You are what you drive: An insight into car culture from Marshall McLuhan

“Although it may be true to say that an American is a creature of four wheels, and to point out that American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s-license age than at voting age, it is also true that the car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.”
— Marshall McLuhan

This insight into American values comes from a Canadian observer. Marshall McLuhan included it in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which was first published in 1964, and which remained in print for years, often as a popular paperback.

This is the book that popularized McLuhan’s belief that “the medium is the message,” which — in the age when television had rapidly become the dominant technology in the home — turned McLuhan into an unlikely celebrity.

His insight into cars is less well known, but still apt. For decades, auto companies have deployed hefty resources in persuading consumers that their car is just perfect … for you. Consumers shop for many factors (quality, longevity of use, safety) but the branding that companies do cannot be denied as being influential. Close your eyes and imagine the logos and symbols of some manufacturers; most people will have no trouble thinking of them, even if they’ve never driven them.

When McLuhan talked about “the car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete,” it was the age of the Mustang and the GTO, when youth culture and car culture felt intertwined.

It’s a different era now, and in many ways our cities are paying the price for a car-centered culture. Decades on, we have cities built on principles that assume that most people have cars and will commute to get to work, shopping, schools, etc. In my own fairly small city, it bothers me that competing municipalities each sponsored subdivisions for a tax base, all based on the assumption of car ownership.

I read Marshall McLuhan’s six-decade-old observation ith that sad reality of sprawl on my mind. People may well “dress” themselves with their cars but the “urban compound” he invokes has not necessarily improved because of this motor-driven fashion.