Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

by Matthew B. Crawford

A brilliant and defiant celebration of driving as a unique pathway of human freedom, by "one of the most influential thinkers of our time" ( Sunday Times ) "Why We Drive  weaves philosophers, thinkers, and scientific research with shade-tree mechanics and racers to defend our right to independence, making the case that freedom of motion is essential to who we are as a species. ... We hope you'll read it." — Road & Track Once we were drivers, the open road alive with autonomy, adventure, danger, trust, and speed. Today we are as likely to be in the back seat of an Uber as behind the wheel ourselves. Tech giants are hurling us toward a shiny, happy “self-driving” future, selling utopia but equally keen to advertise to a captive audience strapped into another expensive device. Are we destined, then, to become passengers, not drivers?  Why We Drive  reveals that much more may be at stake than we might think. Ten years ago, in the  New York Times -bestselling  Shop Class as Soulcraft,  philosopher-mechanic Matthew B. Crawford—a University of Chicago PhD who owned his own motorcycle shop—made a revolutionary case for manual labor, one that ran headlong against the pretentions of white-collar office work. Now, using driving as a window through which to view the broader changes wrought by technology on all aspects of contemporary life, Crawford investigates the driver’s seat as one of the few remaining domains of skill, exploration, play—and freedom.  Blending philosophy and hands-on storytelling, Crawford grounds the narrative in his own experience in the garage and behind the wheel, recounting his decade-long restoration of a vintage Volkswagen as well as his journeys to thriving automotive subcultures across the country. Crawford leads us on an irreverent but deeply considered inquiry into the power of faceless bureaucracies, the importance of questioning mindless rules, and the battle for democratic self-determination against the surveillance capitalists. A meditation on the competence of ordinary people,  Why We Drive  explores the genius of our everyday practices on the road, the rewards of “folk engineering,” and the existential value of occasionally being scared shitless. Witty and ingenious throughout,  Why We Drive  is a rebellious and daring celebration of the irrepressible human spirit.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Travel, Technology, Cultural, Audiobook, Psychology

368 pages, Paperback

Published June 8, 2021

About the author

Matthew B. Crawford is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He also runs a (very) small business in Richmond, Virginia.

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had 2 problems with this book. One is the mismatch between the title and the description and the contents of the book. One was with the author himself.

If the premise of this book is to describe what the title says, Why We Drive, it has failed. Or to create a cohesive philosophy, it has also failed. Instead it seems as if it is a chance for the author to complain about some things that bother him .

The increased technological advances that make driving more automatic, less hands on. At first, I was willing to go along with this premise. I often say GPS has made me dumber and lazier because I don't need to problem solve my way out of being lost, I just make the GPS do it for me. But I'm not sure he makes a good case for this, and not sure it built to a cohesive thesis.

The essays don't really hold together, and they can be very repetitive. Crawford has issues with things. He thinks motorcycles should be able to split lanes. He thinks speed limits are unnecessary and we should be able to set our own. He LOATHES people who use their phone while driving.

Ultimately, this book feels politically murky. There's a sense of libertarianism in his desire for lawlessness only where he desires it.

The weirdest takeaway is that I feel as if this book could be a text that someone could read to "spot the microagressions." Fairly early on in the book, he talks about going to a dealer to test drive some kind of speedy fast car. He says he gave them my license and they gave me the car to drive. "I love being white!" Those of us who've read So You've been publicly shamed might immediately recognize the "joke" that made Justine Sacco the scourge of the world. Why was it necessary? It made me so uncomfortable that I marked the book page and continued on.

Once I was hyperalert to this, I found many other things to bother me. "suburban woman drivers in SUVs" are derided more than once. There's a chapter about "bicycle moralists." I was interested in this - there's a lot of bicycle moralism in my town and I think it's ripe for discovery. But his whole take seemed to anchor on one anecdote, a guy in Portland who used his prefab bike to take his kid to school and insisted on getting in the car drop off. Who's the moral judger now? He describes someone who got into a road rage incident with him as having jailhouse tattoos. He calls people thugs. He mocks people who do help desk for Microsoft. He doesn't call them nerds, but he comes dang close.

References to Nazis (they build the autobahn!) (Trains running on time!) abound.

Ultimately, Matthew Crawford is one of those people who thinks the things HE likes to dabble in (old cars and motorcycles) are COOL and important to our life, but things OTHER people like to dabble in (computer programming, riding bicycles) are for pretentious dorks.

This is such shallow scholarship. Highly disappointing. Hillbilly Elegy redux.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosopher Matthew Crawford’s third book is ostensibly a book about driving, but as with all Crawford’s works, that is merely the jumping-off point. Crawford expands our minds by exploring a range of related ideas, usually through concretizing abstractions, tying them to work done by real people in the real world. Why We Drive uses this structure, as did his first two books, Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head. Such writing is not for everyone; the payoff can take some time to arrive. But it’s worth the modest effort required, and offers insights into critical modern problems, most of all the pernicious vice of safetyism.

Why We Drive revolves around what driving tells us about human capabilities and limitations. Crawford, as a philosopher, is very, very interested in human capacities, and how modernity affects such capacities, in particular how it often limits, or even cripples, them when appearing to enhance them. All of his published thought revolves ultimately around the creation of agency through learned skill, and of its erosion in modern life, “a creeping colonization of the space for skilled human activity.” This is not a discussion about economic efficiency or productivity, however. Rather, Crawford talks a great deal of man’s quest internally for meaning, and externally for status and honor, both earned through the works of his own hands. The focus is the individual—but through the individual, society as a whole. So why do we drive? The question implies we drive for reasons other than to get somewhere. We drive because driving, like other learned skills, satisfies crucial human needs. In doing so, it improves us in a wide range of ways, many not obvious. And taking driving away from us is therefore a problem.

The backbone of this book is a view of driving machines as “a kind of prosthetic that amplifies our embodied capacities.” Crawford begins by explaining how we got to the present time, when self-driving cars, which we by definition do not drive, are imminent. (We can ignore that I, at least, am very certain self-driving cars will never actually arrive.) Crawford considers the history of cars in urban life, good and bad (citing Jane Jacobs’ plus/minus thoughts on cars), noting that the prevalence of cars was a deliberate choice by central authorities. Who are today’s central authorities for most purposes? Our tech overlords. What do they want? Self-driving cars. Why? So we can be more creative in our increased free time, as they say? No. “Self-driving cars must be understood as one more escalation in the war to claim and monetize every moment of life that might otherwise offer a bit of private head space.” Driverless cars are not driven by consumer demand; they are “a top-down project that has to be sold to the public.” Inevitability is asserted by the Narrative and all must bow; you will be required to use a driverless car, the infrastructure and technology of which will not be held in common, but owned by our tech overlords, walled off in secret vaults for their benefit, not ours. And this will come with many, and massive, hidden costs.

One of the charms of Crawford’s books is how he prevents reader fatigue at philosophy by frequently turning to stories that are concrete, interesting, and relevant. For example, he recounts a story of his broken-down Jeep failing in rural California, sometime in the 1980s. Later in the book we get a lengthy discussion of metalworking in the context of rebuilding a Volkswagen to be something more than a Volkswagen. Crawford warns this discussion is not for everyone (though with my interest in metalworking, I found it fascinating), but “To go deep into any technical field is to make progress in independence of mind, and feel a freedom to maneuver that grows in proportion with one’s powers.” This focus on “one’s powers” is perhaps the overriding theme of all Crawford’s work.

In the 1980s, he was young, and he was learning about physical things in the world, engaging with his Jeep, which was somewhat of a Frankenstein’s monster he had himself built, which he understood at a visceral level. Such engagement is rare in modern cars, where what the drivers sees and feels is a mediated representation, not (for the most part) the physical reality of the car. New cars today are largely disengaged, disintermediated—paradoxically, whereas in older cars, the car becomes an extension of the body, “a transparent two-way conduit of information and intention,” modern technology makes this impossible, making the car even more apparent to the driver, rather than less apparent, when it relieves the driver of tasks. But excessive disengagement not only reduces the ability to learn and improve; it also erodes psychological resilience, in cars and in anything else that can be a learned skill, and may in fact be responsible for increases in depression and anxiety, by breaking the connection between effort and consequence. No mental engagement means limited flourishing. Driverless cars are thus even worse than merely modern cars. They are billed as convenient and safe; maybe they are (and maybe not) but they have deleterious consequences.

The problem isn’t just the control on our lives exerted by Elon Musk’s machines, much more so it is the passivity created by any substantial automation. Specifically, Crawford talks about Audis; I drive an A7, and although I am not a “car guy,” and rarely if ever use the vehicle’s capabilities, I can see what he means. (I also learned that “Nardo Grey” is a paint, a matte non-metallic light grey, used by Audi on their high-end models. I need to get that paint on my next car to look cool.) All driving becomes analogous to the “created experiences” without agency that pass for most entertainment. “The pleasure of driving is the pleasure of doing something; of being actively and skillfully engaged with a reality that pushes back against us.” This is vanishing in today’s world, not just in cars, but everywhere. We are not becoming sexy, creative individuals writing poetry in our self-driving cars; we are becoming the fat people on floating automated scooters from the movie WALL-E.

Crawford then shifts somewhat, to the “spirit of play.” Here he talks a good deal about Johan Huizenga, who wrote a classic study of “the play element in culture,” Homo Ludens. Play is hostility mixed with friendship, part of the “human need to fight,” and this has been found in every human culture. But in ours, it is disfavored. “[I]t expresses a part of the soul that sits uncomfortably with the contemporary taste for order, and is therefore subject to censure as irresponsible (on safety grounds) or, because it is competitive, as a threat to the ethic of equal esteem.” Everyday driving is (except for road rage) not part of this type of play, for the most part, but driving machines are often used in this type of play, in various forms of racing and in other competitive activities that revolve around driving, such as car modification.

This introduces Crawford’s highly negative thoughts on safetyism. Safetyism has received a fair bit of ridicule as it has inexorably heightened over the past thirty years, but it has always seemed more silly than pernicious, a matter of removing the jungle gyms so little Johnny doesn’t cry when he scrapes his knee. That was a wrong judgment, as we have seen in the incredibly destructive, unhinged, hysterical reactions to the Wuhan Plague, the logical end result, or perhaps only intermediate result, of unbridled safetyism. Crawford wrote before the Plague, so it is absent here, but much of what he says is exemplified by what has happened in our country in the past six months.

Crawford points out that safetyism is primarily a symptom of declining societal trust. “Rules become more necessary as trust and solidarity decline in society. And reciprocally, the proliferation of rules, and the disposition of rule following that they encourage, further erode our readiness to extend to our fellow citizens a presumption of competence and good will.” Self-governance of a polity is rooted in activities that demand cooperation not mediated by government action. Driving is precisely such an activity, though only one of many. Automation is a response to lack of trust—if we cannot trust each other on the road, automation will fill the gap. Yet automation itself increases lack of trust in other drivers; each driver becomes “spiritless” and less capable (a problem also found in automated airplane cockpits), especially in an emergency, when trust in others needs to be at a maximum. We become incompetent as a result. Thus, we hand over our agency, our human capacities, to those who make the rules, the lords of tech or the state, which are increasingly the same thing. And they take action to keep us safe, since we are no longer capable of cooperating to balance safety with other needs. This process has no logical end.

Not just activity, but the rules themselves, are automated in the name of safety. “Left to its own internal logic, the regime of public safety must find ways to justify its own growing payroll, and its colonization of ever more domains of life. This can always be accomplished through further infantilization of its clients; under the banner of good democratic values.” The result is very bad. “Infrastructure predicted on too rigid an ideal of control fails to accommodate the exercise of our human capacities, or to exploit the social efficiencies they offer, leading instead to the atrophy of the human.” This is true for automated cars; it is also true for society as a whole, Crawford says, citing James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State. Shared norms, on the other hand, such as those developed during driving, create trust and allow mutual prediction of others’ action (which is why diversity is not our strength, totally aside from driving, and Crawford cites Robert Putnam’s study proving this obvious truth). They are the solution; we should go back to them. Organic growth, whether of towns or driving, may look disordered, but it is resilient and far more efficient than it appears to outsiders. We give up the common law, which provided legitimacy, and we allow it to be replaced by rules issued by faceless men, or by computers, based on opaque Big Data, which we must not question, because the experts tell us this is the Right Thing To Do.

Pushing back against this is very difficult (particularly, though Crawford does not say so, in a social media-dominated environment filled with shrieking Karens), and safetyism is then used by people for their own purposes, large and small. “Those who invoke safety enjoy a nearly nonrebuttable presumption of public-spiritedness, so a stated concern for safety becomes a curtain behind which various entities can collect rents from perfectly reasonable behavior.” Crawford’s focus is on speed cameras and the like, but the preening self-regard earned by those demanding safety is a much broader phenomenon (yesterday, in my semi-rural area, a woman posted on Nextdoor congratulations to two small boys riding their bikes wearing masks, “for keeping us all safe,” causing me to vomit all over the screen). This is not only dumb, but “[T]he pursuit of risk reduction tends to create a society based on an unrealistically low view of human capacities,” which frequently exacerbates the very problems safetyism supposedly is meant to solve. With respect to cars, while some safety devices such as traction control no doubt save lives, drivers in modern cars lose embodied cognition, making driver incompetence, and thus ever-increasing reliance on semi-automated systems, a self-fulfilling prophecy—thereby decreasing safety. Thus, any driverless car that is only semi-automated may increase, rather than reduce, danger—especially with the herd mentality in favor of such cars, which has led to manipulation of data that understates their risks. Yet “the logic of automation is joined, in the public mind, to the moral logic of safety, which similarly admits no limit to its expansion.”

Crawford never comes out and says it exactly, but safetyism is tied to a society excessively skewed toward the feminine. With all of Crawford’s books, men are the focus, something he does not specifically advert to, but which is entirely obvious. Nearly all his discussion, both practical and philosophical, revolves around primarily male talents, traits, and interests: risk, justification through endeavor, competition, combat, the desire to feel fear and overcome it, the creation of things with one’s hands. As far as safetyism being the feminization of society, this comes through in Crawford’s talk about play, which in the sense Crawford discusses it means societally-organized and recognized competition. Crawford notes that for the player, almost always distinction is the goal, not domination. “[I]t is the aspect of the contest, the thirst for distinction, that Huizenga identifies as the crucial, civilizing element of play.” This thirst is an essential building block of society; Crawford cites Huizenga for the proposition that “The contest for honor gives rise to deference and trust among players,” in part because “[u]nlike the simple lust for power, [games] require that participants recognize the legitimacy of standards that aren’t simply emanations of their own will.”

But the quest for honor and distinction is far more a male instinct than a female instinct; thus men are the crucial players, and a society run wholly by women would entirely lack both this quest and its benefits. Why a particularly defective brand of feminine thought, of ways of feminine thinking, has come to dominate the ruling classes of the West is a topic for another time (soon!), but one symptom of this disease is that competitive play is today strongly discouraged by those who rule society. Sometimes this is demanded obliquely, under the guise of increased safety (for the children!), but now is often demanded openly, to end “toxic masculinity,” meaning all masculinity. The result of eliminating competitive play is therefore feminization, but not one where the feminine virtues are amplified—rather one where equal esteem is forced through eliminating the quest for honor, thereby harming society, and most of all eroding trust, without any benefit. Crawford says forbidding competitive games leads to infantilism, to a failure to understand reality and its limitations, which “guarantees arrested development on a mass scale.” Games, especially risky games, build societies and civilizations. Lack of games, the reverse. Moreover, when equal esteem is forced, people become easier to control—which is why those in charge of our schools hate and fear traditional competitive games. They want feminine-type compliance and agreeableness, little boys marching quietly in a line.

There are some places where this is still not true . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s not really about driving than it is about being human seen through the lens of driving. For this reason, the book is for folks who want to think about community, social structures, personhood, virtues, technology, technocrats, etc. You may get bored or turned off by the length of time he spends on his cars and the depth he goes. I know I started. But then I thought, “Wait, my response is the epitome of the sort of circumstance he shares we’ve found ourselves in after giving over our control and responsibilities to private parties. I should at least appreciate the art and performance and virtues Crawford is displaying. The best the rest of us can do is say, “Hey, look what I bought.” “

[Jack W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

First time through: Fantastic, entertaining, thought provoking. I did not always agree, but I never regretted completing a page. Also Big Tech is evil. As are red light and speeding cameras.

Second time through: Anglo-American debates on sovereignty are startingly relevant in the 21st century. America, it seems, can never leave the 17th century.

[Vovka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it. More a collection of essays than a comprehensive deep book on a single theme. Some excellent writing by a very thoughtful car guy. I strongly disagree with the author on a few points, be he changed my mind on other points. A perfect give-and-take, with me as reader gaining lots of perspective and education on topics including autonomous vehicles, playing/fighting in vehicles, the structure of and perverse incentives of traffic laws, advances (and regressions) in car technology, London Cabbies vs Google Maps, and so much more.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very disjointed. One could argue the entire book is a digression as he goes off on tangents and down gear head rabbit holes. He has a lot to say and he’s passionate with some good insights. However, he’s a voice crying out to a world that has been hypnotized by high tech.

[Geoffrey Hagberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

What is it: despite the subtitle, not moving "toward" something but, rather, "against" a lot of things.
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Why 2 stars: I chose to read Why We Drive in the middle of a month-long multi-thousand-mile road trip on which I've opted to drive my manual, sports hatchback on as many scenic roads as I can connect in a loop from Wisconsin to the Pacific and back. One of my favorite vacations prior to this road trip was a week that a coworker and I both took off of work to spend several days in a row on our backs under his 2002 Silverado replacing a transmission, overhauling the suspension, and replumbing brake lines, with a side gig of diagnosing and fixing issues with the starter on the '81 Camaro he'd "borrowed" from his dad's yard. Of the hundreds of movies I watch each year, I keep a list ranking those movies by how I like the cars they feature, with notes on the cars' histories and significance. One of my ambitions in life, such as they are, is to make a project of a late '80s Saab 900 Turbo hatchback as either a clean restoration or maybe restomod. One of my earliest memories of reading is attached to flipping the pages of the D.K.-published Visual Dictionary of Cars, and another is attached to memorizing spreads from Quentin Willson's Classic American Cars, from which I learned about the '55 Bel Air, which remains one of my favorite cars of all time. I drive in local autocross events (even if my driving in those events isn't particularly impressive yet). The weekend after I almost died when my Miata flipped upside-down down a hillside (long story), I rode passenger in a friend's track-prepped 370Z at a local track day. On my office walls, when I worked at a company where I had an office, I had purchased large-scale printed county-level roadmaps for Dane and all of its neighboring counties from the Wisconsin transportation department and had colored in a scale of green, yellow, and red every road I'd driven while cruising backroads to provide my friends with a rating of the best and worst roads to drive. If I were to extend that ranking to include roads I've driven on this current road trip, I'd like to take this opportunity to recommend the US 12 between Lolo and Kooskia through the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest--over a hundred miles of curve after perfect curve along forested mountain slopes and following rivers, with surprisingly minimal traffic other than the occasional camper van and a lot of motorcyclists who seem to have stronger word-of-mouth communities recommending good roads than the car enthusiasts. But I digress. Beyond the car credentials, I include in my reading some urban planning, some philosophy of play and play technologies, and Matthew Crawford's own writing on the merit of physical labor and mechanical problem solving. Jane Jacobs, Ian Bogost, and Johan Huizinga have all profoundly shaped my thinking.

All of that to say: you'd think I'd be the reader perhaps most deeply biased in favor of Why We Drive. I'm living five weeks of open road as we speak, and I'm sure eager to philosophize about it, about my car, about the joy of downshifting into a hairpin while the sun pours over the Lochsa River through a break in the firs and pines. By which I mean: I'm a guy clamoring for any opportunity to celebrate cars, celebrate roads, celebrate driving. The skill of it, the thrill of it, the freedom and peace and complexity and pride of it.

What I find in Why We Drive, however, is not celebration. It's bitterness and cynicism.

I should probably have anticipated this. I wrote in my review of Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft that the reading experience was powerfully shaped by Crawford's biting critique and disenchantment. I suppose I may have rated that book too generously because I was feeling that bitterness, that disenchantment, myself at the emotionally lowest point of my career thus far. Maybe if I'd felt work and education had more to celebrate, I would've felt more friction with Crawford there. Whatever the biases of my previous review, here, reading Why We Drive, I certainly feel that friction.

In place of a text advocating in favor of driving, cars, car culture, the open road, etc., I find a text so consumed with a need to rebut driverless cars and road regulation that it not only fails to make meaningful room for constructive, positive thinking but also fails to shore up the rhetoric of its deconstructive, negative thinking.

The failure to make room for constructive thinking is clearest in the early chapters of the book, where Crawford ostensibly is presenting views into several facets of car culture, from quirky communities to amateur motorsport. This section is intended to be a sort of paean to the opportunities for free thinking and close-knit community found in automotive contexts. But for the reader, the chapters are paced and sequenced in a way that skates a shallow arc over the surface rather than looking for any depth, and Crawford never frames any argument that encapsulates the whole of the collected anecdotes, leaving each to speak for itself in the few pages it's given. Crawford tells the reader he's going to do this; in the introduction, he explicitly warns that he doesn't attempt to smooth the disjointed examples or make overt connections across the various facets he finds himself in. But even with an acknowledgement of what he's doing, the reading experience is rough. There's untapped opportunity to dig in deeper, there's untapped opportunity to examine the whole, and there's a lot of facets of car culture completely unexamined simply because they're not quite folky or libertine enough to fit with the rest.

The failure to shore up the negative rhetoric is clearest in the latter chapters, where Crawford increasingly turns away from any consideration of recreational or edifying driving and looks almost exclusively at regulation, law, and technology and their impacts on the day-to-day driving experience. These chapters fall victim to far-too-easy fallacies--straw men abound, wherever Crawford wants to rely on pathos and so manipulates the tone in which information is presented to present it at its worst; complex issues are given overly simple summaries (the worst offenders being a couple moments where Crawford's willing to bring in some points about Nazi Germany's and Brexit England's driving cultures but takes just a couple sentences make points that absolutely require far, far more nuance given the implications for nationalist isolationism, immigration economies, and populist self-regulation); symptoms are addressed rather than causes (there's a lot of words spent relishing in arguments against Google street view and GPS, leaving shorter sections to then clarify that those arguments are really about the otherwise unaddressed underlying reality of Google's business models); motives and futures both are projected or fantasized rather than evidenced or grounded; and somewhere at the core of it all, there are glimpses of an underlying philosophy that depends upon assumed meritocratic elitism without consideration for whether the desired competencies are practical or possible at the scale of a multi-hundred-million-person population from extremely diverse economic and structural contexts.

I need to clarify, I don't actually disagree with many or even most of Crawford's points, when he's making points. There's a lot of material here regarding the importance of actually being attentive while driving, the moral value inherent in seeking skillful operation of tools, the deeply disturbing systems of surveillance capitalism, the reality that we all now depend on an engine that claims to be about knowledge but is in fact about advertising, etc. that I generally agree with. My critique is not the content so much as the way it is presented and how that obscures the content, weakens its persuasion, distances the reader from it rather than involving them.

The result is a book that expresses Crawford's emotions far more than his logic. And those emotions, overwhelming the logic in the way they do, make of a book supposedly about cars and driving instead a book largely about fear and desperation. A grasping for something that, in the panic, seems surely to be slipping away.

But then I look up from the page to my Veloster N resting after four-and-a-half-thousand miles in the past couple weeks, or to the group message thread where my friends back in Wisconsin are chatting about the optimal air flow for oil cooling in the front of a Z4 and about today's Cardle quiz, or to my planned routes for the next two weeks of driving that'll take me through the various deserts of the American southwest, or to the model cars on the bookshelf here in my parents' house that evidence just how early I was a "car guy"... and I can't help but think maybe that thing grasped for isn't actually slipping away.

Maybe, in this case, all it takes to hold onto it is putting the books down, turning off the news, turning off your phone in fact, and getting behind the wheel.
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Try this instead: Crawford seems to build to a point where the whole book is actually an argument in favor of Shosanna Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, so you could just go to the source for that if that argument's what would've motivating you to read this. But maybe just go cruise a backroad near you and decide if you'd highlight its route in green, yellow, or red on a hypothetical county map pinned to your hypothetical office wall.

[Michael Clemens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acerbic and timely.

[The Book in my Carryon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have always felt most at peace with myself during long, solitary, cross-country road trips, a fact that puzzles more than few of my friends and always made my mother a little uptight. So, when I read the description for Why We Drive by Matthew B. Crawford, I felt I'd found a kindred spirit. After reading the book, I'm not sure I did.

Maybe it was about my expectations, or maybe my hopes. I wanted a book that celebrated driving - the freedom, the headspace, the emotional release of getting behind a car and determining your course and timeline and experience. Why We Drive was not that book. Instead, it was a well-written personal essay on why self-driving cars and car-sharing are bad and how car-less and car-hating Americans are ruining it for the rest of us.

I was not a fan, and admit to skimming through much of the book hoping to find something that hooked me in.

For car enthusiasts - as opposed to folks like me who simply like the feel of the open road - Why We Drive would probably be a satisfying read. There's a lot of information about how car safety advocates and environmentalists have changed cars and this the driving experience in general which is interesting, and the author's personal commentary of various cars he's owned or driven definitely adds a friendly counterpart to the more technical information. The writing is clear, the research seemingly thorough and used appropriately to move the story forward, and the author's voice is consistent and engaging.

Overall, I think my lack of enthusiasm for this book is based almost entirely on my own false expectations. I expected one kind of book and read a different kind. And that happens. Still, I walked away with a deeper understanding of the auto industry's move toward automated, driver-less cars and how that will change us all.

[Dennis Maione · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really brilliant book about driving and what it means.

[Gregg Kellogg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crawford is a real non-conformist, and this book is a pean to gear-heads and hot-rodded Volkswagens. I appreciate this, as in my younger days, I had several vintage Jeeps, a couple of which were also hot-rods. He revels in the open-road (or dirt) and chafes against societies expectations and the rule of "the Man".

There is discussion of coming automation, bringing both good and bad, but a strong wariness of large corporations, with their penchant for mining our data and regaling is with ads at every opportunity, which could make a driverless future a dystopia.

[Imogen Lamb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was highly recommended to me from a colleague- and although it started as a very original piece of work linking his love of cars and driving to how every second of our lives is becoming monetised- I think the message got a little lost in the middle for someone who doesn't share the same love for cars.

I would recommend a read as the ideas are very well-written and coherent and is a very original look on our digital age.

[Susen · Rating 2 out of 5]

While there were several redeeming qualities to this book, one could not miss the little political digs this author slipped in. Tiring and unnecessary.

The best part of the book was about the driving rats.

[Thomas P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tbe author writes very well, though many sections of this book the prose got very long winded and drifted way off topic. Also, this book was too political, especially from roughly midway, right up to the end.

[Brenda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Here is where I put the book down - “The men create space for the women to feel fierce by vacating that space themselves.” What an asshole

[Russell Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I profoundly enjoyed each of Matthew Crawford's two previous books, but I wonder if Why We Drive might stay with me longer and effect my thinking more deeply than either of the other two did. It's not because I'm a gearhead and a fan of cars and engines as Crawford is; nor is it because the book has arguments that are stronger and more focused than the other two. Insofar as that last point is concerned, this book is actually kind of weak; Crawford admits in the beginning that Why We Drive has no consistency of tone, and he's right, as the book jumps from autobiography to sociological investigation to deep moral philosophy to political polemic and back again. No, if it sticks with me, it's because Crawford, as a thinker and a human being, is perhaps more frequently revealed in this book than in his previous two, and the choices made and the perspectives employed by the man kind of haunt me.

Fundamentally, this book is a collection of thoughtful arguments against the systemization of human life, against its streamlining in the name of efficiency and convenience and safety and profit, sacrificing personal sovereignty along the way. Pretty heavy stuff for a book which spends a large amount of time talking about crankshafts and timing gears and pistons, but if one accepts his original conceit--namely, that we can and do feel through our automobiles an extension of our selves, a physical expansion of our human capacities for mobility and risk, one that puts us in constant tension with other drivers and also the social contracts by which we theoretically agree to submit our capacities for reckless driving to the common good--then one can easily see how matters of deep political and moral considerations are brought forth through our experiences, both good and bad, with driving our cars (or, if you're Crawford, our motorcycles). Most obviously--and this is the closest thing to a consistent argument throughout the book--Crawford sets himself against a world in which, increasingly, driverless cars and GPS systems and smart cars and machine-learning-enabled traffic lights constrain and discipline the spiritedness which hitting the road makes it possible for many human beings to feel.

I think that last comment--"many human beings"...meaning, not all of them--is probably the heart of what haunts me about this book. I continually wondered--because Crawford would sometimes tip-toe right up to saying so explicitly, but usually would simply let it lie implicit in his many, often excellent observations and arguments--just how aristocratic and, to be frank, how male this argument for driving, as Crawford conceives of it, has to be. There are long stretches of the book--like when he is dealing with the crony capitalism that makes the prejudice against old clunkers or junkyards into a supposed environmental virtue, or when he is thoughtfully considering the different sorts of vehicular freedom which exists in the individualistic yet rule-obsessed United States vs. the street anarchy of Rome or London or Addis Ababa--when I could put away that question entirely, and enjoy his profoundly thoughtful philosophical considerations. But then I turn a page, and here comes the Nietzsche quotes, the praise for the Greeks (and his extremely low-key dismissiveness towards Christian liberalism), and his oh-so-slightly snarking comments about how empowering might be for women when they stop being uptight about mechanics joking and leering about boob sizes and instead get their heads under the hoods of cars and join with everyone else to warn away the "pussies" from the world to speed they don't understand. Whatever else Crawford is--and he is, I want to emphasize, many impressive things intellectually speaking--he ain't woke.

I should also emphasize that the stuff mentioned in the foregoing paragraph is a very minor part of the book, not central to its arguments at all. It's there, but it's woven into the whole. And as a whole, I loved the book. Though I wonder--but only a very little bit--what that says about me.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another solid insight from Crawford. This is a really engaging read for all car/driving enthusiasts, reactionary/libertarian-ish thinkers, and anyone who’s noticed that as devices (a term which now includes many cars) have become smarter, people have become dumber and human competence is in sharp decline. Crawford has a lot of thought-provoking takes on what it means to be free, man’s relationship to his machines, and the harm caused by the “safety industrial complex,” which is a phenomenal term we should all use. But his takes are well-supported logically and well-researched.

Only reason it’s not 5 stars is that a great deal of time was spent on self-driving cars, but there was almost no discussion on EVs vs gas cars, even though that seems to be the more relevant issue for the average car enthusiast today. Anyone who’s driven an EV knows the experience is different from driving a gas guzzler, even beyond just the noise. Self-maintenance is also more difficult with EVs, and this fits well into Crawford’s concern for the decline in human competence.

But that was the only thing I wish was in the book that isn’t. Overall a phenomenal book!

[Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like this book deserves a written review. This book explains the philosophy behind a lot of things about old cars and simply classic mechanical processes I already preferred but couldn’t explain besides the overused explanation of tradition and descriptor of having an “old soul”.

The premise of this book that the automation of driving and other technology takes away more from us the connivence we gain is expertly driven home. The freedom, privacy, and skills we are willingly and unknowingly giving away paints a scary picture.

Warning this book will make you reevaluate a lot of technology you are currently using. It may even make you question what was in all those “Read and Accept these terms” we most certainly didn’t read.

[Elisabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Why We Drive” probably isn’t for everybody. I enjoyed it a lot, but when he went into deep car mode, it was above my pay grade. However, the *philosophy* of the book made it great.

There is very little in life that is better than an open road, a decent car, and a full tank of gas. Crawford expands on this freedom as he powers through this book.

One of the main challenges presented in this book is the advent of the passivity of being a passenger. He does not limit this to being a passenger in the backseat of an uber, but also being a slave to gps, and other devices.

Crawford presses down on how we give up so easily autonomy and freedom for the feeling of security and comfortability in life. We tend to make fun of people who don’t use gps to get to unknown places, because by using gps we tend to get there faster and without deep thought. Yet, many studies have shown recently that by using the tech our brains atrophy. We lose a sense of place and connection.

Driving is a skill. It’s one of the few places left where “man and beast” connect and become something greater than their singular parts. In my opinion, there is something so very sweet when I pull a turn perfectly, when I judge correctly how fast I can go around a corner, and exactly how much space I need to parallel park.

This book was way more gear-headed, and philosophical than I thought it would be. Yet, I still really loved it, and would recommend it for others, especially if you love driving and the freedom of the road.

[Laura Hancock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really a fun and interesting read. I’ve spent much time thinking about concepts in this book over the last couple months, but particularly the direct relationship of freedom to responsibility. My poor husband has heard too many sentences beginning with something like “Crawford said…”
He may overstate some points and be rather casual at times, but Crawford engages with the world and society and humanity in worthy ways. Makes me want to reread Shop Class as Soulcraft.

[Juliette Groothaert · Rating 3 out of 5]

A unique intersection of philosophy and automobiles, this book explores what driving really means beyond getting from A to B- freedom, control, and how technology is reshaping it. Narrated in a heartfelt, personal style- an engaging read!

Whilst I enjoyed it, I’m not a much of a car enthusiast myself, and so the sections on car mechanics and models didn’t resonate as deeply. If I were, I’d probably have given more stars. Still, for anyone passionate about automobiles, this is a must read.

[Ryland Hennessey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being a car guy, it’s hard for me to articulate why I oppose the cars built by tech companies… this book gives me the words! An insightful look into the where we are, how we got here, and the looming destruction of where we’re headed.

Equal parts nostalgia and political philosophy

[Jared Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crawford has a tendency to slip into current affairs territory. And a contrarian streak that is arguably conservative and might turn some readers off. But the detours into political commentary are made up for by the philosophy. An insightful work, I hope it gets the attention it deserves.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The mysterious title of this book is not made any clearer by the end than it was at the beginning.

Why We Drive is a collection of essays relating in various ways to driving. Roughly one third of them are "I am obsessed with cars" essays in which Crawford discusses his love of tinkering with old cars and parts and driving fast and the driving experience.

Another third are "libertarianism-applied-to-roads" essays in which Crawford complains about essentially all road and car-related laws, from traffic lights to speed limits to laws about keeping old cars on your lawn. His argument is essentially that people can take care of themselves and take as much or as little risk as they deem appropriate based on their own driving skills. He argues that there's scant safety evidence for a lot of safety-based laws and that what they mostly do is take away freedoms for no clear benefit. The book was written around the time of the COVID oppressions and Crawford ties a lot of the pandemic outrages in which evidence-free "safety" measures were used to suppress freedoms to traffic laws. For anyone who just wants to be left alone and not told what to do by technocrats, these essays will resonate even if stopping at a red light never felt particularly oppressive before.

The final group is essentially futuristic essays in which Crawford discusses the impact of emerging auto technologies like self-driving cars and increasing surveillance of the citizenry. He raises interesting questions about the consequences of going from self-directed to automated driving and attendant freedom, proposing that the combination of surveillance and autonomous driving will result in cars and associated technology predicting what drivers will want to do or may be susceptible to doing based on data collected about them and then facilitating these desires (he gives an example of a car suggesting to a woman that she buy a handbag that she likes and then taking her to the store).

Why We Drive is not so much an argument for or against auto-related policies as it is an invitation to consider larger issues of freedom and choice, risk and safety presented by emerging technologies generally, even though the focus of the book is on cars and transportation.

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author ruminates on all things driving related in this engaging book – he covers so much ground related to and surrounding cars and driving (everything from the Autobahn to Soap Box derby) that it does risk diluting the various topics, but overall I appreciated the discussion whether it was speculating on how autonomous driving will affect us to the joy of car repair. It’s less Click’n’Clack and more philosophical (citing Marcuse and other 20th century intellectuals) – it largely worked for me. There’s a bit of over emphasis on the human driving aspect as there is some skepticism regarding the inevitable trend toward autonomous driving, but I understand the allure of the ‘open road’ and that this actually matters for a lot of people.

[Hertog · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should have liked this book. Not only is it's philosophy of driving close to mine, the conservative streak (in the sense of wishing to conserve things from the past) appeals to me too. But unfortunately, the author started to compare a sense of freedom with 'republican' life. And with the current crop of republican politicians working hard to curtail freedoms for personal gain, that is not a very welcome images.
This connection to politics comes at a strange point, too. For a book that has some policy advice in it, a bit of politics might not seem strange. But that's not the section these references are made, it's in the bits focused on the pure feeling of driving. Why the feeling of freedom that comes from driving an open car on a curving road might want to turn you into a Trump-enabler is unclear, but it's exemplary for the messy style of the book as a whole. At one point the author invokes 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' and indeed, the speed with which this book moves from one setting to a completely different one reminded me a bit of that. I already disliked it in the novel, it is completely out of place in a non-fiction book.
The book as at its best when the author describes his own experiences, especially when he describes his own driving experiences and restoration efforts. Unfortunately, that makes only about half the book good. A disappointment.

[Drew Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Why We Drive was good in the same way that Shop Class as Soulcraft was good. Crawford uses driving as the main subject but his focus extends beyond driving to a number of current issues. His best points, to me, were: emphasizing the need for human agency and individual judgment (in an increasingly centralized, technical society), bureaucracy and the “rule of nobody” (Hannah Arendt’s term), the nature and role of tradition and authority within various civic groups/social organizations, the tendency for automation and rules to be substituted for judgment and individual discretion, and the “safety-industrial complex.”

Now that I think about it, Crawford's book makes a good pair with Joshua Mitchell's American Awakening (in the sense that both books focus on the importance of "liberal competence" to our political and social cohesion).

Crawford is a deep thinker and a good writer. He keep your attention through topics that you may have little interest in. This is the type of book that reinforces the old saying that reading facilitates thinking. While there are numerous things in the book that I disagree with, Crawford’s comments are always well-presented and worth considering.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Primitivism. Unsurprising coming from a minor governmental bureaucrat. And like Crawford's life, the book is also very plain and repetitive.

[Bargle · Rating 3 out of 5]

As other reviews say, the book doesn't quite match the title. There isn't a coherent philosophy put forth here. There's things the author doesn't like. I'm no fan of driverless cars myself, but does that mean they shouldn't be developed? Mostly the book is Crawford complaining about what he doesn't like about U.S. driving. One thing I do not agree on is allowing lane splitting by motorcycles. In countries where it's been common for years, it's fine. Trying to implement it here would result in many needless deaths. Americans don't like the idea of some people jumping the line, which is what that's a form of.
I would like to know how the VW build is going. There's enough about it to catch my interest, but no mention of where to follow on the 'web if there is a place.
Simply put, we don't go very far towards any philosophy.

[Mike Lutz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's one sentence from the book:

Between the quiet smoothness, the passivity, and the sense of being cared for by some surrounding entity you can’t quite identify, driving a modern car is a bit like returning to the womb.

The essence of Crawford's book is that autonomous cars, rather than freeing us, will be another step on the path to deskilling us, making us subservient to what should be tools. He earns against the ways in which such tools can be used by "totalitarian capitalism" to reduce risk by (a) learning our ways and preferences then (b) using this as a not-so-subtle mechanism to nudge us to make predefined "decisions". Think Google Ads on steroids (Google figures prominently in Crawford's analysis).

Highly recommended.