What’s Pontiac stand for?

After aimlessly cruising the car through town for ten minutes, listening intently for any untoward clanks or sputters, we pulled over into an empty expanse on the outer rim of a mall’s parking lot, to orbit the vehicle and perfunctorily kick the tires. I don’t know anything about cars, but even so, one simply cannot buy a third-hand car without first having opened the hood. And so I opened the hood. I was confronted with an engine that certainly appeared engine-like: right up front was what I felt sure must be the radiator, the fragile aluminum fins of its grille always reminded me of a whale’s baleen, graveyard to countless grasshoppers; immediately behind and to the side, the oil dipstick stood at attention, representing one of the few car-care functions I knew how to perform, its looped orange top beckoned my finger to give it a pull; and occupying the centre, carrying the load, were the cold metal coils of the engine, which promised to somehow conveniently convert, into something that could get me where I wanted to go, the ancient remains of those creatures who had prowled this planet as its jurassic custodians for eons longer than we were now zooming around it, squeezing its crust of every last drop of their dried subterranean blood, choking its priceless atmosphere of the air it gives so freely, destabilizing its precarious vital balance, that to maintain viable and healthy would entail nothing less than consigning us as a species to that pitiful bipedal existence from which engines, like the one I was at that moment pretending to inspect, had so cataclysmically freed us. I closed the hood and stared down at the red, arrow-like logo at its beaked middle point: Pontiac. My very first car had also been a Pontiac, but a nearly pristine specimen, whereas a few flecks of red paint were chipped off this logo.

I got back in the car, assailed by the powerful artificial floral scents propelled by the three air-fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. Breann was getting off the phone with a mechanic, the third she’d called. It was Thanksgiving weekend, and the few shops that were even open did not have time for a drop-in, pre-purchase inspection. Just then, Todd, the seller, called me: he wanted to know what was taking so long. I told him we liked the car and were just phoning around to see if any mechanics were open to give it a quick once-over, before we decided to buy it. He said, “okay, no problem,” and I thought the fact that he had no issue with us getting an inspection must mean he felt confident there was nothing wrong with the car. I might not get cars, but I can read people. Perhaps the three air-fresheners were a bit much, but it showed Todd was trying, in his own way. And since nobody professionally, or even adequately, qualified was available to check out the car anyways, we went to an ATM inside the mall and took out $250 each to give Todd as a deposit.

Sure, it was not our dream car, but we only needed something affordable and dependable, and in that order; something that would get us to and fro for the next eight months. When Breann mentioned, reasonably, “I can’t drive clutch,” I responded, exuberantly, “you can learn, it’ll be fun!” But I was wrong—on both counts. And it turns out that my confidence in reading people, which still persists to this day, was also mistaken. Because as we drove back to Todd to give him the money, pleased with our new purchase, there in fact was a problem with the car; one which even I would have been able to immediately identify and diagnose, if only I had known to look in the right spot.

Needless to say, I am not a car person. I’ve never spent more than $5k on a car, and I hope to never have to. During the 19 years I’ve been eligible to drive, I’ve never had a car insured in my name for a full 12month period. As I’ve stated on this blog before, I actually love to hate cars and car culture. I’ll schlep groceries home by hand across six densely populated multi-use city blocks rather than drive home from Costco any day of the week. If I moved to Amsterdam and never sat behind a wheel another day in my life, I’d count my blessings. I tend to see cars as, at best, terribly inefficient and costly (albeit often convenient) forms of transportation; and, at worst, as personal mobile lethal weapons, legally placed in our hands shortly after adolescence and only withdrawn just before the onset of senility. And yet—yet—I still find myself completely susceptible to identifying with a car; to infatuously investing it with hollow value, and then letting its inflated artificial meaning delude my reasoning and buoy my sense of self. To my surprise, during the last year and a half, I’ve fallen hopelessly in love with a car. It isn’t the Pontiac.

Although now thinking back on the convolutions taken by my warped thought process in that parking lot, I think it was the deep and dormant love for my previous Pontiac that made me rush into the decision to purchase this rusted reincarnation. Because you never forget your first, and I did love that car. Grandma had just died and left her rather fancy car to my uncle. Empathizing with the fact that I was fresh with my license that same month, but with a wary eye towards the reckless driver I was likely to be for the coming years, my uncle kept his mother’s car and sold to me for one dollar another car that had been both of my older cousins’ virgin vehicle: a 1990 Pontiac 6000 SE. “Just like me, 1990,” I’d said.

As soon as I had the keys, I set to vacuuming assiduously. I had never vacuumed something without having been told to; at sixteen, I didn’t know you could vacuum something without first being told. Having finished, I sunk into its comfortable, full-bench seats, and immediately felt very much like an adult. When I took my first drive around the block, I marveled at its speedometer, which rather than making the usual half circle, instead moved in a straight line across the dash. (I would soon learn that if I went fast enough, I could ‘bury the needle,’ and it would disappear completely, but this only happened while going down a long, steep hill.) I got a cloth and a bucket of warm soapy water, and scrubbed the protective plastic that encased the dashboard until it was so clean it became hardly visible; polished around the radio knobs, air vents, and gear shaft, making sure to remove all the dust hidden in every nook and cranny; and hosed down the floormats, watching as grime continued to be expelled long after they appeared to be clean, until I simply decided to stop, and left them to dry on the fence. Finally, I was ready to proudly present to my friends my new car, my most prized possession. “Pontiac, eh. You know what that stands for, right?” one asked. “What?” I preened. “Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s A Cadillac.” That was my first lesson that a car is never just a car…

Like Fish in a Bucket Car

We, as North Americans, are imbedded in car-culture. We interact with cars every day of our lives, whether we’re encased within their metallic shells, or on the outside of them, making our way through the world, rather, in our somewhat softer scaffolding. If we somehow manage to avoid cars in our daily routine, we nonetheless suffer the reverberations of their presence in ways more invisible but nonetheless inescapable, such as the temperature of our cities or the price of our homes—both of which rise higher due to cars.

Looking down at our cities from above, it becomes clear that our cities have been designed not for people to live in, but for cars to get around in (or, more often than not, for cars to merely sit around in). The egregious extent to which those two things can come apart—what people need to live well, and what cars need to move around—as well as the ways in which they can literally come crashing together, all too often remains obscured. Until something suddenly shifts, to jarringly reveal the underlying discordance, like when you get in a fender bender while your upbeat music plays on.

It may cross our minds, whenever we are stuck in rush hour traffic, that cars are an especially inefficient means of transporting thousands of people around cities; and we might somberly reflect on the dangers cars pose, while we slowly curve past and take a look at the metallic wreckage that made us late to work that morning. But any more serious and thorough appreciation of the catastrophe that is our car culture eludes the vast majority of us. This is, at least in part, because our utter car dependency is so immediate and overwhelming. As the old joke goes, we don’t know who first discovered water, but we know that it wasn’t a fish. It is precisely when one’s way of life is wholly surrounded and shaped by something, that one is most unable to see it.  

So let me ask a question, reader: what is the most dangerous thing that you do? Your mind might wander to your hobby as a rock climber, or scuba diver—maybe you’ve even swam with sharks. Or perhaps you go backcountry snowmobiling each winter, or have a penchant for bungie jumping. As much as any of these activities may get your adrenaline pumping, the underwhelming truth is that for most of us, the most dangerous thing we do is driving. Indeed, you may be more likely to violently die as you make your way to these other activities than you are actually doing them, so long as you make sure you drive to get there.

Along the same vein, if I asked you to guess the most dangerous jobs, I imagine some of the first ones to pop into your head would be police officer, firefighter, pilot—maybe even a rodeo clown. And you could be forgiven these guesses, as most of them do in fact crack the top 20 most dangerous jobs. (Police and clowns do not, but I bet that’s not the main similarity you think of when you envision the venn diagram of cops and clowns.) Guns, fires, flying through the skies—raging bulls! What could be more dangerous than all that? Well, falling trees, apparently. And, of course: cars.

Topping the list of dangerous jobs we have our hurley-burley lumberjacks (#1), but rounding out the top five are the unassuming garbage collectors (#5). And before you think they’re getting squished in those intimidating trash compactors, the data is quick to clarify that “The most common cause of death for these workers is being struck by a garbage truck, or other vehicle.” And as you skim through the list, that clarifying clause starts to pop up again and again. With the diligent delivery driver (#7) beating out the daring firefighter (#9), and where even in the latter’s case we again read, “The most common cause of death on the job for firefighters is traffic crashes, followed by fires and explosions.”

Scattered through the list are dangers related to the idiosyncrasies of certain jobs, such as electrocutions for power linesman (#10), or plane and crane crashes for pilots (#2) and crane operators (#13). When we try to deduce the deadliest denominator, we might think it is the high fall, a fate shared by roofers (#4), construction helpers (#14), landscapers (#15), and cement masons (#17). But running through the list like a red thread of death—no wait, sorry, driving through the list, on a fatal freeway of our own making—is cars, constituting the common cause of death for (besides those three already mentioned above): agricultural workers (#11), crossing guards (#12), highway maintenance workers (#16), small engine mechanics (#18), and finally, heavy vehicle mechanics (#20). All these leading work-related deaths, tied together by the same cause of sudden termination: “transportation incidents.”

And before you think that vehicular violence is limited to certain jobs, where such people spend large portions of their day performing specialized and dangerous tasks (or just abnormal amounts of time driving) rest assured that cars don’t care if you’ve punched a clock or not—they’ll still punch yours, as they do for more than a million worldwide. That’s over 2 deaths each minute, or more than 3,200 per day. Or put yet another way, about 40-60 people will die because of cars while you’re reading this essay (depending on how fast you read or how much you decide to just skim.) More than half of those deaths will be people not even inside cars, i.e., pedestrians and cyclists. In the US, rates of car death are 7x higher than in Sweden, Switzerland, or the UK. Driving is so dangerous in North America, that neither the Canadian Prime Minister nor the American President are allowed to drive themselves on public roads. (This rule seems likely to be one of the very few statutes that the latter leader might be prudent enough not to break.)

For American children and teens, the leading cause of death had long been cars (in both rural and urban areas), at least until somewhere around 2018-2020, when it became guns, but with cars still close behind. Of all the things American parents tend to worry about, fixating on kidnappings or a family vacation to a ‘third-world’ country, their children are now more likely to die at school, or on the way there.

For American adults, after heart disease and cancer, accidental deaths are the third leading cause of death, and cars are the second leading cause of accidental death, right behind drug overdoses, and alongside falls. But of course, to focus just on the corpses created by cars threatens to obscure the millions more who walk—or limp—away from their accidents with life-changing injuries, as cars park just under 4 million Americans into emergency rooms each year. Do you find all this data distressing? Don’t worry! The American government has decided to stop keeping track of it. If a car crashes on the freeway but no agency is there to record it, does it make a sound?

Off the top of my head, and thinking of only people that I’ve known personally who have died suddenly or otherwise violently, I can think of four suicides, one murder, an overdose, a mining accident, a mountain climbing accident, one who froze to death, another in an apartment fire, and even a friend struck by lightning while cutting sugarcane, who died from his injuries a few days later. When I expand to friends-of-friends, my ex knew someone who died in a terrorist attack, Breann’s friend’s aunt was killed in a mass shooting, and my mom’s friend died in a bush plane accident. This is a tragic and unsettling list, to be sure.

But when I bring cars into the mix, I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t know someone who has been killed in or by a vehicle. In that way, cars remind me of cancer: we all know people they’ve killed. That above ledger of lost lives still falls short of the almost one dozen people I’ve known personally whose lives have ended in their cars, which includes a close family friend, killed just a few months ago, while I’ve been collecting notes for this essay, when two men driving a big truck decided to attempt a dangerous pass and came into her lane. I attended her memorial, where only one of her two children was able to successfully fight back tears and say a few words.

So why don’t we seem to really recognize, in our personal lives and as a society, the true toll of the cost of cars? Because in the wake of these statistics and anecdotes, what deserves to be acknowledged next is that, despite all of this, so few of us approach cars as if they’re wildly dangerous. To the contrary, we get behind the wheel, call shotgun, or pile in the backseats with little sense of any impending peril. If anything, we are often at our most distracted or impatient when behind the wheel, precisely when we need to be our most cautious, the most willing to extend grace to our fellows.

We should be our most sympathetic version of ourselves when we are driving. Driving is the biggest trust game any of us play, with the highest stakes. Sometimes I’ll drive through the flow of traffic in awe of our grand ballet of blinkers and timed stop lights and sloped overpasses, and I’ll feel overwhelmed with fellowship for all the strangers in their cars around me, partaking in this colossal feat of concrete coordination. But these moments are brief. Indeed, the only time I seem to have any temper at all is when I’m driving, stuck in traffic. Our car induced impatience is so cliché it has a name: road rage.

It is partly because cars hide our bodies, encasing them in metal, that enables and exacerbates our anger. Whereas the subtle movements of the human body can both signal and elicit sympathy, the car is a ready receptacle for our rage. When walking or biking, if you cut in front of someone with less space than you intended, you can shirk your shoulders or bow your head to offer an instant apology, and they’ll respond with an understanding smile, “no problem, these things happen.” In cars, you’re free to scream, but you’re also sure to go unheard. Confronted with the metal shell hiding the human within, your anger builds. If while walking you passed by someone stopped and looking lost, you might offer, “do you need some directions, ma’am?” In a car, you’re likely to scream, “Move it, fuck-wad!”

Just a couple months ago I was biking down the road when a driver, not yet noticing me, began to push into the intersection. He quickly saw me, and came to an abrupt stop. He also must have seen my body tense up in fear, because after he pulled up alongside me, rolled down his window, and apologized, “sorry man, I didn’t see you.” Later that same week, I walked past a woman in her car, leaning on her horn at the driver in front of her, who had come to a stop at an intersection. “Go, motherfucker, goooo! There’s no stop sign!” Although I could hear her yelling from the sidewalk, her intended target could not; neither could they see her bulging neck vein.

Cars elicit something imperious from deep within us. And why not? Placed in control of this ingenious metallic machine, its immense power at our fingertips, our capacities are vastly extended, our will empowered, our personalities emboldened. We become little gods. But cars can never quite deliver on the myth they sell us. The commercials promise an epic drive straight up the side of a mountain, or a race through empty city streets on glistening pavement; in reality, we’re inching along on crumbling infrastructure, stuffing our face with junk food, filled with fury, waiting to crash, or have a heart attack.

Even when confronted with a close calls in cars, we shrug it all off remarkably fast. Think of how many times you’ve seen a pedestrian or cyclist at the last moment, just in time to tap the breaks (or how many times another driver has noticed you at the last minute). It couldn’t be a more commonplace experience; we smile sheepishly at each other, give a wave of apology, “sorry about that, I almost perforated your vital organs!” We’ve all driven past deadly wreckages and returned to our drive with almost perfect equanimity. I assume that if you saw a child drown in a pool, you’d take your kids out, and say that’s enough swimming for today. But if you drove past a deadly accident on the way to the pool, you wouldn’t decide to turn around and go home. For those of us fortunate enough to not be living in an active war zone, driving is the only activity we do every day that has the not unlikely potential to result in carnage. One minute we’re telling our children to finish their breakfast or they’ll be late for soccer practice, and five minutes later we’re regaining consciousness in a crumpled minivan, and in our mouth is blood and bone and bits of brain.

If it seems that I am being gratuitously gory—and I am—it is only to act as a necessary counterpoint to how we tend to think of cars, which is the result of processes of both general familiarity and purposeful socialization. I am trying, in other words, to bring the fish out of the water, and let it get a look at what it’s been swimming around in. Driving around in cars doesn’t feel like cleaning our chimney atop a ladder or smoking crack in an alley, yet the statistics suggest they’re all similarly dangerous. But whereas our natural instincts protect us against falls, and our governments restrict access to certain drugs, so much of our social world and public policy pushes cars upon us—and we love them!

We give cars personal names, we spend beyond our means to purchase them; some of us bring our cars right inside of our homes, so that we can sleep near them while sharing the same roof. We invite cars to participate in the production of our personality, saying “I’m a car person,” or “he’s a car guy.” All the while they kill and maim us and wildlife, poison our shared environment, and deform our cities, which could otherwise be much more livable and beautiful. What is this about? Perhaps the reason for this oversight regarding the way we think of cars has to do with the very wiring of our brains?

For instance, we noticed that deaths by falling followed cars closely when it came to work deaths, but it is how these two dangers are different that is most illuminating. If you step up to the edge of a 100 foot cliff, with only a slender rope tied around your waist, your heart will immediately be in your throat, the hair on the back of your neck will rise, your teeth set on edge. We cannot say the same about when you strap a seatbelt across your waist and head down the freeway at 50 miles per hour. (A crash at just 30 mph converts 100 lbs. of human flesh into 3000 lbs. of kinetic force, roughly equivalent to falling from a 3-story building.) In both cases, if just one thing goes wrong—something often beyond your control—the forces entering your body to tear it apart, and the mess it leaves, will be quite similar. The difference is that evolution has had millions of years to warn you of the real dangers associated with standing too close to cliffs. Not so with cars.

Surely we don’t have to wait around until an aversion to cars confers some sort of reproductive advantage, and a genetic predisposition to reject cars spreads throughout the population. Afterall, the Dutch did it, when they decided to transform Amsterdam from a car clogged city to a cyclist’s dream, which began with the successful “Stop de Kindermoord” campaign (“stop the child murder”), and ended with 767km of bike lanes in the city. Cars may not be the first association that springs to most our minds when someone mentions ‘child murder,’ but that’s what the Dutch realized: to change for the better our relationship with cars, we have to cut through the common misconceptions, and change how we conceive of cars.

From Smelly Socks to Status Symbols

In her essay “Driving as Metaphor,” Rachel Cusk suggest that a certain amount of delusion is necessarily constitutive to driving: “it was as if driving was a story I had suddenly stopped believing in, and without that belief I was being overwhelmed by the horror of reality.” We’ve all had similar experiences, those moments of clarity that come upon us while we are in cars or on the side of a road, where we realize suddenly that all it takes is someone else’s moment of distraction. “Why was everyone else not likewise crippled by this realization?,” she wonders.

It’s as if there is a sweet spot that we must occupy, between dangerous distraction and crippling awareness, that allows us to delusionally drive onward. Indeed, it was precisely this need to pay close attention, namely to the manual switching of gears, that Breann hated so much about the Pontiac, or “Mr. Clutch,” as we came to name that car. “Why do people even want to drive cars like this, they’re horrible!,” she complained, as she made Mr. Clutch buck and lurch in search of second gear. It was her first time driving in real winter, with snow and ice, and now she was being asked on top of that to learn to drive stick. “This is crazy dangerous,” she acknowledged. This coming from the person I’ve watched in fear (my fear) as she drives down the 405, steering the wheel with her thigh, while fixing makeup or putting her hair into a ponytail. Now these quiet winter roads were “crazy dangerous.” We’d both become accustomed to our own variety of danger, which came with its corresponding set of delusions. Nonetheless, within a week, we’d decided that Mr. Clutch would have to go.

I was encountering my own set of problems with Mr. Clutch, although of a less practical nature. The first time my friend Travis saw it, he laughed and asked if I also planned to get a job at Dominos delivering pizzas in this car. Owen also laughed, “a Pontiac coupe? You look like a high school kid!” I chuckled along at these comments, but they planted their intended seed.

Once you have a car, you start to notice others like it, and now every time I saw another Pontiac, I had a look at who was driving: greasy looking high schoolers, tired looking single moms with a brat or two in the backseat, or dads who probably only see their kids every other weekend. Whenever a Pontiac pulled up alongside me to stop at a red light, the driver’s window would usually be cracked open in the dead of winter, so that the driver could tap out their cigarette. Is this what I looked like, I wondered? Or worse: is this who I am? Of course, I was projecting, fastening my insecurities to my shit car, just as those with luxury vehicles use them to bloat their own sense of self worth. Soon enough though, the Pontiac came to represent a 1-ton confirmation of my otherwise sneaking suspicion: that I was a loser. I didn’t so much think this as I felt it; it seeped into me, through the hierarchical status norms of our car culture. Mr. Clutch would have to go indeed.

These, however, were still not our most pressing issues with the car, because every time I drove it, even if just out to get groceries, I felt as if I could watch the gas gauge move down. Surely I was being paranoid. But there it went again, and damned if I didn’t also detect the faint whiff of gas whenever I stepped out after parking. We hadn’t been able to get a pre-purchase inspection, but maybe it was time we’d got a post-purchase inspection. And so I dropped it off at the mechanic, shared my experiences, and left them to their esoteric investigations, understood only by the initiated, “car people.”

When the mechanic called back he said he’d “never seen that before”: not only was there a hole in the fuel lines, from which gas was indeed leaking, but there was also a sock tied around the leaky lines. I thought back to the three air-fresheners Todd had placed in the car; what I had taken as a scent meant to appease had actually been a stench meant to deceive. The little snake. With labour included, the job would come to $844. There was nothing to do but pay it. I started searching online for a new car that same night.

Over the following weeks I would try in vain to get in touch with Todd. Before I’d bought the car, it had been him who repeatedly texted me, injecting urgency into the entire process: just “making sure you still want the car” because “other people are asking too” so “when can you come with the money?” But since I’d driven away, silence from his end. This despite the fact he’d also promised to meet again and give us the summer tires, which had been included in the price. Things got to a point that I eventually decided to go back to his place (his parents’ place) and knock on the door to play the role of indignant buyer. His father opened, and informed me that “Todd is back in jail right now.” As to why, he didn’t offer, and I didn’t ask. I decided not to mention the leaking lines or the sock, and only ask after the tires, since I’d need them when I soon sold the car myself. He said he’d try and get me the tires, but they were at the house of one of Todd’s “sketchy friends.” I never got those tires.

I took Mr. Clutch to the car wash, cleaned him up, snapped some pics, and posted him on Facebook marketplace, ready for purchase with a clean bill of health. With its new fuel lines and pump, and low kms (just ~120km), it was still a fine car, and I could now sell it with a clean conscience. We had bought it for $5k, and put about $1k into it. I told Breann we could probably sell it for $7k. But after the first few days, nobody seemed that interested. Finally, the first person called, came for a test drive, and said he was interested if I was willing to come down a bit. I said I’d come down to $6k, since I couldn’t include any summer tires, and he accepted, and with that Mr. Clutch was out of our lives. (I’d even come out ahead about $100.) But what about its replacement?

After weeks of scouring ads, just before Christmas I finally came across the perfect car: a used 2001 Audi A6 Avant. Low kms, automatic, AWD, and most importantly, a very pretty colour: a brilliant turquoise. I loved it as soon as I saw it, and to this day, I still have not seen a car exactly like it. I messaged the lady selling it, said we were interested and serious, and although we wouldn’t be able to come check it out until after the holidays, if she would be willing to talk on the phone for a moment, so I could ask a few questions, then I would be happy to send her a deposit. She sent her number, and I called her.

She introduced herself as Loire, and told me she had bought the car from an old German couple in Victoria. The previous owner had had it shipped all the way from Germany. The car had lived in a garage, seldom encountered harsh winters, been regularly maintained, and had all its records. (This, by the way, is the history shared by about 90% of all used cars being sold.) It had no issues. She had only had it for one year herself. The old German man had only sold it because his wife was forcing him to part with it as he was losing his eyesight, and possibly his mind. Loire was only selling it because her husband had recently died and she would take over his SUV and no longer needed a second car. I mentioned I liked the colour. She said apparently it was a custom ordered colour. She then also mentioned she had another person who was interested, who was going to come take a look in a couple days, but that she was willing to hold it in our name until after Christmas, if we were serious enough to send a deposit now. While still on the phone with her I had also started snooping on her Facebook profile. I noted with grim relief that her husband had in fact recently died. Good, so her story seemed to check out. That was enough for me. We transferred 2k into her account.

A week later—and after this time making sure to get a pre-purchase inspection—the car was ours. We were thrilled. Not a scratch or fleck of paint missing. “But it only plays tapes,” Breann noticed. “That’s ok, I still have lots of great cassettes we can listen to, and we can find more at any thrift store, it’ll be fun!” This time I was right—on both counts. When we got home, I set to meticulously cleaning the car, just as I had with my very first Pontiac. I vacuumed the seats and carpets; I popped out the cup holders, which have this neat way of discreetly folding into themselves when not being used, and wiped them down; I found an Audi-brand squeegee tucked in a back wheel well compartment, and used it to Windex all the windows and the sun roof; I loaded up all my tapes in the side door panels, and I said a silent prayer of thanks for the fact that I had a nice car with buttons and dials and knobs all over the dash, instead of a loathsome computer screen. Finally, I ordered a custom tennis ball to be placed on the emergency break that read “The Mabey Mobile,” and Breann ordered a custom bumper sticker, “Mabey…and that’s final!” We imagined how people might come to recognize our car as we drove through town, “there go the Mabeys!”

This time, when I showed it off to friends, there were no little jokes, just expressions of appreciation. I pointed out the tasteful touches of wood paneling, “you won’t find that anymore in the plastic cars they make nowadays.” When Nick climbed in, he ran his fingers along it, commenting, “this Audi is such your steeze.” I wasn’t completely sure what he meant, but I knew it sounded much better than a nigger who thinks his Pontiac is a Cadillac.

Everyone loved the color, which the owner’s manual informed us was ‘Jasper Green, LX6V’ and so we named the car Jasper. Last summer, I took Jasper to the carwash more times than I’d done for all of my previous cars combined. We even took a couple photo shoots with the car. The four rings of the Audi logo became the lifesavers I needed to buoy my enfeebled esteem. Nothing had changed in my life, I was still broke and jobless. But now I drove a luxury German automobile, albeit one over two decades old. For now, that was enough. I was still not a car guy, but for the first time, I could understand how one could be. Now whenever another Audi pulls up next to me and I glance into it, I’ll see an older gentleman at the wheel, handsome, but aging too gracefully, likely he’s had a brow lift, or got his chin tucked; in the backseat might be some hypoallergenic dog, the kind my more trendy friends buy but then refuse to tell me how much they paid.

“I get it now,” I told my friend Josh, a car guy, when he came for a visit. “I can see why you can get obsessed with all these expensive brands.” He smiled back at me and countered that it’s not all about the status, and that people also want dependable cars, so that’s why they’re willing to pay for the best. (Josh drives a new Porshe Cayenne.) And I suppose that sounds reasonable, but I still have my suspicions. Once planning a road trip with my friend Dustin, he wanted to splurge for a sports car; his grandparents had one, his parents each have one, and so did he back home in Germany. “We’re a ‘Mercedes Family’,” he explained. It had never occurred to me that one might capture something about their family through their relationship to cars. I explained to him that my family is more of a “the a/c hasn’t worked for years,” or “you can only open that door from the inside” type of car family. We ended up renting the Honda.

But now, I could feel something changing. Driving Jasper, I seldom see another car like it on the road. And there is a pleasure that comes with that distinction. I have it, and others don’t. That’s the point of a luxury item: its luxuriousness is bound up in its exclusivity, and the delicious subtleties of the hierarchies this creates. The point of first class is not simply the large seats and better service; it’s also that they’re seated first so that the plebs can then watch them sip champagne while they walk by; it’s the transparent, almost see through curtain that is pulled across as a faux divider, meant to tease more than it is to conceal, ensuring that people on either side of the curtain keep thinking about what they have or don’t compared to the other side; it begins before the plane is even boarded, when those in first class are invited to board earliest, in the self-assured carriage of their shoulders as they stand to separate themselves from the crowd, enjoying that brief moment where the crowd stares in envy.

If suddenly everyone were to be given Porsches, even though the dependability of Josh’s would not change, he would nonetheless feel that the car had been devalued. If everyone can have one, then I no longer get to indulge in the status such a car once conferred. If I told you that every morning I am picked up and driven to work by a driver in a vehicle that costs well over $250, 000, you might be impressed. But if I then told you I’m talking about the city bus, you’d probably laugh. The bus or metro is a just as much a mechanical and policy achievement as a Bugatti or Maserati, but the former are open to everyone, whereas the latter are exclusive, restricted to the few, and so that’s where we affix our admiration.

When I see a car collector, someone like Jay Leno, with over 181 cars, I cannot but understand this as an undiagnosed mental health problem. All these rare (and rarely used!) cars, sitting in his garages, presumably filling a void in his soul. If we were to step into a hoarder’s apartment, it would become immediately clear to us that this person is not well. But Leno and the hoarder both give themselves over to the same base, pervese acquisitive desire—one of them just has a bigger bank account. There’s a reason the cliché male midlife crisis attaches itself to nice cars: quick cachet for currency. We hoped we’d grow up to be astronauts, but now as accountants, we’ll settle for a car shaped like a spaceship.

Just take a look at this advertisement, a classic case of cathexis, and tell me what kind of need a truck is meant to meet, what kind of desire it aims to satisfy? The automobile has become an object of identity formation. But what, then, are we saying about ourselves? Do we need the all space these vehicles offer? Maybe, but this mini Japenese Kei truck and this massive Chevy Silverado actually have the same bed length. From Ram to Toyota, the sightliness of these trucks now allow up to 10 children to be in front of the grille before their heads become visible to the driver. Perhaps we buy them to feel safer, which they are, except for the fact that now we’ve set off an arms race of bigger and bigger SUVs and trucks, which ends with our roads being less safe for everyone. Why, though, are those truck and jeep grilles actually designed to appear more aggressive and angry, what purpose does that serve? My friend Travis, the one who made fun of my Pontiac, just had to sell his new Ford truck: he couldn’t keep up with the payments, which amounted to a staggering $1,100 per month.

These big trucks are a big part of the reason why pedestrian deaths are actually increasing: whereas these vehicles once hit us below the hip, they now come crashing into our chests. To take the most egregious example, the new Cyber Truck looks like it is intentionally designed to mow down other human beings while driving to an underground bunker—a post-apocalyptic eventuality that is eagerly awaited with erotic anticipation by precisely the kind of people who purchase Cyber Trucks.

So while Jasper seemed to making me happy, even proud, like a ‘somebody.’ I couldn’t help but wonder: what was the underlying lack that had left me so susceptible to this form of support? Why do we North Americans have car shaped holes in our souls, just waiting for that ‘dream car’ to drive in, and change everything?  

You got a fast car…

When Americans take a trip to a European capital, or one of Latin America’s great colonial cities, they all have the same realization: “wow, the city is so…alive. There’s so much happening in the streets!” What they really mean is: “look at all these car-free spaces, all these places where humans can come sell things, perform, play, eat, and just hang out.” We’re used to those same spaces being filled with cars, which means filled with noise, filled with danger, and bereft of human life. This defining difference has even become a common Instagram meme.

On occasion, we’ll do the same thing in North America, on a micro scale, when we block off a certain street from being accessible to cars. Once done, that instantly becomes one of the most pleasant places in the entire city, where there’s social events, farmer’s markets, the tables of different restaurants spilling out onto the sidewalks and into the street, families walking by, couples sitting on the edge of giant flower pots, maybe there’s even a public piano, the sounds of voices and music. On these streets we get a glimpse of the truth that cities aren’t loud—cars are.

Even in America, that’s what streets used to be: places for people, not cars. People met and talked in the streets, children played in them; before cars, streets were not considered especially dangerous spaces, something that only exists today in the quietest of cul-de-sacs, where you might still find a basketball hoop. When cars started to appear, people thought the onus should be on the drivers of these curious contraptions to carefully and slowly make their way through the streets, responding and deferring to the spontaneous movements of pedestrians, much like we would expect from a cyclist making their way through a crowded pedestrian area.

When cars started getting faster and hitting people, the public was initially furious. The ensuing campaign to shift streets from safe places for people, to loud dangerous routes for cars was a matter of concerted corporate coordination. Car companies would pay local newspapers to notify them of any accidents, and then supply them with ready-made accident reports that shifted the blame to the pedestrian. Because “jay” was a pejorative term for a dumb country bumpkin, the term jaywalking was invented, at first to publicly shame pedestrians, and then to eventually penalize them. This was just the first forerunner in what would become a long list of all the ways cars were going to change cities for the worse.

I currently live in the Wooster Square neighborhood of New Haven: Little Italy, famous for all the old pizza spots. Its blocks are filled with “a concentrated collection of distinctive 19^th century residential architecture,” nice restaurants, coffeeshops, a beautiful park, tree-lined streets; every Saturday there’s a nice farmer’s market we walk over to for bread and vegetables, and every Spring the neighborhood hosts an annual Cherry Blossom Festival. In 1971 it was listed on the National Register of Historic places. But before that, in the mid 1950’s, there were plans to tear it all down and build the 91 Interstate right through the place. Fortunately, due to strong local opposition, by empowered residents, the neighborhood was saved. I’ve driven past my home along the eight-laned 91freeway a few times, and at 75miles per hour, the curve the freeway makes to avoid Wooster Square—all those famous pizza shops, trendy cafes, historic cherry blossoms, all that life—amounts to a barely perceptible rotation of the steering wheel for about 20 seconds.

All over the country in most major cities, freeway construction was steered along routes that bulldozed the neighborhoods of the poorest residents, almost always racial minorities. America’s interstate network systematically destroyed black neighborhoods, or separated them from white neighborhoods. When that wasn’t enough, and once the freeways were built, white flight to the suburbs began, and racist practices like redlining, which still continue, were enforced to block blacks from the same path to homeownership that was generously showered upon whites. Homeownership remains our most salient marker of socio-economic security and wealth-generation, and the racial homeownership gap actually continues to grow. Our morning and evening traffic jams into and out of the city were built for us by this history of racism and cars.

Each time we’ve had to make our way in and out of LA during rush hour traffic, I imagine how we must look like a giant metallic caterpillar, inching slowly along, only one part of the long body moving in short spurts at any given time. Although we learn to parallel park when we get our driver’s license, we are not taught how to best drive in traffic jams, nor how to help solve them. And so our collective actions often serve to exacerbate these jams. People mistakenly assume traffic is something that suddenly appears in front of you. This is wrong. Traffic is what happens behind you: every time you drive in such a way that the person behind you must apply their brakes or come to a complete stop, you help create a traffic jam. Once in a traffic jam, everyone should actually slow down even more and begin to build up as much space as possible between them and the car they follow, enough so that if they tap their breaks you won’t have to, nor the person driving behind you. In this way, as this video demonstrates, such phantom traffic jams can be overcome through collective action. (Just 6 drivers creating this kind of space for every 45 drivers in a traffic jam can help to ease and eventually eliminate phantom traffic jams.) But this is the opposite of what people do. And whenever one attempts to create such pockets of space, invariably someone else—usually a man in a sports car—switches lanes and scoots into it, so sure the he’s ‘cracked the code’ of the traffic jam, flitting between lanes, making everyone else tap their brakes and exacerbate the problem, all so he can get back home to the suburbs a couple minutes sooner, while the jam gets worse.

To this day, astoundingly, nearly half of all Americans live in the suburbs, and continue to want to move and build there. This despite the fact that economists argue the suburbs are more expensive to build and maintain than more densely populated urban areas, every extra foot of sewage line and water pipe driving up infrastructure costs, we yearn for the home with the lawn as the paragon of financial independence; this despite the fact that government subsidies to homeowners cost the government over 200billion dollars each year in lost revenue, which actually makes single-family homeownership the largest form of government subsidized public housing by far; this despite the fact that the median income for a homeowner tends to be twice that of a renter’s, which means the lion’s share of government subsidies are going to those who earn twice as much money. All of this mess was made possible, and continues to be propped up, by our utter car dependency, our love of cars. The suburbs we built for cars, where the nearest store can be over two miles away, and where walking to and from that store certainly feels as if it’s been designed to be an exhausting and humiliating experience.

In cities, cars wreak havoc whether they’re moving or not. Restrictive zoning laws enforce parking lot minimums that carve out entire city blocks, often up to 50-60% of downtown real-estate, effectively suppressing the emergence of small businesses or housing. In America, there are 1 billion parking spaces—four for every car in the country. In New York City drivers can spend literally an hour circling the block for parking, yet if you arranged all the curbside spots in a line, it would stretch to Australia, and laid side by side it would be the size of 13 Central Parks, the real-estate alone worth billions of dollars. (If NYC offered the same parking per capita as LA county does, it would require a parking garage the size of Manhattan, 10 stories high) Compare all this to the amazing double-decker bike racks in Copenhagen or the underground bike storage units in Japan, which allow you to order up your bike up like cash in an ATM.

Our car dependency—the concrete it entails, the exhaust it exudes, all those boring black cars—increases urban heat profiles in a variety of ways, especially because we don’t want to plant big trees along the sidewalks of busy streets, since drivers might smash into them, which nicely illustrates how much more we value a driver’s safety over that of a pedestrian’s. But multimodal streets, with less car lanes and more bus and bike lanes, actually move people along much more efficiently. As these graphics illustrate, we could have tree-lined streets with wider sidewalks and restaurant seating, all while providing faster transportation routes through our cities.  

Cars, the primary driver of urban noise pollution, also keep our cities loud. My own favourite anecdote illustrating this comes from while I was watching the final of the Auckland Tennis Open this year, and I kept hearing the unmistakable sounds of car engines roaring by in the background, during those quite moments before a player serves. There I was, precisely on the opposite side of the world from the ASB Tennis Arena, just trying to enjoy the game—the thwack of the ball, the squeak of the player’s shoes, the roar of the crowd—and still cars were intruding, the unpleasant sounds of nearby Stanley Street broadcast to the entire world.  

Take a look of these maps that track everywhere a car accident has occurred in Vancouver or Toronto or Ottawa: it is quite literally every single street, every block. These are not unavoidable ‘accidents,’ not at all. To call them accidents is a misnomer. Every car accident is basically a policy choice. By now the data is in: we know how to induce traffic calming infrastructure, narrow streets, incentivize drivers to slow down. Many European cities have done this, and some such as Helsinki have gone years without a single traffic fatality. But we instead make our roads even wider, build our cars up bigger, and our death tolls rise. Countless lives lost and altered: parents losing children, children becoming orphans, teens losing their lives, or the use of their legs; futures forever altered, bodies deformed, families diminished—so much human possibility snuffed out.

How many more of my friends or loved ones will cars yet claim? Will I eventually meet my end because of a car? And all of this for what? So I don’t have to ride a bike to work? So I don’t have to stand around on a corner waiting for the bus, and then sit next to a stranger? So I can instead take out loans to have my own little metal box, and then create more traffic in my own little metal box? So I can then get angry in my own little metal box, filled with rage in my own little metal box, when I can’t go much faster in my own little metal box? Until I die in my own little metal box.  

It doesn’t have to be like this… I don’t think autonomous electric vehicles will save us from our urban design problems or climate crisis, not by a long shot. But bikes and buses and trains will certainly help—and just simply walking. These solutions of course require massive urban redesign. But America had wonderful trains and trolly cars and bus and bike lanes before. They were all demolished for freeways. LA, today synonymous with car culture and traffic, once began down the path of becoming a biker’s city, where its flat geography and mild year-round weather made it perfect for cycling everywhere. LA even had the nation’s first bike highway, punctuated with clever bike ramps that made it possible to ride your bike along a slight downward slope in both directions. But it was all torn down for cars, and the few bike lanes that exist today are only a sad imitation of what we once had. And what we could have again. If only we are first able to fall just a little bit out of love with our cars.

I remember almost a decade ago having an argument with an ex over one of my favourite songs, Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, which happened to play on the radio while we were driving. She saw it as a “hopeful song,” about the “hope for a brighter future.” “Nooo,” I groaned, “this is a sad song, about being trapped in your shit life, and unable to escape.” We each argued for our view, neither of us changing our mind, and around a year later we broke up, for reasons largely unrelated to our differing interpretations of this song. But I never forgot that argument. Years later I was listening to Fast Car on Youtube, when I scrolled down to the comments and encountered this same ‘hopeful song’ interpretation. I was furious. This lead to me for the first time creating a Youtube account, just so that I could irritably type out my reply, correcting this person’s interpretation, and showing why the song was clearly about “inherited cycles of trauma and the lack of upward social mobility beyond one’s given socioeconomic status.” I have no idea if that comment was actually left by my same ex, but in case it wasn’t, and this ‘hopeful song’ interpretation is more widespread, let me end this essay with my reading of Fast Car, and how it conveys the promise and peril of our car dependency.

It was Chapman’s genius to pick the symbol of a fast car for a song meant to capture one’s hope for a better future, “the feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone.” As I found, in my old third-hand Audi with the pretty color, it’s almost impossible to sit in a nice car and not start to think of yourself as a “someone.” Because that’s the hollow hope that cars try to sell. We’ve all felt it: when we’ve sat behind the wheel of our new car and pathetically thought to ourselves “new me.” I think that’s the reason some people mistakenly assume that surely this must be a hopeful song: listen to her—she’s in a fast car! But she isn’t, is she?

If you listen carefully, you’ll hear that she’s only remembering being in a fast car. And she only first starts reminiscing about the car ride after her life takes a turn for the worse, when she quits school to begin caring for her alcoholic father. She’s invoking that nostalgic but misguided wistfulness when she allowed herself, as a confident young woman, to be momentarily seduced by the myth of the car; that maybe this meant that for her the dominos of petty bourgeois life would start to fall: “maybe we’ll make something, maybe together we can get somewhere.” Which in Tracy’s dream, conjured within the waking confines of our car-dependent country, amounts to “buy a bigger house and live in the suburbs”—suburbs that were never meant for girls like Tracy.

In reality, when she’s not reminiscing, she works “in the market as a checkout girl” and lives in the shelter. And even near the end of the song, when she’s “got a job that pays all our bills,” she still realizes she’d “always hoped for better.” It is in these moments of disillusionment and disappointment that she still finds herself revisiting that long distant memory of that fast car ride, and the false promises it once filled her with.

We are all of us Tracy Chapman, in our fast cars. But “we gotta make a decision:” leave our cars, or live and die by them. If we can start to seriously think about what our lives might look like if we were less car dependent, then maybe we can “finally see what it means to be living.”   

For both of my previous cars (the 1990 Pontiac, and then a 1992 Volvo), when I left BC to return to school at the end of each summer, I’d just leave them parked in the yard for the winter, maybe with an old tarp thrown over to keep the snow off. But this time, with the Audi, I purchased a fitted car cover, with straps and buckles to ensure a snug fit, and I parked the car in my mom’s garage, where it would be extra safe from the elements. I’ve never properly hand washed a car before, but maybe I will next summer, after I take off the tarp, and before I get Jasper back on the road. I’ll polish the turquoise metal until I can see myself reflected in it. I wonder if I will recognize the face smiling back at me.

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