American Car Culture

America is a car culture. In my previous blog posts, I wrote about how America was a car dependent culture because many Americans depend on their personal automobiles to go to work so they can get paid and drive to places to spend that money on food and goods. On an even larger scale, most goods require automobile transportation to be moved across the country. Automobiles help us live our lives easily, but that’s not all there is to it. There’s a more historic reason Americans love using cars. Cars are part of the American culture because of the feeling of individualism they inspire and their prevalence in American life and media.

Cars give drivers the individualism to pursue the American dream because of their freedom of mobility. According to Michael Ferro, the American car represents individualism and other characteristics of the dream.

“In the US, the car has come to embody a conception of individualism whose roots might be traced to the talks and writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in which he focused on the virtue of following one’s own thoughts and intuitions and the avoidance of a superficial conformity.” (Scheller 34)

Emerson was a legendary American writer known for his writing on the subject of American individualism. He played a great role in making individualism become one of the core American values and part of the American dream. (Churchyard) Ferro claims that the car embodies individualism. This is true because the car is what gives most Americans their physical mobility. The idea that a person can go anywhere on their own with their car is a great example of the reason that cars embody individualism. The very idea of an impromptu road trip wouldn’t exist without cars. This has been the case since the invention of the car in the 1920s, so most people alive today weren’t around when cars weren’t. The physical mobility that we can afford through cars gives us the power and the independence that are characteristic of the American dream.

Aside from the historical connection between cars, individualism, and the American dream, there’s also a much simpler reason that cars are so important to us: we see them everywhere. Ferro says that “cars are fundamental units of the lives of Americans because of the way we drive them, ride in them, and cannot avoid seeing or hearing them every day.” (Scheller 34) Most people ride in a car every day, and even more people see cars every day. Cars are everywhere, including in American movies, television, and books. In class, we discussed how television advertisements often include cars even when advertising something completely unrelated to cars. Personally, I can’t remember a single day going by without interacting with a car in some fashion. Avoiding the influence that car culture has had on all aspects of American culture is virtually impossible, even for those who don’t own or use a car.

American culture promotes cars through the ideal of individualism. The American dream promotes individualism, and American entertainment and media publish the images of cars and their relationship to individualism and personal success. It’s nearly impossible to be an American and not be heavily influenced by car culture.

Works Cited

Scheller, Preston, Eric C. Bruun, and Jeffrey R. Kenworthy. Introduction to Sustainable Transportation: Policy, Planning and Implementation. London: Earthscan, 2010.

Churchyard, Charles. “American Individualism and Emerson, Its Champion” CharlesChurchyard.com. Web. 5 Oct 2011.