It is my aim, in the first chapter of this book, to demonstrate how driving is paradigmatic as well as formative of the way we think. By this I am suggesting that the way in which the mind travels through time and space on its everyday cognitive journeys – encountering a novelty here, a memory or an obstacle there – is figuratively similar to the way in which cars and their drivers engage with the temporal and spatial environments through which they pass: probing, pausing, advancing, reversing and, of course, changing direction with the flick of an indicator light. The automobile, long regarded as a prosthesis of the human body (Thrift 2008 [2004]; Dant 2004), may thus also be thought of as a prosthesis of the human mind.

The rapid succession of thoughts that present themselves to a driver's consciousness – directed now towards the past, now towards the future, and prompted, in both cases, by a perceptual encounter with the present – first occurred to me when I was working on my essay ‘Driving North, Driving South’ in the late 1990s (Pearce 2000). Although, at the time of writing, I never thought of this as an essay ‘about’ driving, its publication coincided with the birth of the Mobilities research centre at Lancaster (CeMoRe) and a seminar presentation to this group caused me to reflect that this was an area of research that I might pursue further. Sadly, other commitments meant that I was unable to do so for another decade: indeed, it was 2010 before I wrote about driving again and 2012 before this book was conceived. Such time lags are, of course, unremarkable in academic scholarship: the wide-ranging professional duties of academics mean that the gestation, writing and production of books often take this long. However, what lends this anecdote a thought-provoking edge is the extent to which the experience of driving in Britain has, itself, changed during this fifteen-year period.

Throughout the 1990s, when my parents were still alive and I had first started working at Lancaster University, I made frequent trips ‘down the road’ to Cornwall. From the mid-1990s onwards, I also started driving up to Scotland on a regular basis and, in 1998, bought a small cottage there which meant that all vacations and several weekends also involved a drive in that direction.