Inhabiting the Car

In this paper I consider just how neglected the car has been in contemporary social analyses. Yet it is the most important example of a global technology. I try to rectify this neglect by considering some of the ways in which we can think of people inhabiting the car and more generally inhabiting the system of automobility. The car combines exceptional flexibility and coercion. I consider the nature of time that automobility both presumes and generalises. I analyse just how people inhabit the car as a place of dwelling, suggesting that there have been three characteristic modes of dwelling within the car, from ‘inhabiting-the-road’, to ‘inhabiting-the-car’, to ‘inhabiting the intelligent car’. I consider whether there are some emerging convergent technologies that might enable a new kind of automobility to emerge that dispenses with the old-fashioned steel-and-petroleum Fordist car of the last century.