Why We Drive

Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

By: Matthew B. Crawford

Narrated by: Ron Butler

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.

An absolute masterpiece!

Why We Drive covers the importance of maintaining our freedom and humanity and not giving over our free will to big tech. In this book we see the infantile effects of AI technology and how it intrudes upon us in order to “idiot proof” our lives. This book is a must read.

Fabulous!

Exhaustively researched and wonderfully narrated. The author takes us on a journey of fabulous insights of both four wheel and two wheel transportation.

Another masterpiece by Crawford.

This book touches on many of the themes that Crawford explored in his two previous excellent books, Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head. He studies the growth of human agency through the development of skill with ones own hands and with machines as extensions of consciousness. In this book he focuses on the collective threat that we face of having these opportunities to develop as more complex beings taken from us by the ever advancing techno-capitalist class in Silicon Valley and by their enablers and sycophants in DC.

What appears on the surface to be a banal exploration of that classic American hobbyist/fetish - the automobile - turns out to be a deep exploration of what it means to be a human being in this time and place. I highly recommend reading this book and the other two I mentioned before. You will come out the other end of these three books with a far richer technical and humanistic understanding of the human species and where it is headed in the near future.

Perfect for a road trip

Informative, thought provoking and hilarious at times. Great performance. Listened this book while driving across the country, and it was a great companion.

Surprisingly relevant to a non-Gearhead

I am not mechanically savvy, or a connoisseur of automobiles, and I discovered that you don’t need to be to appreciate this book.