... a thoughtful, entertaining and substantive work about the joys of driving—and about the attempts by various scolds torelegate that joy, and similar expressions of independence, to the junkyard of history ... The chapter titles in Why We Drive reveal an instinctive skepticism and pleasant pugnaciousness ... [Crawford] can be evangelical at times ... Mr. Crawford is at his best rattling the smug beliefs of 'bicycle moralists, electric scooter gliders-about, and carbon teetotalers,' not to mention safety nags, whose mission in life is to pour their enlightened sugar into renegade gas tanks.

... the author brings an easy and wide-ranging erudition to his subject ... Despite his mostly sober prose, Crawford’s 'critical, humanistic inquiry' is ultimately a passionate appeal to the importance of the autonomous individual in the face of the dehumanizing pressure of automation. Driverless cars meet a worthy opponent in Crawford ... this book will have you pining for the freedom the open road has always represented. Crawford can get carried away, as in a too-detailed account (with diagrams) of rebuilding a Volkswagen engine, but his delight in his subject makes for an enjoyable reading experience even for the non-enthusiast. The text is yet more evidence for Crawford’s argument, now extending over three books, that paying attention to and placing ourselves in the material world brings a certain satisfaction that we neglect at our peril. Employing memoir, journalism, cultural criticism, and political philosophy—and never shying away from the contentious—the author makes being human seem worthwhile ... Even if Crawford is fighting a losing battle, he fights it valiantly, even heroically.

...[a] thought-provoking, full-throttle inquiry ... This is not only a petrolhead’s complaint against rule-making officialdom; it is also a vivid and heartfelt manifesto against the drift of our world, against the loss of individual agency and the human pleasure of acquired skill and calculated risk ... No doubt, as Crawford understands, there are environmental arguments against our attachment to the combustion engine. His book, however, remains a powerful (and enjoyable) corrective against that wisdom that suggests the unchecked march of all-seeing tech monopolies – ravenous for data, trading attention for distraction – is essential to human progress. In the past two decades, we have already given over much of our ability to navigate the world to black-box algorithms; as that journey accelerates into a smart machine future, we would be advised to look out where we are going.

The author writes with spirit and occasional humor about his adventures in fixing up old cars or 'folk engineering,' road rage and its political implications, and his travels around the country ... As this book attempts to do so much at once, it inevitably falls short, not only of answering the question of why people drive but also of offering any comprehensive philosophy of the road. It feels as if some individual sections could easily be books of their own, but Crawford stops short of giving many ideas their full consideration so that chapters sometimes end abruptly, before it’s entirely clear what point was being made. While anecdotes give meaning to the author’s arguments, the project Crawford set out to accomplish here requires more than just stories arranged haphazardly. Even so, there’s a lot this book offers to chew on. People who read it might just feel inspired to go for an aimless, tech-free, irrational ride, while they are still free to get lost.

... [Crawford] grabs us by the lapels and shakes for page after page, until we are bound to agree that driving expresses everything about how we evolved and learn and is essential to the exercise of fundamental freedom – indeed, to all that we are.

The book contains some terrific moments, but its big and important argument is muddied by the author’s prejudices ... The book’s middle is like being taken for a drive by a hyperactive, unreliable uncle. You’re going a way you don’t recognise and you’ve been told not to put on your seatbelt because seatbelts are for squares. As you cling to the sides of your seat, he takes you past a stock car rally, then an off-road race course in the desert. Just as you’re approaching something familiar, there’s a handbrake turn and off you go down a detour on the Nazis, a bit on utilitarianism, then a lesson on how to drift ... He is selective in his nostalgia and romanticises bits of the present that other freedom-loving individuals would object to. In his view, it’s fine to destroy speed cameras, but it’s not fine for grown-ups to ride bicycles ... We can be legitimately horrified that more than a million people a year die on the world’s roads, while being also surprised that most of us, most of the time, do not get into danger ... Car culture, as with many traditions invoked by conservatives, is a relatively recent invention, propped up by powerful industrial interests. Arguments against the claims of new technologies need not be as reactionary as Crawford’s. In the space between a souped-up vintage Beetle and a speculative self-driving Uber, we can imagine a range of progressive possibilities. Nostalgia may not be a good guide.

Why We Drive is about driving like Moby-Dick is about whaling. Its real subject is the creeping culture of 'safetyism' and its handmaiden: a cloying progressivism — abetted by tech companies for whom its moral messianism conveniently cloaks venal self-interest — intent on sanding down life’s hard edges that, for all its professed concern for our welfare, is inimical to much of what we know about human flourishing ... there’s an ornery, autodidactic streak to Why We Drive; the sense of an omnivorous editorializing mind for whom everything is grist for a think piece. His analysis seems at times as 'overdetermined' as the vehicular future he fears ... A sojourn in Portland furnishes a target-rich environment, but there’s a canned feel to Crawford’s cliche-slinging account: stilted vignettes of run-ins with woke-scolds and lurid-haired poseurs. And the event he’s ostensibly there to cover — hipster mummers careening around a manicured city park in art cars — isn’t remotely analogous to the event he juxtaposes it with: a motorbike 'scramble' in the Virginia countryside that’s essentially a gathering of expert practitioners from a skilled subculture. It’s purely a butt, to throw the rugged integrity of the latter into sharp relief ... But it would be a shame if these excesses put readers off. Crawford has something important to say.

Part portentous cultural philosophy, part funny anecdote, part evisceration of Big Data ... This is a book for those who love cars, or at least are sympathetic to the idea that many people enjoy driving. Those who live in Ubers so that they can catch up on social media feeds won’t get past the nerdy bits, which is a shame because there are broader questions here about the fate of human agency and democratic governance ... Crawford’s book is uneven, an analogue man’s despairing roar, but he is witty, open-minded and impossible to label as reactionary. As public polymaths go — he’s an engineer, physicist, philosopher, sociologist, motorbike mechanic and a restorer of VW Beetles — he leaves Jordan Peterson at the start line. I like his advice to challenge the chorus of inevitability, that 'one must accept the future rather than ‘cling to the past’ (which often means simply accepting the present — what presently exists — as perfectly adequate)'. Let’s question what progress means.