Small v. Big Cars

The U.S. Senate voted last week to spend $965,000 for a parking lot for the new Senate Office Building. Originally planned to handle 200 cars (with an 8-by-20-ft. space for each), it would now take only 185 (in 10-by-22-ft. spaces). Reason: the ever-growing size of U.S. cars.

On that, up rose Connecticut's Republican Prescott Bush, who drives a 1955 Cadillac, to sound off against "these gargantuan monsters being forced down the throats of the buying public. They are too big, too fast, too powerful. They are rapidly making obsolete our highways and endangering life and limb, and are enormously wasteful of raw materials" that should be saved for national security. "Unless American manufacturers meet the public demand for smaller, cheaper cars, European imports will take over a steadily increasing share of the domestic market, with serious effects upon employment in American automobile plants."

In the Senate Office Building, where the Senate's Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee was investigating auto prices (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) , G.M.'s President Harlow Curtice was drawn into the argument as he explained why the 1958 Chevy is better than the model of ten years ago. It weighs 324 lbs. more, is almost a foot longer and five inches wider. Wyoming's Democratic Senator Joseph O'Mahoney interrupted: "You say it is a better car because it is longer, wider and heavier. Have you received any complaints from people who believe these things are disadvantages? Do you think the modern car is too big?" "No, I don't," Curtice replied, added that he is just providing the public what the public wants. "Cars have attained their present dimensions as the result of popular demand."

Did he plan to build a small car in the U.S.? Curtice answered: "Over the years that has been under constant study. Thus far it has not been economic to offer a small car. That is because you take the value out of it so much more rapidly than you do the cost of it."

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