This chapter covers distinct modes of car cultural consumption with particular reference to class and ethnicity. Subcultural car scenes, layered with creativity, emotion and taste, are actively present in the city and are discussed against this context. However, intersecting with taste and forms of social and economic capital, attention is also paid to middle-class car cultural practice. Throughout, any manifestation of class remains influential, but rather than being fixed, its performance is fluid and ambiguous. Similarly, rooted in these class formations is taste, best understood when memory, history and identity slip and slide over each other, producing contingent, subjective and varied meanings. With that in mind, an outline of habitus is offered wherein taste, its realisation and its constructions are visible through the car. To begin with, however, it is useful to spend some time on minority ethnic car consumption in Bradford. Here, the ways in which taste, as a corollary of class, continues to evolve in relation to the car hinges on Bradfordian-Pakistani car cultural practice over the last 50 years or so.

In seeking to understand why there appears to be a lively growth in car-related consumption in Bradford, asking how it is economically maintained is reasonable. As documented elsewhere, some Pakistani-heritage residents are now in the position of having levels of disposable income that have led to growth in conspicuous consumption. Declining levels of remittances and increasing levels of education and entrepreneurship suggest an economic middle class is becoming, if not already, established. In effect, an overlooked form of ‘integration’ enables such consumption to take place. Car-buying practice is therefore framed by wider modes of consumption within which choice is a dominant feature. TA offers a model of rationalisation that helps make coherent what appear to be disproportionate investments in cars: