"The fact is that the automobile has become hypnotic.
The Role of Attainable Pricing for the Masses.
With the end of World War II, the United States returned to a different life and culture than the one it had left behind at the start of the war. The United States had gone to war with 70 percent of the American people falling below the category of earnings poverty. "After the war, the change in American society was dramatic and quick. As rationing had ended, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line fell dramatically and soldiers returned home with the dream of a house and car of one's own. It is at this important juncture that cars and culture collide. With the broad explosion of automobile production in post-World War II America, the automobile had far-reaching societal and cultural impacts beyond the production lines in Detroit. In short, the massive increase in post-war automobile production fundamentally altered American Society. .
In post-war America the automobile would take hold and retain its intense grip on wide-ranging aspects of society for more than the next quarter century, with its effects still apparent today. During this time the automobile would be elevated to the level of a celebrated symbol of such juxtapositions as individuality and conformity, tradition and modernity, and uniqueness and mass production. These effects would also dramatically affect not one but at least two generations, specifically and perhaps most intensely both the "greatest generation"" and their children, the "baby boomers,"" who would each interpret and style the trend in their own image. Through these generations, the automobile culture would grow and transform, progressively building upon itself and extending its influence further into American society until outside forces, especially the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, would deal a fatal blow to driver's wallets and subsequently the cars and the culture they had shaped.