Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives

Americans’ infatuation with their cars is critiqued in this readable treatment. Replete with the ironic and irrational aspects of owning and driving cars, it partakes of car psychology to deliver its message about the statistical costs of four-wheeled freedom. Emphasizing the attachment of values such as personal independence to car ownership, not to mention self-image and status, Lutz and Fernandez cheerily saunter through automobile advertising and movies to show how mass media exploit people’s desire to buy cars. The authors offer many personal anecdotes about consumers’ experiences of the showdown in the automobile showroom as a narrative illustration of how people’s emotions battle it out with their finances in purchase decisions. Turning to life on the road, Lutz and Fernandez, relying on studies and interviews with about 100 drivers, look askance at public expenditure on automobile infrastructure, fractions of lives spent in cars––and lost in them by the tens of thousands annually. An agenda for personal and political action concludes the authors’ knowledgeable survey of car culture.