At a Los Angeles intersection, a 1964 Impala lowrider floats on hydraulics, chrome flake shimmering like fish scales in the sun. To its left, a white Tesla with a meek sticker: “I bought it before he went crazy.” To its right, a Lamborghini Murciélago in Verde Ithaca, twelve cylinders erupting through the exhaust. The Impala is inheritance on wheels, wire rims, candy paint, and cultural preservation. The Tesla hums with fading virtue. Once a badge of conscious futurism, it is now racked by liability, shackled to its maker’s politics. The Lamborghini is magnificent in itself, a masterpiece of carbon and combustion. Yet in this scene it registers as theater, money’s operetta in Italian. In a culture that pretends to have moved past symbols, the car remains autobiography in motion.
Post-materialism promised sameness: billionaires in hoodies, feeds stripped of ornament, swipe-culture democracy. Yet the road refuses flattening. When every phone is just a glass tile and $2,000 hoodies look like the ones at Walmart, the car stays stubbornly expressive. It is the second-most expensive thing most Americans ever buy, and, unlike homes, we bring it to work with us. Every commute is performance. Every driveway, a declaration. The car tells on us.
Thorstein Veblen saw this more than a century ago. A Veblen good is a paradox: its value rises not despite its high price, but because of it. As a paradox, pure Veblen goods don’t truly exist outside of a five-hundred-dollar bill encased in acrylic, a treasure defined entirely by its own uselessness. Keep it sealed and it mocks you, but try to break it out and you’ll destroy it. Cars, anything beyond the most basic ones, are certainly Veblen goods: luxuries, not necessities. Every person driving today could meet their needs with a 1993 Honda Accord: modern safety equipment, heat and A/C, even power windows and cruise control. Everything beyond this is luxury: expense made visible, status rendered in steel and glass.
David Gartman charted three phases of car culture. First came class distinction: in the early twentieth century, mere ownership was status enough. Then the mass-market era, when make and model divided the bourgeois from the working class. And now, in the U.S. today: lifestyle allegiance.
A Cadillac once announced that you’d arrived, but today anything short of an Escalade is likely just bought with inertia. The Escalade itself, a truck that began as a cynical GMC rebadge? Veblen would have a field day. A stanced Civic, low enough you can’t slip a piece of paper beneath it, turns what was once the anti-Veblen good into one. Sometimes the money sunk could buy several Civics over, sometimes it is sweat equity instead. To many it reads as ruined; to those who build and drive them, it is beauty born from persistence. The Rivian R1T whispers, “I could have bought a G-Wagen, but I recycle,” charging silently in driveways beside teak hot tubs, Patagonia quarter zip in pickup form. To some the R1T is progress, to others posturing, but in either case it is a tribe made visible.
Warren Buffett famously still drives a 2014 Cadillac XTS, a badge job on the Chevrolet Impala that he bought with hail damage. The choice is hardly ostentatious, but remarkable for its age in his position. Among the entrenched elite, this is the pattern. They buy well, and they keep it—not to save money, but because quality endures. Drive through Newport, Rhode Island, or Carmel, California and you will count scores of old Volvo and Mercedes wagons, Land Cruisers, and Range Rovers. None flaunt like the now $127,700 Escalade IQ, a full $20,000 more than a Range Rover, but you can bet the Escalade will be traded in at the end of its 60-month lease. Perhaps some of those aging imports have acquired life’s scars: rust spots, door dings, a frequent customer card for the Land Rover dealership. But their owners bought quality, not a badge. They kept it. The Cadillac will be on its third or fifth owner by the time most Land Cruisers change hands once.
Scholars have long argued what every parking lot already shows: the car is a prosthesis, an extension of the self strapped to steel and glass. Daniel Miller called it a “hybrid of human and machine.” Pierre Bourdieu described it as habitus in motion, our learned and inherited class and taste on four wheels. A black Dodge Challenger SRT prowling Woodward reads as menace, rebellion, maybe escape. The same car outside a Bethesda country club is a retro costume for someone who can’t let go of the past. A Prius in Los Angeles signals frugality and anonymity; in Texas oil country it is a provocation. A Suburban in Dallas is practicality with room for seven; the same truck in Manhattan is just an Uber.
Americans learn this grammar early. Children can tell who is rich: the Mercedes. Who is flashy: the Escalade again. And who is just making ends meet: the sensible used Toyota. Even as clothing lost its cues with hoodies as uniform, logos recycled into thrift racks and billionaires blending into anonymity, the car endured as the last fluent symbol. A Lexus in the suburbs still whispers success. A lifted Ram 2500 with 24-inch wheels and an American flag the size of a sail shouts the owner’s claimed identity, real or not. For an entire generation, a certain German automaker has not shaken its 1980s yuppie shadow. To them, a red BMW convertible will forever be less a car than an off-white business card for an anonymous investment firm. With a watermark. The dowdy halo around a minivan carried just as much force in the other direction. The grammar shifts with time and place, but it never disappears.
Rites of passage are shaped by the car. Your first license a laminated ticket to freedom. The used Corolla from your parents: independence with hand-me-down coffee stains. The Miata in your twenties: light, impractical, unforgettable. The eventual compromise when life demands a crossover (a generation ago a minivan, a generation earlier a station wagon), the back seat filled with 18 years of obligation.
Those who lose their license report feeling trapped, stripped of autonomy. The change is not just legal or financial. It is the collapse of daily life: bus routes that stop miles short of where you need to go, light rail that never reaches your town, expensive Uber rides that drain savings, begging friends and family for lifts, riding your bike in a downpour, even hitchhiking when all else fails. In a country designed for cars, it is not a sanction but an imprisonment.
Academics speak of the car as a hybrid of one’s self: part exoskeleton, part avatar. Psychologists describe cars as transitional objects of attachment, carriers of memory and security. Anthropologists treat them as cultural texts, written in steel and read in traffic. Philosophers have noted how machines dissolve into the body; Merleau-Ponty would recognize the way car journalists describe a sports car on a good road as an extension of the self, your arm one with the suspension and your fingertips the tires. The bumper sticker, the vanity plate, the fuzzy dice, the COEXIST logo, the provocative political slogan: each one a sentence added to the script. Every intersection a speed date, every commute a performance. You don’t just drive. You introduce yourself.
Hollywood understands this grammar as well as any sociologist. Bond’s cars have always been co-stars: Aston Martins in the 1960s, briefly BMWs in the 1990s, and then a return to Aston in the 2000s. Some would say the BMW era revealed how out of step those films were with the franchise itself. The Veilside Mazda RX-7 from the first Fast & Furious film recently sold for about $1.22 million, not because of its engineering but because of its role on screen. While RX-7s have enjoyed a renaissance, the very best example would trade in the high five figures. Hollywood has the power to multiply that tenfold, turning a body-kitted tuner into a cultural artifact. The franchise went on to make entire catalogs of cars, from Dodge Chargers to Toyota Supras and Nissan Skylines, into global celebrities as central to the story as the actors themselves.
In Hacks (2021–), Deborah Vance’s automotive arc begins with a Rolls-Royce Wraith. It is not chauffeured: she drives it herself. A V12 luxury coupe with rear-hinged doors and menace in its stance. It is the first thing we see when she bursts through the iron gates of her Las Vegas compound.
The symbolism peaks in the desert. Deborah’s Wraith blows a tire. Ava proposes using the spare. Deborah snaps, “It’s a Rolls-Royce, not a Suzuki Samurai.” The absence of a spare is not mechanical. It is philosophical. In Deborah’s world, breakdowns do not exist: a helicopter descends to collect her. Even a Rolls can be outdone. Ava is left behind with the crippled car, reduced further by the contrast.
By Season 3, Deborah trades the Wraith for a 2000 Rolls-Royce Corniche V, the last of its line built at Crewe before BMW took over. Dark, heavy, and slow, its platform dating back to 1981. The Wraith was new money, a Vegas marquee in automotive form. The Corniche is establishment, the late-night desk on four wheels. She drives it through the Los Angeles hills, through confrontations, and in one scene chases her sister Kathy across a parking lot, her fury outpacing the ancient chassis. What began with the Wraith hunting Ava ends with the Corniche hunting Kathy. Pursuit is the constant, whether it is of her career or the people important to her. The car is a period piece, as is its owner.
Ava, by contrast, does not grow through her car. The Leaf stays. When she borrows cars, it is never her story. Her identity remains tied to a tired electric hatchback that looks out of place in every Beverly Hills or Las Vegas driveway it enters. In Hacks, the Wraith, Corniche, and Leaf are not props. They are characters. One represents unapologetic dominance. One, an anachronistic legacy. The third, the quiet fragility of trying to do the right thing with too little power to change anything that matters.
Yellowstone (2018–) picks up that tradition and buries it under Montana dust. John Dutton, landowner and patriarch, drives a new Ram 3500 Heavy Duty. Crew cab, diesel, top trim. The choice is deliberate. It says: I could have any car I want. I choose a ninety-thousand-dollar truck that shouts utility but has the interior of a luxury car and never lets on. Prosperity disguised as grit. Cowboy camouflage for generational power.
Beth Dutton is the opposite. She arrives in vehicles built for autobahns and Belgravia: an AMG E63 S, an S-Class coupe, and finally a Bentley Continental GT coupe. Glossy and useless on gravel, it follows her like a thundercloud. When Kayce asks how much it’s worth, she shrugs: “It’s a lease so it’s not worth anything to me.” Beth’s dismissal of a $300,000 extravagance as worthless says everything. Her cars are not tools. They are weapons.
On Yellowstone, the moral taxonomy is drivetrain-deep. Dutton men drive pickups. Outsiders show up in Escalades and Range Rovers. Kayce’s truck is older and honest, a perfect match for his personality. Jamie’s SUV is as anonymous and irrelevant as he is. Vehicles reveal loyalties before characters do. Each scuff, each trim badge, each glint of chrome or matte paint are lines of code. Yellowstone perfects the formula: identity is automotive, and the ranch is a showroom of social structure.
Performative (toxic) masculinity has long shaped the way Americans read cars. From adolescence (or earlier), boys are taught that horsepower is tantamount to testosterone, that louder exhausts or taller suspensions substitute for certainty about the self. The pickup truck is cast as a working-class totem, the muscle car an assertion of sexual prowess (usually imagined), the German sport sedan a credential of success. High-performance exotics, drenched in engineering prowess, are mocked as anatomical compensation, the cheap shot being that their owners must be lacking elsewhere. The insult says nothing about the car’s owner and everything about the fragility of the construct of masculinity: always suspicious, always in need of proving itself, of asserting virility.
The inverse follows with equal force: anything coded as feminine has been minimized. Women’s cars have long been dismissed as “cute,” “safe,” or “practical,” their significance written out of the script even as women became a dominant force in the market. For decades, automakers assumed women’s choices were secondary to men’s, reinforcing stereotypes in trim lines and ad copy. They were sold family cars, as if men did not have families, while men were offered performance, prestige, and freedom. The pattern dates back generations: early ads for automatic transmissions in the 1940s promised that driving had finally become so simple “even a woman could do it.” “Mom cars” followed, painted in pastels and marketed on cupholders and crash tests, cordoned off from the supposed seriousness of driving. The irony was that women were never a niche but the majority in many categories, steering the very segments—crossovers, minivans, compacts—that came to dominate the American road.
Gay men were courted differently despite also being labeled as feminine. Invisible to marketing departments until the 1990s, “confirmed bachelors” were lumped in with all other unmarried men. But research soon made the obvious impossible to ignore: gay men had more disposable income than any other distinct demographic. By the end of the decade, analysts were estimating the U.S. gay and lesbian market at more than $800 billion annually. Automakers realized the obvious—gay men have money, and they drive. Soon, marketers cast them as arbiters of style, taste, and cultural cachet. Volkswagen’s 1990s ads for the Cabrio and Jetta played with aesthetics, minimalism, and lifestyle imagery that resonated with urban gay buyers, while later luxury brands followed suit. Yet the pattern was reductive, flattening gay men into avatars of chic and erasing the diversity of their presence in the market.
The group most ignored of all were lesbians. In the 1990s, Subaru’s market research found something unusual: female heads of household were buying its cars at statistically significant rates, particularly in liberal enclaves like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon. Many were lesbians. At a time when no other mainstream automaker would openly acknowledge queer buyers, Subaru leaned in. They created ads with coded license plates like “XENA LVR” and “P-TOWN,” signed Martina Navratilova as a spokesperson, sponsored Pride events, and partnered with advocacy groups. What began as invisibility became one of the first deliberate, sustained campaigns by a major automaker to court queer consumers. The loyalty that followed was so strong it helped Subaru weather the 2008 recession while competitors faltered. Subaru wasn’t selling “cute” convertibles or safety-first stereotypes. It was selling recognition. And recognition proved more powerful than displacement or cylinders. The payoff endures: Subaru is still thriving today, its Outback far and away the highest-selling wagon in the United States.
Subaru proved that recognition could build a tribe. Tesla showed how quickly one could be destroyed.
Tesla began as a Silicon Valley cathedral, an electric car (previously a niche economy product) humming with moral superiority and suddenly elevated into a luxury object: green, quick, tech-rich. The luxury Prius for those who saw Toyota as a little too downmarket. Its base was well-to-do liberals who wanted virtue without sacrifice, luxury without ornament. But Tesla’s luxury was paradoxical, a kind of high-tech Veblen play. The cars cost more while giving less: under 300 miles of usable range, a single screen the only adornment in a stark interior. Their austerity was the point. They broadcast both wealth and climate consciousness, the promise that restraint itself could be opulent.
A decade later, that signal cracked. The company’s CEO alienated his base; shareholders took notice, and so did once-loyal owners. The badge that once implied intelligence and innovation curdled into a liability. Cybertrucks now draw middle fingers on highways, or worse: keyed panels, vandalized charging stations, antifascist graffiti across Berlin showrooms. What once symbolized progress became an ideological Rorschach, every charging stop a referendum. The Cybertruck sharpened the spectacle. Brutalist, stainless, unpainted, it is less a vehicle than a tantrum cast in steel. Some see Mad Max futurism, others a billionaire man-child’s joke. Either way, it demands a reaction.
This inversion is precisely what Daniel Miller anticipated in Car Cultures. Cars do not just mirror their owners; they manufacture meaning. They are prostheses, not possessions, blurring object and identity. A Tesla does not mean anything on its own. It means what it does in traffic, in headlines, in discourse. Meaning is performative, fluid, contingent. The car does not just drive. It speaks, absorbs, recirculates ideology.
The Cybertruck is this logic in steel. Its brutalist, unpainted form was destined to divide, but in practice it has become a post-ironic meme-object. Tech bros champion it. Boomer uncles despise it. Some treat it as avant-garde sculpture, others as a stainless-steel tantrum. Whatever the reading, it forces one. Parking lots become battlegrounds of semiotics. This stainless steel doorstop is not neutral. It is provocation on wheels.
Contrast this with the quiet meaning of a well-kept 1999 Toyota Land Cruiser. To the untrained eye, it is just an old SUV. To those who know, it is an echo of Japanese perfectionism: tight panel gaps, bulletproof mechanicals, restraint that never ages. Just as likely to sit in the garage of a billionaire’s Martha’s Vineyard compound as it is to be street-parked outside a young enthusiast’s duplex. In either setting it speaks the same line: I care about quality, not status. The anti-Tesla. Prestige in longevity and solidity.
This is the new automotive fluency. Cars still tell stories. They just do it more subtly—or more weirdly. A Subaru Forester with a faded Clinton ’16 and equality decal signals loyalties past and present. A debadged Mercedes E-Class whispers discretion that risks being read as shame. A pink-wrapped Lamborghini Huracán could belong to a TikTok star, or to someone desperate for you to think it does. The readings are endless, and they still matter. In a culture flattened by digital uniformity, the car remains an expressive holdout. A physical object that insists on saying something, whether you like it or not.
And then there are the deniers, the ones who insist their car says nothing about them at all. The beige Corolla chosen only for reliability. The dented Sentra kept long past its expiration date. The generic crossover justified as “most practical.” But negation is still communication. The refusal to engage in automotive theater is itself a role, a statement of priorities, even a performance of indifference. At the other end of the spectrum sits the executive who replaces an S-Class every 36 months, claiming it is simply “the sensible choice” for work. Both extremes—frugality and default opulence—make the same claim to neutrality. And both fail, because in traffic, silence is still a signal.
Nowhere was automotive identity louder than the Hummer. Born from the military HMMWV and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s whim, the H1 was a 7,000-pound declaration that transport was beside the point. It existed to say: I can. The H2 took that swagger mainstream. It rode on a Tahoe chassis but sold presence, not engineering. Celebrities drove them, rap videos flaunted them, and every driveway it blocked was part of the appeal.
The backlash was swift. By the mid-2000s the Hummer was ecological enemy number one, keyed in parking lots, firebombed at dealerships, mocked on FUH2.com. When gas prices spiked in 2008, GM killed the brand.
But icons never die. In 2020 the Hummer returned as a 9,000-pound, 1,000-horsepower electric “supertruck” that can sprint to sixty in three seconds and crab-walk sideways — feats nobody asked for in a pickup. It claims sustainability while screaming indulgence. GM doesn’t apologize; it revels in the contradiction. The message is clear: excess has gone electric.
Europe, by contrast, remains suspicious of ostentation. Practicality and refinement still dominate the automotive class code. A BMW 1 Series is a modest step up from a Golf, tasteful but restrained. An old Volvo wagon is determination on wheels. American trucks and SUVs, comically overscaled, are gawked at with disdain. In Frankfurt, an S-Class might be an executive’s company car, a senior politician’s transport, or a taxi. In Modena, a Ferrari is hometown pride, but almost everywhere else it reads as excess. Luxury in Europe must appear earned, or hidden.
In Sweden, a CEO might drive a last-generation Saab 9-5. In Germany, engineers prefer wagons to SUVs. In Denmark, the real luxury is a license plate: car taxes make even modest cars into symbols. In London, congestion charges and environmental levies turn a Cayenne from prestige into defiance. European car culture isn’t classless. It’s just more fluent in understatement.
Nowhere was that clearer than in early 1990s Germany, when Mercedes launched the W140 S-Class. Americans embraced it as the ultimate Veblen good: a $130,000 vault on wheels, massive and imperious. Germans recoiled. Double-pane glass, self-closing doors, swollen bulk—all read as arrogance in a reunified country wary of display. Buyers hid their indulgence. Mercedes offered a factory badge delete, and the V12 emblem never appeared. An S600 could pass for an S320, every indulgence of Stuttgart hidden under a humbler badge. That logic survives today. Porsche still sells debadging, even in America, where the meaning has flipped: not modesty but bravado. Ferrari goes further, sometimes delivering cars with nothing but the prancing horse. If you had to ask, you didn’t speak the language.
In China, the car occupies a hybrid of Gartman’s first two stages. For many, mere ownership is still a marker of status. For the wealthy, the differentiation is already in full swing. An Audi A6 is the government official’s badge. A black Mercedes S-Class, the entrepreneur’s declaration. The fu’erdai—China’s rich second-generation—buy Lamborghini Urus SUVs in colors visible from orbit. Plates matter. Badges matter. Even the wheelbase carries meaning. Nearly every sedan and SUV sold there is stretched, from the Mercedes E-Class down to the Audi A4. The car doesn’t just show wealth. It announces lineage, power, and proximity to the Party. In China, the car remains a narrative of conquest.
And so, at that Los Angeles intersection, the cars mark not just income but identity. The Impala carries ancestral memory, defiant continuity against efforts to erase it. The Murciélago is performative wealth at 8,500 rpm, engineering brilliance eclipsed by spectacle. The Tesla is shackled with opposing meanings, proof that machines can be dragged into culture wars, as the Hummer was during the financial crisis. Lined up together, they turn the red light into a stage. Each choice of make, model, color, trim, and even cleanliness is a line of dialogue. You are what you drive, whether you think so or not.