Will a Diminished Affection for Driving Change Our National Character?

We may be shifting from explorers to passengers.

Look around on the highway.

People of a certain age – and I definitely fall into that category – can remember when cars were distinctive. You could tell a Ford from a Chevy and a Chrysler. Volkswagens were easily spotted. So too were Volvos and Toyotas.

I can even recall when the French were still selling cars in the United States. [No car was as easy to spot as the Citroen.]

Now, however, with a few exceptions such as Mustangs, Camaros, Corvettes, and Challengers, much of what’s out there seems to blur. You have to look for the car’s name in order to distinguish between the Toyota mid-sized car and the ones by Ford, Kia, and Hyundai.

In other words, you can’t look for fins or two-tone colors. [I recall that American Motors’s poorly named Ramblers had decidedly inferior colors compared to the Big Three automakers.]

Now it can be a challenge to locate some cars in a parking lot.

But here’s the good news. On the whole, cars are much better built and safer. The days when you risked bashing your head on a metal dashboard are gone. So too is the possibility that an engine might wind up on your lap. Crash tests indicate that we have a much greater chance of survival.

And yet I wonder about the drift.

As cars lost their personality and their beauty, they became Ultra-Generic. Practical, safe, and boring.

There is little chance that people in the future will look back and find the same thrill that many of us get today when we see a 1955 or 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air.

The beginning of this change may have been when Ford produced the first egg-shaped car: the Taurus. It was neat and popular and that egg-shape, which gave more room for passengers, was quickly copied.

And so, the utilitarian approach rolled on, but although most of the vehicles were bland, the drivers had not become completely boring. Over time, we didn’t just want reliable vehicles, we wanted ones that could tackle the wilderness and perhaps a riot or two; a desire that makes you wonder whether we were bold or scared.

Hence the popularity of the rhino-guards on the Range Rovers. The buyers knew that the chances of their SUV going anywhere near a rhino were remote, but by then we were into the “Better safe than sorry” mentality and you know, you just never know.

Where will this eventually go? Our fading love affair with cars may be linked to a diminished interest in driving.

There are reports that many teenagers today are postponing that old rite of passage called the driver’s license. That would have been unthinkable when I was a teenager. Even the biggest bookworm longed for the freedom of the road.

One of my friends made insane promises to persuade his parents to buy a used Comet.

Others worked on restoring broken-down Jeeps, Chevys, and Studebakers.

There was a visceral desire to get out there and get moving and that often involved visits to junk yards as well as drag strips.

What’s happened to us?

I fear that our society has been heavily blanketed with a cozy and debilitating passivity.

For years, urban planners have dreamt of getting people out of their cars and into public transit. This has had limited success in part because the bus-riding and light-rail experience often is less Norman Rockwell and more Blackboard Jungle.

But driverless cars are closer to having your own limousine.

My hometown of Phoenix is a test market for the driverless Waymos, an attractive and reliable way of getting around without, get this, having to talk to anyone, a key feature for an increasingly security-conscious population.

Consider the appeal of being able to get around without the cost of car repairs, fuel, and insurance, stir in an aging population that is freeway-wary, and you can see the attraction of going driverless.

And yet, and yet, and yet. We already know that our sense of direction can be lost if we depend solely on GPS to tell us where we are and where we’re heading.

What will be lost if we abandon driving and turn into a nation of passive passengers?

Professor Matthew Crawford, the sage whose earlier work, Shop Class as Soulcraft, warned us about the loss of industrial arts, has issued a similar alert in Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. He cautions that we may inadvertently be on the way to losing our sense of independence and exploration.

I find that to be more than troubling. Americans are supposed to be bold explorers. When we take road trips, we don’t dawdle about. We try to make “good time.”

Remember Joni Mitchell’s classic song, “Big Yellow Taxi”?

We may not know what we’ve got until it’s gone.