Why We Drive

Speed, risk, freedom… Driving is one of the last remaining activities available day-to-day in which we get the chance to take control of our destiny, feel that intense and primal connection between movement and sheer joy, and experience a whiff of actual danger – the kind of faith in the unknown that makes us feel alive.

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Why We Drive is a rebellious and daring celebration of the human spirit and the competence of ordinary people by the bestselling author of The Case for Working with Your Hands, 'one of the most influential thinkers of our time' (Sunday Times).

Once we were drivers, the open road alive with autonomy and adventure. Today we are as likely to be in the back seat of an Uber as behind the wheel. As we hurtle toward a shiny, happy 'self-driving' future, are we destined to become passengers in our own lives too?

Driving, it turns out, offers a near-perfect embodiment of the broader changes being wrought by government and technology throughout our lives. In Why We Drive, the philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford shows the driver's seat to be one of the few remaining places where we still regularly take risk, exercise skill and enjoy freedom. But it is here too that we discover what we are losing to automation and the technocrats, and who will profit from the vision of progress they press upon us.

Blending philosophy with hands-on storytelling and drawing on his own experience in the garage and behind the wheel, 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. In turn he speaks up for rivalry and play, solidarity and dissent - and the existential value of occasionally being scared shitless.

Wry, humane and occasionally hilarious, Why We Drive takes us to the heart of one of the defining questions of our times: who is really in control?

'One of the most original and mind-opening studies of practical philosophy to have appeared for many years' John Gray