It is my hope that this book will make a small but distinctive contribution to the rapidly expanding field of automobilities research. As the introduction to Chapter 1 explains, my own relationship to this new body of scholarship is shadowed by a sense of belatedness inasmuch as there has been a twelve-year delay between the publication of the essay – ‘Driving North, Driving South’ (2000) – that first put the idea of this book in my head and its realisation. It was, of course, during this very period that mobilities research emerged as a field in its own right, a good deal of it led by colleagues at my own institution where the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) was launched in 2003. While this hiatus in my project meant that I had a vast amount of scholarly ‘catch-up’ to do when I was finally able to return to it in 2012, I also benefited from the groundbreaking work that had already been done on the ‘car system’ (e.g. Dennis and Urry 2009), car cultures (Sheller and Urry 2000; Miller 2001; Wollen and Kerr 2002; Merriman 2007, 2012) and the history of motoring (e.g. Scharff 1991; Jeremiah 2007; Clarsen 2008) during this time, not least in sourcing many of the primary texts that are the focus of my discussions here.

When I characterise my own contribution to this vibrant and, of course, politically urgent, new field as ‘small’ I do so advisedly inasmuch as my highly specific focus on automotive consciousness – literally, ‘what we're thinking when we're driving’ – notionally goes against the ‘holistic’ vision of the field's leading researchers such as John Urry, Peter Merriman and – most recently – Gijs Mom (2014). All these theorists, in their different ways, have emphasised the complexity and interconnectedness of the ‘car system’ and its attendant cultures as well as within/ between mobilities themselves. Further, my reintroduction of a ‘mind/ body split’ in a theorisation of the driving process may, on first inspection, appear to ignore all the important work that has been done over the past decade – and across the wide-ranging disciplines of sociology, psychology, geography and literary studies – in bringing the ‘embodied’ or ‘haptic’ experience of driving/passengering to the fore.