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Yet, in also juxtaposing a contrasting thesis of automotility, our aim is to set other relations alongside those of the car system. Other ‘totalizing’ possibilities exist and so we consider how people shift perspective; and even perhaps navigate contemporary life as a process of ‘forgetting’ as much as of reasoning. Ahead of this focus on driving, we engage with current debates on automobility. Specifically, we ask how the cultural dominance imputed to the ‘car system’ is supposed to work. How, exactly, might the car system engross the social body?

All in all, Urry’s image of the car as the ‘conquering hybrid of automobility’ focuses on the kind of domination and discipline that is perhaps unparalleled in the annals of history. His analysis throws up a powerful vision of the car as a latter day Leviathan. Having become almost a state-in-itself, automobility stretches its six fingers – production, possession, pipelines, projection, pressure and power – to tighten its global grasp on humankind. Yet the basis to this vision of automobility is not entirely new.

Much of the dominance attributed to the car, we suggest, can be teased out by a more careful depiction of the ‘powers’ of the car in these terms. What forms of extension does the car afford? And what kinds of relations are elicited, precisely, by the car in general, or by driving in particular? The concern is to suggest how ‘attachment’ to cars, at the same time as positioning us within extreme and unexpected relations, also comes to stand in the place of, and even as a relief from, face-to-face encounters.