Motordom

Near-synonyms: automobilery, automobilism, automobility

All Chichester appeared to be assembled at the Cross, and we were accorded a most hearty welcome. Mr. S. F. Edge on his Coventry Motette and Mr. Jarrott and two friends on De Dion and New Beeston motor tricycles also participated in the general accession of motordom to the town.

[…] Packard had a new model out, "step-down" Hudsons were being introduced via live TV commercials, and all of motordom was preaching longer, lower and wider. Was that all of motordom? Well, not quite. There were many men in 1948 gambling their financial empires in search of the ideal light car, and searching, too, for the often-[elusive] light car buyer.

In the traffic safety institutions that motordom founded, new experts promoted new ways to fight accidents. Chapter 8 recounts how motordom worked to reconstruct street casualties so they would no longer be the sole responsibility of motorists. Instead, accidents could be a failure of pedestrians to adapt to a new age, or a failure of the streets to adapt to technological progress.

In cities large and small, urban mobility above all meant streetcars and walking. Reconstruction coincided with industry's efforts to change the norms of street use, laws, and engineering standards so that cities would welcome automobiles. In response, diverse automotive interest groups, including manufacturers, dealers, and automobile clubs, recognizing common threats and shared interests, organized a collective effort. Among themselves and in the press, the coalition was sometimes known as motordom. Motordom told versions of history that celebrated progress in transportation while redefining it as the ever-expanding reach of cars and motor roads. The technique of history telling was an important but generally unappreciated development in the new field of public relations and the new enterprise of the full-service advertising agency.