America's chronicler of the idle rich, F. Scott Fitzgerald, created in 1925 one of American literature's most memorable automobiles, Jay Gatsby's Rolls-Royce, an automobile which encapsulates the move from automobile as romantic object to automobile as central icon of a decadent culture. Our hereditary instincts are shocked at seeing anything on the road faster than a horse, but as our senses become educated we shall recognize the fact that speed of itself is not dangerous, but the inability to stop is dangerous. It is becoming more and more important with each progressive step in the life of the world. . . . Nothing more flagrantly false was ever said than that speed is inherently bad. Speed is the difference between doing and not doing.
Speed is the measure of efficiency.
They rode through five years in open car with the sun on their foreheads and their hair flying. They waved to people they knew but seldom stopped to ask a direction or check on the fuel, for every morning there was a gorgeous new horizon. . . . They missed collisions by inches, wavered on the edge of precipices and skidded across tracks to the sound of the warning bell. Their friends, tired of waiting for the smash. . . . One could almost name the day when the car began to sputter and slow up. . . .