The Humanity of the Car: Automobility, Agency, and Autonomy

"Automobility" has grown as a research paradigm in the human sciences since 2000, and has analyzed the "car-driver" as a hybrid entity existing in a "civil society of automobility." Over the same period scholars in literature and philosophy have argued for a post-humanist paradigm that breaks down the divisions between subject and object and between nature and culture. However, post-humanists (with the exception of Bruno Latour's early work) have not explored the car-driver. This essay shows how humans have thoroughly humanized their cars, given them faces, ethnicity, and personality, perhaps because they have not wished to recognize how they have been altered by them. In the near future the humanity of the car may change with the introduction of autonomous vehicles, and may lose the humanist qualities that have enchanted cars for more than a century.