Automobiles are instruments of violence. It wasn’t always this way. Think of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “The Love Bug”, “Furthur” the bus (although a bus isn’t exactly an automobile, is it?). Let’s talk about the cars of today. There are no innocent cars. Even, say, a wholesome Subaru Outback. Is there a more innocent car? It is a ferocious, squat, blunt nosed speeding brick.

Cars

Automobiles are instruments of death. They hurtle down highways menacing everything in their path. Bunnies, for example. Deer. Dogs and cats. Children. Pedestrians. Birds of all kinds. Bats. Butterflies. Other cars. Stand on a street corner waiting to cross the street or walk a sidewalk (if you can find one). Can you feel the rush of ballistic steel threatening at any moment to swerve, lose control, mow you down? See their operators checking likes and messages?

The effect of impact is spectacularly overwhelming, especially on soft targets like your average squirrel. Also on other cars.

In the year 2022 about seven thousand, five hundred (7,500) pedestrians were killed by cars. That was in the United States. The number of people killed inside of cars was about forty-two thousand, nine hundred (42,900). That leaves about fifty thousand dead in one year. If you take the pedestrian to be collateral damage, the civilian body count is one seventh of the total.

In the United States Civil War, that lasted four years, about one hundred and ten thousand (110,000) soldiers died from wounds received in battle 1. That would be about twenty-five thousand per year. The war was the deadliest in United States history. It took half as many battle fatalities per year than are taken by the voracious automobile.

In Constitution Gardens near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. you’ll find the Vietnam Memorial wall honoring U.S. military who died or remain missing as a result of their service in Vietnam and South East Asia. There are about fifty-nine thousand (58,320) names on the wall. The period covered by the wall is 1955 to 1975, twenty years. Fairly, serious U.S. troop deployments cover the last nine of those years. Using nine, the wall memorializes about six thousand, five hundred (6,480) soldiers lost per year.

F150

In lower Manhattan of New York City the National September 11 Memorial names about three thousand (2,983) victims on the airplanes and at the sites targeted by the airplanes in the attacks of September 11, 2001. There are several dozens of permanent memorials for the violent and lethal, terrible events of that day.

None of this is to diminish nor disdain nor disrespect. These are horrible events rightfully memorialized. It is to highlight the invisible, unremarked toll taken by the lethal automobile. Next you see a plaque or memorial to soldiers or civilian victims of this or that attack or war or battle, accident or disaster, think of the seven thousand five hundred (7,500) pedestrians taken in a year, in a distributed fashion by marauding cars.

Let’s visit briefly the the environmental disaster that is an automobile. If you believe the news about global climate change due to burning hydrocarbons, believe that the EPA accounts cars and light trucks with fifteen percent of the damage2. That is not to mention all of the dead bunnies and squirrels. You can forgive Mother Nature if she thinks of cars as instruments of violence.

In 2021, also in the United States, about forty-nine thousand people died from “gun related injuries”. That’s fewer, although roughly equal to the number of people killed by cars.

If we think about it at all, and we don’t, we view the seven thousand plus civilian and forty-three thousand combatants; the fifty thousand annual U.S. death toll from automobiles as a part of life– like heart attack, cancer, stroke, crib death. But really? We love cars. We don’t keep a special place in our hearts for tumors. We love cars more than we love guns, and perhaps tellingly, cars are more lethal than guns.

Cars

In automobile advertising there are no other cars. There is the open road and unimpeded pleasure. Even urban streets are empty. There are no pedestrians. It is our dream. The advertising promises power, performance, freedom, speed, sometimes and rarely safety– that is safety for the driver and the occupants. Inside the car we ride in a cocoon, behind glass often tinted to hide us, armored by steel. The world outside is a moving picture punctuated with threats and obstacles. Cars objectify the world for us as soldiers objectify an enemy.

Behind the wheel of a car we strap-in and assume combat position, ready to do battle against other drivers, motorcycle riders, bicyclists, pedestrians, small animals, and anything else that attempts to impede our speed and pure driving pleasure. Pedestrians become pylons. Bicyclists and slow drivers become enemies of freedom. Other drivers must lead, follow or get out of the way. Commanding our beloved machine of power and liberation we maneuver proudly as superior drivers, unquestioned masters of the road kill universe. Each and every one of us. And we kill. With cars.

  1. In the U.S. Civil War, many more died from disease and starvation than from battle. Fifty thousand civilians died. Counting the indirect deaths, deaths not in battle, the total casualty count was about a million. That is two hundred fifty thousand per year. If there’s anything you can say for cars, so far as I know, they don’t cause widespread famine and disease. At least not yet. ↩

  2. The one we worry about, jet airplanes, is accounted with two and a half percent. ↩