Nothing, it would seem, could be further from H. V. Morton's early morning crawl out of London or Edwin Muir's stuttering progress through Scotland's ‘Far North’ than the vision of automobility – a streak through America's hot and featureless deserts – laid out here in Jean Baudrillard's iconic essay on ‘astral America’. More often cited as a signal point of reference for what postmodern America has become and how it is known to us, Baudrillard's text – like Paul Virilio's Negative Horizon (2008 [1984]) – also endures as a provocative statement about what the act of driving has become or, more precisely, is in the act of becoming. Speaking directly to my own project, both Baudrillard and Virilio contend that the ‘denaturing’ of perception consequent upon travelling at speed (the ‘invisibility, transparency, or transversality of things’) not only renders the world outside the car ‘spectral’ (Baudrillard 2010: 9) but also evacuates the mind of the driver. ‘Intoxication’ is a key (and repeated) term here (see also Virilio 2008: 94), leading to what amounts to a loss of consciousness.