A Car for the Great Asian Multitude
Toward the end of 2007, the Indian industrial conglomerate Tata unveiled the Nano, a tiny four-door sedan powered by a rear-mounted, two-cylinder, 624cubiccentimeter engine delivering 30 horsepower. The car brought to mind some earlier examples of minimal motoring, but what really grabbed the world’s attention was its projected price: 1 lakh, which is 100,000 rupees, or about US$2,500. Although it would have little appeal to drivers in the industrially developed world, the Nano held out the promise of personal mobility for hundreds of millions of people in India and other countries of the developing world.
Chinese manufacturers have not been as aggressive in developing an ultra-low-cost automobile, but production there has rapidly expanded nonetheless. In 2007, the Chinese auto industry produced 8.88 million motor vehicles, of which 6.38 million were passenger vehicles (cars, SUVs, and minivans). This represented an increase of 22 percent over the previous year and made China the world’s third-largest producer of automobiles, surpassed only by the United States and Japan.1
The current and projected expansion of the automobile market in China and India brings to mind earlier epochs, when vehicles like the Ford Model T and the Volkswagen Beetle made car ownership possible for what Henry Ford dubbed “the great multitude.” When the first Model Ts rolled out of Ford’s Piquette Avenue factory in 1908, the United States had 198,000 registered automobiles.2 With the country’s population then standing at just over 88 million, that worked out to 2.2 cars for every thousand people. In only five years, this ratio jumped to nearly 13 cars per thousand, and by the mid-1920s, every American man, woman, and child could have been seated in the nation’s automotive fleet. The historical trajectory of automobile ownership in other nations also shows impressive rates of growth. In 1950, for example, the Federal Republic of Germany had only 40 cars per thousand people; a scant two decades later, that ratio stood at 230 cars per thousand. Similar examples of growth could be found throughout Europe during this period.3
Somewhat more germane to the cases of India and China is the expansion of the car population in Russia that occurred during the years following the collapse of communism and the abandonment of centralized economic planning. For decades, Soviet economic planners had little interest in expanding the production of passenger automobiles, and it was not until 1972 that more cars than trucks were produced.4 The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in many profound changes, among which was the rapid growth of private automobile ownership. In 1991, the year of the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, 600,000 automobiles were registered in Moscow, about the same as the Parisian car fleet four decades earlier; by 2006, the city’s car population had zoomed to 3.5 million.5 The growth statistics for Russia as a whole were almost as impressive: the number of automobiles per thousand inhabitants, which stood at 75 in 1993, had doubled by 2003—a year in which 1.5 million cars were sold.6
Today, India and China are not too far from the car-to-population ratios achieved during the early stages of automobile ownership in the United States and Europe. And, as occurred in the past, their car fleets are increasing rapidly. In 1999, Chinese consumers bought 1.2 million cars; that number increased sixfold by 2006, when 7.2 million cars were sold.7 In that year, China surpassed Japan in domestic auto sales, and it now trails only the United States in annual sales.8
By the end of 2007, the motor-vehicle population in China had reached 57 million, of which 21.5 million were privately owned cars.9 This made for a ratio of 44 vehicles for every thousand people, well below the current world average of about 120 cars per thousand, but a bit above the ratio found in West Germany in 1950. A similar story could be told of India, where the car population has been growing at an annual rate of 17 percent in recent years. A ratio of 60.3 vehicles (cars, trucks, and motorcycles) per thousand people puts it ahead of China, but Indian passenger-car ownership translates to only 11 cars for every thousand people.10 Even so, this is a ratio only slightly lower than the one for Italy in 1950.11
Growth rates of this magnitude in automobile ownership should not be surprising. A number of cultural, societal, and political variables affect the growth of automobile ownership, but the most powerful influence on automobile sales is income per capita.12 Although the expansion of automobile ownership in recent years has been impressive, it is only a glimmer of what is likely to come. Although both India and China are poor countries and will remain so in the immediate future, their middle-class populations have been expanding in parallel with the growth of their economies. India’s annual increase in gross national product (GNP) has exceeded 8 percent in recent years, while China’s growth rate has been even more impressive: though the commonly cited rate of 10 percent GNP growth per annum may be an overstatement, there is little question that China has achieved one of the highest sustained economic growth rates of all time.
Yet for all of their impressive economic advances in recent years, both China and India have large populations of very poor people. “Poverty,” of course, is an elusive concept that can be defined and operationalized in a number of ways. Adding to the difficulty are the pitfalls of cross-national comparisons of income (or, more properly, of buying power). Yet by any reasonable measure, poverty continues to be the prevailing condition for hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese. According to a 2007 World Bank estimate, 100 million people in China fall below the poverty line.13 The situation in India is even more baleful, with an estimated 350 to 400 million people living in poverty.14
Poverty in the two countries is heavily concentrated in rural areas that have not participated in the economic boom transforming many urban regions. The countryside also contains the majority of the population living just barely above the official poverty level. This means that the spatial distribution of automobiles in India and China resembles the initial stage of automobile ownership in Europe and North America, where the bulk of automobiles were purchased by urban residents. This pattern had shifted by the second decade of the twentieth century in the United States, as farmers and other rural people began to constitute a key segment of the automobile market.15 Given the poverty of much of rural China and India along with the associated rural–urban income gap, many years will pass before the countryside catches up with the city in terms of automobile ownership.
The Automobile’s Impact on China, India, and the World
The growth of the world’s automobile population has been inseparable from an ever increasing consumption of petroleum. The future consumption of this essential resource by the Indian and Chinese car fleets will depend on a number of factors, such as the rate at which the car population expands, its average fuel economy, and aggregate miles driven. But even under the most favorable scenarios, the large and growing car fleets of China and India will make substantial claims on the world’s petroleum resources; within twenty years, China alone is expected to equal the United States as a market for imported oil.16 It can be reasonably assumed that global fuel prices will reflect the resultant pressure on supplies.
An inescapable result of petroleum consumption is the production of nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and other pollutants. The local effects of automotive emissions are readily observable in the blankets of smog that hang over many Chinese and Indian cities. More ominous, especially for foreign observers, is the prospect of substantial future increases in the production of carbon dioxide, a leading contributor to global warming. By 2020, according to one estimate, China’s passenger-car fleet may produce 144 million metric tons of CO2;17 other estimates range between 89 and 231 million metric tons by the year 2025.18 India’s car population will likely not expand as rapidly as China’s, but if present rates of growth are sustained, its vehicles will increase the nation’s CO2 emissions sevenfold by 2035.19 CO2 emissions from the two countries will make significant contributions to global warming, but many years will pass before emissions from Indian and Chinese vehicles begin to approach levels currently existing in the United States, where gasoline-burning vehicles produced 1,186.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2005.20
More immediately damaging to China and India than the long-term effects of greenhouse gas emissions is an increased number of vehicular accidents, and the injury and death that come with them. Although India and China have far fewer vehicles per capita than the industrially developed nations, they account for an inordinately large share of the world’s car accidents. According to the World Health Organization, China had more than a half-million traffic accidents in 2005, which resulted in 107,077 deaths and 480,640 injuries.21 This amounted to 338.8 deaths and 1,521 injuries per 100,000 vehicles.22 Put differently, despite having only 3 percent of the world’s vehicles, China accounted for 21 percent of the world’s traffic fatalities.23 Somewhat less grim are the statistics for India, where traffic deaths claimed 98,254 lives in 2005, resulting in a ratio of 148.22 deaths per 100,000 motor vehicles.24
A high rate of vehicle-related deaths and injuries may be inevitable during the early phase of mass motorization, as can be seen in early-twentieth-century statistics from the United States: the vehicle-related death rate per 100,000 vehicles was 268.5 in 1914, and 188.1 in 1917.25 If past trends are any guide to the future, the rates for India and China will eventually drop with increasing levels of automobile ownership, but only after further increases in fatality and injury rates.26
The Political Costs of Automobility
These grim statistics can be attributed in part to woefully underdeveloped infrastructures in China and India: roads, bridges, signage, traffic-control devices, and the other essential ancillaries of high-density motorized traffic have all lagged behind the rapid growth of automobile ownership. These deficiencies can be viewed as a reprise of the history of mass automobility in other lands; the United States presents a particularly vivid example of automobile ownership outstripping the development of supportive infrastructures.27 Even today, in many parts of the industrially developed world, infrastructural development still trails automobile ownership—as attested by bridge collapses and jammed roadways.
Infrastructures that are essential to mass automobile ownership are classic “public goods”—projects that only governments can provide. A growing automobile population requires increased efforts by governments to build and organize highway projects and to collect the revenues to finance them. This expanded role for government creates a paradoxical situation for car owners and drivers. From its earliest beginnings, the automobile has been the “freedom machine” par excellence: along with their utilitarian value, private automobiles have held out the promise, and usually the reality, of taking their operators where they want to go, with whom, and at what time. But this freedom rests upon a significant degree of governmental intrusion in the form of taxes, emissions and safety inspections, mandatory insurance, the enforcement of traffic laws, and the punishment of violators. Although much of the recent economic success of India and China has stemmed from the liberalization of their economies, the parallel expansion of automobile ownership will necessarily bring new forms of government intrusion into private life.
These restrictions on individual freedom notwithstanding, it still can be argued that automobile ownership promotes a more individualist lifestyle. If this is true, one would have to conclude that authoritarian and totalitarian states that encourage automobile ownership and undertake large-scale highway construction undermine their own power. The most notable historical examples are, of course, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev. While the former never made good on its promise of universal Volkswagen ownership, during the 1970s the central leadership of the USSR exhibited a genuine commitment to expanding the nation’s automobile population. But the Soviet Union entered into a Faustian bargain when it partnered with Fiat to build a gigantic manufacturing complex for the production of Soviet versions of the Fiat 124. The resultant expansion of car ownership may have served to dampen popular discontent over a moribund economy and the general stagnation of the Brezhnev era, but, as Lewis Siegelbaum has noted, through its promotion of automobile ownership, “the Soviet state virtually guaranteed that millions of its citizens would become entangled in webs of essentially private relations that were ideologically alien and often in violation of Soviet laws.”28
At this point, ideological rectitude is honored in the breach in China, and mass motorization can be seen as part of the general trend of economic and social liberalization. In similar fashion, less allegiance is given in today’s India to its founding principles, which stand in sharp contrast to the mass-consumption society that is epitomized by widespread automobile ownership. Given the many economic, environmental, and cultural challenges engendered by mass automobility in China and India, we can only speculate on its future trajectory. At present, however, it can fairly be asserted that the spirits of Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan have prevailed over those of Mao Zedong and Mahatma Gandhi.
1 “Auto Production, Sales Hit Record 8.8 Million Units in 2007,”
2 U.S.Bureau of the Census,“Transportation Indicators for Motor Vehicles and Airlines: 1900 to 2001,”
3 Jean-Jacques Chanaron, “The Universal Automobile,” in The Automobile Revolution: The Impact of an Industry, ed. Jean-Pierre Bardou et al. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 197.
4 Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile, (Ithaca, N.Y., 2008), 238.
5 Ibid., 255.
6 Ibid., 256.
7 Alexis Madrigal, “China’s 2030 CO2 Emissions Could Equal the Entire World’s Today,”
8 “Auto Output,Sales Likely to Hit 10 Mln Units in 2008,”
9 Ibid.
10 Gwynne Dyer, “Western Hypocrisy over India’s Nano Ignores Global Need for Fewer Cars,”
11 Chanaron (n. 3 above). In 1950, Italy had only 15 cars for every thousand inhabitants.
12 For example, my study of the growth of automobile ownership in Spain yielded a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.886 for per capita income and car ownership; see “Mass Motorization in Spain,” Journal of Transport History 27 (September 2006): 116.
13 David Dollar, “Poverty, Inequality, and Social Disparities during China’s Economic Reform,” World Bank Policy Research working paper WPS 4253,
14 “Poverty in India: A Synopsis by IndiaOneStop.Com,”
15 Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and GrassRoots America (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1972).
16 Kelly Sims Gallagher, China Shifts Gears: Automakers, Oil, Pollution, and Development (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 155.
17 Ibid., 18.
18 P. H. Kobos, J. D. Erickson, and T. Drennen, “Scenario Analysis of Chinese Passenger Vehicle Growth,” Contemporary Economic Policy 21, no. 2 (April 2003): 200–17, cited in Gallagher.
19 Randeep Ranesh, “India Gears Up for Mass Motoring Revolution with £1,260 Car,” Guardian, 11 January 2008.
20 U.S. Energy Information Agency, “Emission of Greenhouse Gases Report,” 28 November 2007, DOE/EIA0573(2006), table 8,
21 World Health Organization, “Environmental Health Country Profile—China, as of 9 June 2005,”
22 For these ratios, the number of vehicles in 2005 is taken to be 31.6 million, the figure given for “civilian-owned cars” in the online edition of People’s Daily; see “China Has Over 20 Million Privately Owned Cars,” People’s Daily, 28 February 2007, at
23 Peter Hessler, “The People’s Republic Learns to Drive,” New Yorker, 26 November 2007, 108.
24 [Indian] National Crime Records Bureau, “Accidental Deaths in India,” 2005,
25 Calculated from the U.S. Census Bureau’s “Transportation Indicators” (n. 2 above).
26 Matthijs J. Koornstraw, “Prediction of Traffic Fatalities and Prospects for Mobility Becoming Sustainable, Safe,” Sa¯dhana¯ 32 (August 2007), available online at
27 The lag between automobile ownership and highway development in the United States is one of the central themes of John B. Rae’s The Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).
28 Siegelbaum (n. 4 above), 248.
Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology
Filed under: Vol. 49 No. 4 (October 2008)
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