied a massive surge in sales: in that same period, the number of automobiles on American roads also increased nearly 50 percent, from roughly 50 million to about 74 million.

But Detroit’s emphasis on impractical design would come to haunt U.S. automakers. As Detroit fixated on frivolous details, its foreign competitors were engineering safer, more reliable, and technologically superior cars with better-performing engines, brakes, suspension, steering, and fuel economy. U.S. consumers began to purchase more automotive products from abroad than they did from homegrown companies, and Japanese and European automakers including Toyota, Honda, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz rapidly gained market share. “Complacency carried a high cost,” noted Flink. “The United States shifted as early as 1967 from being a net exporter to a net importer of automotive products.”

Gas mileage on American-built cars plummeted, a trend that continued into the mid-1970s. Whereas a large Caddy got 20 miles per gallon in 1949, by 1973 American cars averaged 13.5 miles per gallon due to their continued growth in size and weight, and added creature comforts. Fuel economy was hardly a concern during the fifties, when oil prices were at record lows: a vast new infrastructure of pipelines and refineries had been built during World War II to provide a reliable oil supply for the military. The year 1943 saw the birth of Big Inch, a pipeline roughly 1,200 miles long that funneled petroleum from Longview, Texas, to Linden, New Jersey. Little Big Inch, built the following year, was an even longer conduit, extending almost 1,500 miles, transporting oil pumped from Beaumont, Texas (home of Spindletop), to the Northeast. These pipelines revolutionized oil delivery. Less than 5 percent of U.S. oil traveled by pipeline in 1942; just three years later, the volume was more than 40 percent. This expedited distribution system flooded U.S. consumer markets with cheap and abundant petroleum after the war.

In the meantime, Americans were coming to depend on oil in ways that went far beyond the business of getting from point A to point B. Automobiles were quickly and irrevocably shaping not only our preferred modes of transport but also our destinations. The proliferation of cars among mainstream American consumers gave rise to the first drive-in fast-food joint (1921), the first shopping mall (1922), the first motel (1925), and the first drive-in movie theater (1933).

The mainstreaming of cars also influenced rituals of romance. The automobile helped bring about an era of sexual liberation, enabling teenagers to escape the surveillance of their parents and journey to the fabled “lookout point.” Ever the killjoy, Henry Ford allegedly designed the backseat of a Model T to discourage sexual frolicking. “But determined couples found ways to thwart Ford’s intentions,” wrote Flink, “and the automakers came to facilitate lovemaking in cars with such innovations as heaters, air-conditioning, and the tilt steering wheel.” Flink cited a 1967 survey in the magazine Motor Trend showing that of 1,100 marriages, some 40 percent of grooms had popped the question in an automobile. The American landscape in which these young couples would be raising families was, meanwhile, increasingly becoming one of suburbs linked to cities and other suburbs by a sprawling network of highways.