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Killer cars: the violence of automobility

It’s now a decade since the publication of Mike Davis’ book on the car-bomb, a weapon which as ‘indistinguishable from ordinary traffic’, made for a highly effective means of enacting violence on urban populations. Whilst the threat posed by car-bombs remain, especially in war-ravaged parts of the Global South, a spate of deadly attacks in Western cities (most recently in London, Charlottesville and Barcelona), shows vehicular terrorism’s mutation into an even cruder, but still more difficult to detect strategy of ‘vehicle ramming’.  Terrorist actors have realised that motor-vehicles are already weapons, with the contagious spread of such attacks across both state lines and ideological affiliations showing no signs of abetting.

The vehicle-as-weapon lurks undetected, circulating in/as ordinary traffic. And whilst the use of seemingly innocuous objects like cars or trucks in political – or politicised - acts of violence unsettles, such attacks are ultimately inseparable from what might be called the ‘ordinary violence’ of automobility, from the global epidemic of traffic injuries and fatalities, to the car’s degradation of the sociospatial fabric of urban life, to perhaps now unstoppable climate change.

Marshall McLuhan’s notion of ‘auto-amputation’ is especially pertinent to the automobile, which simultaneously extends and supplants human locomotion. The car, which afforded – to those who could afford it – a dramatic extension of bodily capacity, also wrought serious bodily harm on an astonishing scale. In 1935 there were 3, 000 pedestrian deaths and 1, 400 cyclist deaths in Britain, with tens of thousands more seriously injured. Injury and death were borne disproportionately by poorer people, children especially, a pattern which continues to this day. Globally, traffic injuries and fatalities are comparable only to armed conflict in terms of casualties.

Indeed, the car shares a lineage with the gun, as much as with the cart, wagon or coach. The car, like the gun and unlike the carriage, is a product of combustion, or what Simon Dalby calls firepower, in the case of the car, the combustion of fossilised hydrocarbon in an internal combustion engine, rather than exploding gunpowder in a chamber. 

We might say that there is a latent violence in speed, or acceleration, a violence famously gestured to by Adorno’s remark (or admission!): ‘And which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of the engine, to wipe out the vermin of the streets, pedestrians, children and cyclists?’ 

As traffic volumes increased in cities across the world during the post WW2 period aptly referred to as the ‘Great Acceleration’, streets became ‘lethal rivers of kinetic energy’, in Ian Robert’s words. Here ‘might is right’ and the weak - or slow - are forced off the street, or for those who can afford them, into cars, in a kind of ‘motorised arms race’.

As cars proliferated the populous streets that Jane Jacobs argued were so central to urban vitality, became replaced by motorised landscapes, landscapes of alienation and anomie, precisely the affective conditions in which fascism thrives, or so its commonly thought. The processes of urban ‘transformation’ wrought by urban planners’ desire to accommodate the motorcar, have been likened in scale to the destruction wrought by total war (Kunstler 1994; 2006). 

The car’s capacity to maim and kill, whether ‘intentionally’ or by ‘accident’, the power of acceleration granted by burning fossilized hydrocarbon in internal combustion engines - is inseparable from the car’s – as part of an aggregate system including many other such devices, singular significance in processes of global warming. Indeed, the seemingly unstoppable global surge in popularity of vehicle rammings, coincides with revelations that all internal combustion engine vehicles need be taken-off the roads by 2030, if humanity is to have any chance of averting ‘dangerous’ levels of global heating, in the muted words of climate scientists.

If vehicular terrorism is inseparable from the ‘ordinary’ violence of automobility, the former will most effectively be addressed in tandem with, and as part of addressing the other pathologies associated with the ‘steel-and-petroleum’ car system.  If the car-as-weapon circulates undetected in urban traffic flows, then car-free cities are the way to go. Whilst those intent on deadly harm will doubtless find new means (‘cars don’t kill people, people do!’), it’s much harder to kill someone with a bicycle than with a car. Granted, the latest mass killing with a vehicle (Barcelona) occurred in a pedestrianised area; indeed, pedestrianised areas in cities where the car remains a significant form of transport (every city in the world), present particularly attractive targets – which has major implications for so-called ‘shared space’ initiatives. In order to thwart vehicular terror attacks, and moreover mobilise against the far-more-significant threat, at this stage a reality, of runaway heating, we need to go all the way, and prohibit the sale and hire of internal combustion engine vehicles in the same way in which most jurisdictions prohibit the sale of firearms. 

Could electric vehicles be used in attacks of this kind? Yes, but their slower speeds reduce their lethality, in tandem with the ways in which an EV system may be a less deadly variant of automobility from a global heating perspective. Autonomous EVs can offer failsafe mechanisms, preventing their use in these sorts of attacks. On the other hand, such vehicles are vulnerable to hacking, enabling attackers to act at a distance and virtually eliminate risks to themselves.  

It is perhaps instructive that fascistic, ethno-nationalist and militant religious fundamentalisms (including Salafist ideologies) mushroomed in the first half of the 20th century, precisely the era of the car’s unstoppable rise. Could the proliferation of motor transport, the phenomenological immersion in practices of acceleration, and the necropower (Mbembe) this acceleration afforded, have played a role in the production of fascistic subjectivities and collectives? If so then automobility and fossil fuelled firepower are key not only to the material means through which ‘terrorism’ is presently enacted, but also to the formation of the very political forces and subjects which perpetrate such violence.