Miles C. Collier: Cars Can Grab You by the Throat!

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Learn more at HyundaiUSA.com or call 562-314-4603. And we continue with our American stories and with a story from one of the top car collectors in the world. Miles Collier is the founder of the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida, which has been named America's best car museum by Road and Track magazine. And today we hear from Miles about his own story with cars. The only thing I will say about my racing career is that years later, I was accosted by a representative of the ASPCA, which is the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Automobiles, and they suggested that I probably shouldn't be driving anymore. The cruelty of automobiles, you don't know the ASPCA, they lurk around racetracks and they find you doing mean things to your car.

They say, stop that, son, you ought to be on the beach. I'm totally and completely facetious. The point being that I am not the embodiment of Tazio Nuvolari.

Not that I was terrible, I wasn't terrible, but I just drifted away from it. My high point was I was awarded the first SVRA Driver of the Year award. Even the blind pig eventually finds the corn. The thing about cars is that they have the unique property of reaching out and grabbing the susceptible person by the throat. The point being, a sociology researcher whose materials I read basically said cars pick the people that are interested in them, not the other way around. And that's not necessarily true of golf or fly fishing or flying model airplanes or any of these other things. Cars have this property where analogously we think of wind in the windows. Remember how Mr. Toad, the first time he saw a car, all of a sudden his eyes started rotating in his head, and all he could say was, poop, poop, or whatever it was, and he was just completely blown away by the automobile.

Well, that is literally how automobiles attract their following. So what was my St. Paul on the road to Damascus event? Well, all I can say is my dad was a racer back in the day.

Sadly, he died in 1954. But I remember some years after that when my family moved back to New York City where I was going to school one weekend or something, I came across a box full of old road and track magazines, and I pulled them out and I started flipping through them. And I can recall even now there's one article on a Jowett Jupiter.

Now there's a terrifying confection. A Jowett Jupiter is a particularly nasty English confection with a four-cylinder, water-cooled, horizontally opposed front engine. And the Jowett mark was prevalent in, its last gas were prevalent in the UK in the 1950s.

And their high-performance sports car version was the Jowett Jupiter. And some small voice in the back of my head said, now it's time to get interested in cars and never look back. So a long roundabout way of saying that cars reached out and grabbed me, they did it through the medium of magazines. Well, I think the way people get involved in cars is idiosyncratic. It depends on the person. And as a former girlfriend of mine said, Miles, you can over-intellectualize anything.

That was a relationship that was not going anywhere. I can over-intellectualize anything. So I got interested in cars first of all because of their obvious glamour, romance, attractiveness, all the things that everybody loves about cars. And then the more interesting thing to me was the context and the connections, so context and connections, which I have been able to push to the extent of what you see today, where we have one of the world's great library collections and one of the world's great car collections and all kinds of things that combined together allow us to really understand the automobile as a human and social and cultural phenomenon, which is where I'm particularly interested. And that's why I have ended up writing a book called The Archaeological Automobile. But the point is The Archaeological Automobile is essentially about thinking about the automobile as material culture. Material culture are the things that mankind produces in ordinary life, in ordinary use. And material culture varies around the world as a function of the culture from which it comes. And so something from Japan is going to be different from something from Germany or something from South America.

But it is basically the material remnants that we leave behind as our species travels through time. The automobile is completely underrepresented in the academy. It is completely underrepresented among our normal cultural institutions for reasons that absolutely no one I've been able to find can articulate. The automobile is just something that nobody wants to talk about.

I did an enormous amount of reading for my book. And the gist of academic commentators who comment about the automobile, and they're few and far between, is that we find it inexplicable. Normally the amount of published materials roughly is congruent with the importance of the thing being written about. This is not true of the automobile. It is enormously important, and nobody writes about it. In fact, it's generally viewed as one of those subjects.

It's a third rail of the academy. You write about automobiles, you're immediately suspect. I guess I would say the problem with the automobile is it's way too stimulating, it's way too interesting, it's way too charming, it's way too engaging, and therefore it can't be serious. So we can talk about the evolving morphology of Barbie dolls over time and the self-perception of women as a sociological paper, but we cannot talk about the automobile in any way, means, or form.

It's changing a little, and there are some academicians out there. I mentioned Dale Danifer, who did sociological research on how do car enthusiasts become car enthusiasts. There are people, academicians, who are writing about the influence of the automobile on society in various ways, but generally the focus is on the automobile as a social change agent, because that lets you deal with the automobile in the abstract. It's a social change agent.

We don't need to get into it anymore. So now we can talk about society and how society changes with this amorphous, undefined thing, an automobile social change agent. No picture of the automobile is created there, no analysis of the automobile exists, we just talk about its influence.

So that seems to be relatively safe. If you start talking about the automobile as material culture, boy are you in trouble, because that's where everything suspect happens. So naturally my book is about the automobile as a material culture. It's a hugely important piece of our material culture.

The thing we need to remember about the automobile, and much other material culture is the same way, is that it has a function, it has a nominal function, and the automobile's nominal function is personal mobility and mobility of goods. But it has other functions that are implicit, and one of them is social signaling. Human beings have evolved over millions of years to be sensitive to other human beings across vectors of power, status, and wealth.

People are social animals, you stick them all in a room, they immediately want to know, what's the pecking order here? And we have a zillion signaling modes to do that so that it becomes a natural and easy thing to do. It's everything from fashion, you can have a $150 suit from Walmart, or you can have a totally custom silk blend, and you can tell the difference. So it's clothes, it's houses, it's furnishings, all of those kinds of things. And one of the most effective has always been transportation. So the man on the horse was always in a superior position to all the peasants that were standing around pulling on their forelocks and making nice noises to him.

The glittering carriage with a perfectly matched pair and a coachman and a footman pretty much let everybody know where you stood. The automobile did the same thing, and it does the same thing today, right? You see some beat-up Toyota Hilux with a bunch of garden equipment in the bed of the thing.

It's like, okay, I kind of know what the story is there next to some Porsche 918 hypercar, right? It's like, okay, if that's not social signaling, I don't know what is. I mean, people say, oh, no, that's a terrible thing. I got news for you, I don't care if it's terrible or not terrible, we have evolved that way.

Genetically, we are sensitive to status and power and wealth because evidently it worked over tens of thousands of years. So whether it should be or it could not, forget that. That's a mug's game to play. And you've been listening to Miles Collier, the founder of America's best car museum, The Revs Institute, the automobile, its story, its cultural as an artifact and as a fact of life here on Our American Story. Murder should be fun. Obviously, murder's not fun. Elspeth is all new.

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