STANFORD – It all began with a simple question posed by a car collector in Florida: Why do oil paintings get so much intellectual attention from academia and cars get virtually none?

In his mission to find the answer, Miles Collier invited major research universities to compete for a gift that would bring the automobile, much coveted, collected and often cursed, to the forefront of academic inquiry.

"The idea is to look at all aspects of the car – and when we say all aspects we mean not just how you build cars, but the history, literature, you name it," said Clifford Nass, director of Stanford University's new Revs Program, which won the funding and is aiming to create the nation's largest repository of information about the automobile.

It took little time after the gift was announced last spring for the program to ignite the interest of faculty from a spectrum of disciplines.

Car culture is everywhere this school year. There will be a class on cars, race, sex and gender in 20th century American fiction, film and music, as well as car-related courses in the archaeology, art history, urban studies, and design and engineering departments, as well as affiliation with the university's Center for Automotive Research.

Nass, head of the school's Communication between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, has been working on the program's inaugural project, an "auto biography" of the 100 most important cars. The project involves intense scrutiny of each model, from history and design to performance and interaction of cars and drivers.

In August, Stanford researchers went to a racetrack in Monterey to study a 1964 Porsche Carrera. They fitted the car with laser sensors and a gyroscope to track its suspension and measure how it responded to curves. They also attached wires to the driver's arms and chest to monitor his sweat, heart rate and body temperature.

"We want to understand the car fully, just as you would study a painting," said Nass, who is interested in the psychophysiology – the emotional and sensory experience – of driving. "You look at the time of the artist, the time they lived, the paints and pigments. You try to get a complete view."

Archaeologists weigh in

Archaeologist Michael Shanks, who usually studies classical antiquities, is planning a course he dubs "everything car." As part of the university's continuing studies track, the class will feature Shanks talking to experts on "every conceivable automotive topic," from how cars change lives to how they fit into contemporary family life and how they are likely to change in the future.

Studying cars actually is not such an academic stretch for the field of archaeology, he said. Archaeologists deal with people and their artifacts, of which cars are one in a long line. Automobiles provide another lens through which to study humanity.

"We are design historians and researchers," he said. "We look at people's relationship with stuff for as long as we've been human. It's a broad historical view that takes things seriously."

This term, in an undergraduate course on the archaeology of design, he's including two cars among the 10 items that students are studying. They will consider an ancient stone tool, a Greek perfume jar, a Wedgewood pot, but also a 1933 Bentley and a new-generation car with potential to change the future of commuting.

"Everybody's got a story about a car, whether we hate them or we remember Mom's or Dad's car," said Shanks. "The car is in many ways iconic in people's lives."

All this makes Miles Collier happy. The founder of the Revs Institute for Automotive Research in Naples, Fla., an educational organization with archives, objects and hardware, Collier owns some of the world's most exotic cars, from a French 1896 Panhard-Levassor M2F to a 1995 McLaren F1. Each one, he says, represents "best of breed," but the purpose of the collection is not merely flash and fun.

"My orientation is to look at connections, to try and get to the significance of things behind the surface," he said. "The history of the developed world can be analyzed by looking at cars. We can see society's view of women, the way cities develop, the role of work, leisure, moral and cultural values."

So why did he choose Stanford, far from the industrial birthplace of cars in Motor City? Partly for the university's enthusiasm about the program, he said, but also because it's in California, "the land of the automobile," and near Silicon Valley, the center of car technology research.

"We'll be producing graduates and post docs who are inspired and want to take their work to other institutions," Collier said.

"That's how you know you've won in the academic world. In the corporate world, work is proprietary, but in the academic world you recognize success when the pie gets bigger."

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

---

Katherine Seligman is a San Francisco-based freelance writer.

• Read more articles by Katherine Seligman