Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
MATTHEW CRAWFORD
(BODLEY HEAD, 368 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Like most people who live in London, I don’t own a car. And while, like anyone who has watched Steve McQueen in Bullitt or Tom Cruise on one of his impossible missions, I thrill to the idea of handbrake turns and racing changes, I don’t find driving much fun. As of March this year, there were 38.3 million cars licensed for use on UK roads. That’s roughly a car for three out of every four people old enough to drive. Bully for them, though the fact they’re so many means that getting behind the wheel of a car really means getting behind someone else who’s behind the wheel of a car. In Easy Rider, the young Jack Nicholson counsels the titular petrolheads that the squares hate them not because they’re dirty long-hairs, but because they’re free. Try telling that to the guy or gal locked down on the M25 during what we are pleased to call rush hour.

Matthew Crawford is having none of this. A philosophy prof who also runs a motorcycle repair shop, he worries that the trend towards Uber usage and driverless cars means another nail in the coffin of individual responsibility and a boost to the surveillance state. Driving, he argues, is practically the last arena where individual agency obtains. Driverless cars might liberate you from the tedium of the daily commute, but you’re kidding yourself if you think that your new free time won’t be filled with in-car ads and consumer profiling. Freedom is just another prison.