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As in architecture, so in automaking. In a given cost range, the same technology tends to produce the same solutions. The visual evidence for this is as obvious for cars as for buildings. Today, if you choose models in the same price range, you will be hard put at 500 paces to tell one makefrom another. In other words, the specifically American traits that lingered in American automobiles in the 1960s--traits that linked American cars to American history--are disappearing. Even the Volkswagen Beetle has disappeared and has taken with it the visible evidence of the history of streamlining that extends from D'Arcy Thompson to Carl Breer to Ferdinand Porsche.
汽车制造业的情形也像建筑业的情形一样。在一定的成本范围内，相同的工艺技术就能产生相同的产品。证明这一点的直观证据在汽车方面和建筑方面一样，都是显而易见的。今天，如果要你在同一价格档次的各型汽车中进行选择，从距离五百步的地方看是很难分辨出各种不同牌子型号的汽车的。换句话说，六十年代里美国汽车还保留着的美国特色--美国汽车中那种与美国历史相联系的特点--正在逐渐消失。甚至连德国的大众汽车公司的大众甲壳虫型汽车也丧失了自身原有的特色，而通过自己车型的变化演示了从达西·汤普森到卡尔·布里尔到费迪南德·波尔舍一代一代的流线型汽车设计发展史。
If man creates machines, machines in turn shape their creators. As the automobile is universalized, it universalizes those who use it. Like the World Car he drives, modern man is becoming universal. No longer quite an individual, no longer quite the product of a unique geography and culture, he moves from one climate-controlled shopping mall to another, from one airport to the next, from one Holiday Inn to its successor three hundred miles down the road; but somehow his location never changes. He is cosmopolitann. The price he Pays is that he no longer has a home in the traditional sense of the word. The benefit is that he begins to suspect home in the traditional sense is another name for limitations, and that home in the modern sense is everywhere and always surrounded by neighbors.
人创造了机器，而机器反过来也能塑造其创造者。由于汽车已普遍化，使用汽车的人也就司空见惯了。现代社会的人像他们驾驶的世界流行汽车一样正变得越来越彼此雷同。他们不再具有鲜明的个性特征，再不是某个特殊地理文化环境里孕育出来的特殊个人了。他们可以从一个装设空调的市场到另一个市场，从一个机场到另一个机场，从一个假日酒店到三百英里外的另一家酒店，不停地旅行运动，但他们所处的环境却可能永远一个样。他们是世界人，他们为此付出的代价是他们不再拥有一个传统意义的家。他们从中得到的好处则是开始觉得传统意义上的家是牢笼的别称，而现代意义的家则无处不是，自己身边周围的人又无不是自己的邻友。
