Is Our Obsession With Cars ‘Insane?’ How Are Those Behaviors Changing?

The North American International Auto Show kicks off this week. But not everyone agrees that the car is so worth celebrating.

Remi Jouan

The North American Auto Show (NAIAS) kicks off this week as it opens its doors to journalists, industry watchers, and public figures.

This is our annual homage to the car — and to some extent, to ourselves, as the city that invented the car’s mass production and still rides or dies with the car’s fortunes or failures.

But not everyone agrees that the car is so worth celebrating.

Edward Humes is journalist and author of the book “Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation.”

He writes, “Considering the constant fatalities, rampant pollution, and exorbitant costs of ownership, there is no better word to characterize the car’s dominance than insane.”

You can read an excerpt from that book in The Atlantic here.

Humes joins Detroit Today with Stephen Henderson to talk about our current behaviors as they relate to cars and trucks.

Henderson also speaks with Amy Webb a quantitative futurist and professor at the NYU Stern School of Business. She’s also the founder of the Future Today Institute.

Webb talks about how our relationships with cars are changing, as well as the ways in which our behaviors are likely to change in the future as technology evolves.

Click on the audio player above to hear those conversations. 

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