The World’s Growing Car Culture

The social observer Ivan Illich wrote in 1974, “The model American male spends more than 1,500 hours per year on his car; driving or sitting in it, parking or searching for it; earning enough to pay for the vehicle, the tolls, the tires, the insurance or highway taxes.” Things may have changed little since then other than American women joining men in the love for their cars! The situation is known as car culture in which a society’s activities—economy and recreation—revolve around the car, but so too do people’s sense of style, wealth, or identity.

The car culture is composed of the production of automobiles but also includes car-related products, fuel production, fuel consumption, and car travel for work, school, shopping, and vacation. Of the fuel consumption component of car culture, President George W. Bush declared in 2006, “Here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.” Bush made a valid point; the United States consumes nearly one-fourth of the world’s oil.

The car culture flourishes in the United States more than any other nation for two reasons. First, the United States has ample land that allows dispersed cities to continue spreading outward. (The United States, Canada, and Australia—countries with large open spaces—own the highest number of cars per person in the world.) Second, the United States’ historically low gasoline prices have not hindered people from driving places
where they could walk or take a bus. Now other parts of the world have begun to follow the U.S. lead. China’s expanding middle class, for example, purchases a large portion of the world’s new cars, and, as a result, China now experiences the same ills caused by too many cars that the United States does. Though most people in China’s 1.3 billion population do not own cars, car ownership has grown 300 percent in a mere six years. The Beijing Web site engineer Zhu Chao told the Washington Post reporter Maureen Fan in 2008, “I’ve been to Sichuan, Shandong and Jilin provinces, and I plan to spend Chinese New Year driving to Yunnan. I really like what the car brings to my life—convenience, freedom, flexibility, a quick rhythm. I can’t imagine life without it.” Zhu Chao could have been speaking for almost any American.