This chapter tackles various contemporary issues that continue to reach into broader, often negative, conversations around cars and driving behaviours. Attention is paid to local newspaper stories that seem to reflect, and arguably magnify, anxieties around antisocial, criminal and, at times, deadly driving behaviour. Featuring throughout are elements that explain how racism, racial stereotypes and racialisation operate within discourses around specific forms of car cultural practice. Cross-referencing some of the earlier discussion points further reinforces the view that cars can be and are used as subtle code-making machines, often feeding into expressions of ethnic danger and difference.

How did I get here?

Nationally, there is robust regulation and control of driving through legal prohibition, road signage and speed cameras. Like other countries, the UK has driving tests that are passed through adequate demonstration of driving competence, but less formal are those culturally bound scripts that produce particular behaviours. In some countries, it is not unusual for pedestrians to wait at traffic lights even in the absence of traffic – a rare practice in the UK, arguably because personal agency overrides a pure but inefficient (and possibly inconsequential) obedience to the law, suggesting flexibility and discretion can trump formal rules of the road. This extends into expectations and interpretations of driving behaviour, and shores up ideas about the character, attributes and tendencies of particular types of driver. These expectations are operative in Bradford, but are amplified when ethnicity, as well as class, gender and age, become used as markers of identity that determine behaviours.

There are countless stereotypes of collectivities being constructed on the basis of perceived driving habits and lifestyles of specific vehicle users. More acutely, externally attributed characteristics come to be reified within the ‘young Asian man’ stereotype. For the most part, such framing processes produce identities that are problematic, and in some cases deviant and criminal. This phenomenon is necessary to examine, not because it is both banal and spectacular, or because it is simply present, but rather, because neither driver nor car exists independently. What we encounter, therefore, is an amalgamation of car and driver and because of this, ascertaining the outcomes of car ownership and usage becomes possible.