Why We Drive

Matthew Crawford Bodley Head £20 ★★★★

Aself-confessed ‘gearhead’ with rusty car parts piling up outside his house, Matthew Crawford was astute to take a subject he’s passionate about – the maintenance, driving and general culture of automobiles – and turn it into a wellinformed diatribe against big data, or, as he calls it, surveillance capitalism.

His initial target is the driverless car, which huge corporations such as Tesla, Google and Uber want us to adopt. On one level he considers such innovations an insult to motoring. They take the fun and sense of achievement out of being on the road. Cue a perhaps over-long section on his vehicle-owning history, from his high-school 1963 VW with its swing axle rear suspension that allowed spectacular slides round corners.

But Crawford, who is something of an American cultural guru, never strays far from his main thesis, which is how these big tech companies milk us of data, and see the car, so central to our society, as crucial to their mission. So they map your movements, monitor your travel picks and nudge you to related choices, which may be more to their taste than yours.

And why their interest in you taking your eye off the road as you drive? They’d prefer you were inside one of the new breeds of self-driving car (pictured) scrolling through social media for another hour on your commuter trip, so they can monetise that too.

Crawford examines all sorts of ramifications, from theories about risk to the history of the internal combustion engine. He’s fascinating, for example, on traffic lights, where the manipulation of the length that the amber light remains on has diverging safety and revenue connotations.

Some ground is familiar. But Crawford skilfully takes us through the gears as he intelligently, and in a very American way, flies the flag for individualism over dour corporative determinism. ‘Roaming not algorithms’ are the words on his bumper sticker.