At a Los Angeles intersection, a 1964 Impala lowrider bounces gently on hydraulic suspension, its chrome flake paint glinting like fish scales in the sun. On one side: a glossy white Tesla Model Y with a peeling sticker that reads “I bought it before he went crazy.” On the other: a Verde Ithaca Lamborghini Murciélago LP670, crouched low, its carbon-fiber rear wing twitching like a snake about to strike. No words are exchanged, but the stories are loud. The Impala is Chicano heritage on wheels—wire wheels, candy paint, and ancestral memory. The Tesla broadcasts faded virtue, now tempered by market saturation and the baggage of its CEO. The Lamborghini, all angles and carbon, remains pure excess—Silicon Valley money reincarnated as Italian performance. Even now, in an allegedly post-materialist age, the car is still the clearest declaration of self. You are what you drive—perhaps now more than ever.
Post-materialism promised us a flattened aesthetic. Tech billionaires in hoodies. Minimalist feeds. The visual democracy of swipe culture. But on American roads, hierarchy survives. Phones may be the same. Clothing is curated by algorithm. But the car, stubborn and analog, remains wildly expressive. It’s the second-most expensive object most Americans own, and the only one they park in public. Every commute becomes a performance. The driveway is a declaration. The car still tells on us.
This symbolism isn’t new. David Gartman outlines three phases of car culture: the era of class distinction, where ownership alone conveyed status; the mass-market phase, where make and model sorted the bourgeois from the working class; and the present, where cars express lifestyle allegiance. In the 1950s, a Cadillac meant you’d arrived. Today, a stanced Civic signals creative defiance, while a Rivian R1T says “I could’ve bought a G-Wagen, but I recycle.” Vehicle choice no longer just places you on an income ladder—it plants your flag in a cultural tribe.
Scholars have long argued that the car is a prosthesis, a visible extension of the self. Daniel Miller called it a “hybrid of human and machine,” an object that objectifies moral narratives. Bourdieu would call it habitus in steel—the natural-seeming expression of internalized taste. You don’t just drive a Dodge Challenger. You inhabit it. You perform it. A blacked-out SRT in Bakersfield means one thing. The same car in Bethesda, parked outside a country club, means something else entirely. The metal stays the same. The reading does not.
Americans learn this grammar early. The aspirational glow of a BMW. The dowdy halo around a minivan. Even children can tell you who’s rich, who’s flashy, and who’s just making ends meet. As the cultural semiotics of clothing fade—thanks to normcore, athleisure, secondhand designer sources, and billionaire anonymity—the car endures as the last legible symbol. A Lexus still means something. So does a lifted Ram 2500 with 24-inch wheels and flying an enormous American flag. The meanings may shift, but they never disappear.
Rites of passage are also shaped by the car. The first license. The used Corolla from your parents. The Miata in your 20s. The eventual compromise when life demands a crossover. Losing your license is not just a legal change—it’s a loss of autonomy. Of personhood. Researchers have called the car a hybrid self, part exoskeleton, part avatar. Bumper stickers, custom plates, even fuzzy dice—each is a micro-broadcast of identity. You don’t just drive. You declare.
Hollywood understands this. From the gleaming Aston Martins of James Bond to the busted ’70s Chargers of street racers, the car-as-character trope persists. Films like Christine, Transformers, and Herbie the Love Bug literalize it—making the car sentient, emotional, expressive. Even in live action, the car often says more than the driver. The Batmobile is more recognizable than half the Justice League. In Mad Max, the V8 Interceptor outlasts the human cast. We imbue machines with meaning because they already mean something before the camera rolls.
This cultural literacy extends to genre and generation. Men, especially, are trained to tie identity to horsepower. The pickup truck as working-class totem. The muscle car as sexual bravado. The BMW M3 as coastal ambition. Meanwhile, women’s car choices have historically been dismissed or underrepresented—relegated to supporting roles, safety-first stereotypes, or “cute” convertibles. Only recently have advertisers acknowledged what’s always been true: women are not just buying cars; they’re driving culture. Yet the gendered scripts persist, embedded in trim lines, ad copy, and assumptions.
And so, at that intersection in LA, the cars don’t merely represent different socioeconomic strata—they embody philosophies. The Impala isn’t just a vehicle. It’s a rolling archive of Chicano culture, an heirloom with hydraulics. The Murciélago isn’t just fast. It’s performative wealth, a cathedral to scarcity and carbon fiber. The Tesla isn’t just electric. It’s a Rorschach test—read as progress by some, betrayal by others. In one glance, you see more than transportation. You see taste, politics, and personal mythology—rendered in paint, glass, and torque. What happens next—how each car pulls away, what noise it makes, whether it glides, stutters, or squats under throttle—only deepens the read. The street becomes a sentence. The vehicle, a verb. The driver, an idea.
Television understands this better than most media. In Hacks (2021–), Deborah Vance’s automotive arc begins with a royal blue Rolls-Royce Wraith. It’s not chauffeured. She drives it herself. A V12 luxury coupe with rear-hinged doors and menace in its stance. It’s the first thing we see when she bursts through the iron gates of her Las Vegas compound. Her assistant, Ava, shows up in a 2015 Nissan Leaf—rented, aging, and trembling on low charge. They nearly collide in the driveway. The symbolism is immediate: power versus precarity, combustion versus anxiety, privilege versus practicality. No dialogue needed. The cars speak first.
The symbolism peaks when Deborah’s Wraith blows a tire in the desert. Ava suggests checking the trunk. Deborah snaps, “It’s a Rolls-Royce, not a Suzuki Samurai.” The absence of a spare isn’t just mechanical—it’s philosophical. In Deborah’s world, breakdowns are someone else’s problem. The car, like its owner, is not built for contingency. Ava’s DIY practicality belongs to a different class logic entirely. The scene is quiet, brutal, and precise. A masterclass in vehicular metaphor.
By Season 3, Deborah trades the Wraith for a 2000 Rolls-Royce Corniche V. A convertible grand tourer. Long, pale, and slow. It’s not a step down so much as a lateral move into nostalgia. The Wraith was conquest; the Corniche is preservation. She drives it through the hills of Los Angeles, through confrontations, and in one scene, chases her sister Kathy through a parking lot—her fury outpacing the Bentley-derived chassis. Deborah doesn’t update. She settles in. The car is a period piece. So is she.
Ava, by contrast, never upgrades. The Leaf stays. When she borrows cars, it’s never her own story. Her identity remains tied to an underpowered electric hatchback whose range anxiety mirrors her professional one. In Hacks, the Wraith, Corniche, and Leaf aren’t props—they’re characters. One represents unapologetic dominance. One, decaying legacy. The third, the moral fragility of trying to do the right thing with a five-bar battery light.
Dallas (1978–1991) understood the car-as-character decades earlier. J.R. Ewing’s progression through Mercedes-Benz sedans—from a green W116 450 SEL to a black W126 560 SEL—mapped perfectly onto his growing power. They weren’t flashy. They were cold, efficient, and feared. When he briefly switched to a Cadillac Allanté—a front-drive, Pininfarina-bodied convertible with identity issues—it didn’t work. J.R. wasn’t American sentimentalism. He was a black Benz with smoked tail lamps. He went back.
When Miss Ellie remarried Clayton Farlow, his arrival in a Rolls-Royce Silver Spur altered the orbit. The Spur was long, silver, and silent. It was the only car in Dallas that outranked J.R.’s Mercedes. A shift in family power, told through two chromed radiator grills.
Every car in Dallas was a line of dialogue—spoken before anyone opened their mouth.
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 this. It’s a truck that costs ninety grand but never lets on. It’s prosperity disguised as grit. It’s 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 white Bentley Continental GT. That car, glossy and useless on gravel, 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 emphasizes her character’s attitude. Her cars are not tools. They’re 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. Jamie’s SUV is anonymous. Vehicles reveal loyalties before characters do. Each scuff, each trim badge, each glint of chrome or matte paint is a line of code. Yellowstone inherits Dallas’s formula and perfects it: identity is automotive, and the ranch is a showroom of social structure.
Nowhere has the symbolic volatility of car culture been more exposed than in Tesla’s transformation. In 2013, the Model S was Silicon Valley’s paragon of taste—green, fast, software-rich. It was the tech elite’s Prius for those who had made it. Driving one implied innovation, intelligence, and moral superiority. But a decade later, that signal broke. Elon Musk’s increasingly erratic political provocations turned Tesla from virtue signal to ideological Rorschach. Model Ys now wear stickers that read, “I bought it before he went crazy.” The car hasn’t changed. The story around it has.
The Tesla brand’s semiotic clarity collapsed in real time. Once a rolling endorsement of progressivism and climate ethics, it was reabsorbed into the culture wars. Leftists now key them. Right-wing influencers wrap them in American flags. In Berlin, Tesla showrooms are graffitied with antifascist slogans. In Vermont, someone scratched “KYS” (kill yourself) into a Cybertruck at a charging station. Owning a Tesla no longer means you’re saving the planet. It means you’re being read—accurately or not—as someone with an opinion about Elon Musk. The badge became a political liability. Cultural capital turned into a semiotic bomb.
This inversion is precisely what Daniel Miller anticipated in Car Cultures. He argued that cars don’t merely reflect their owners—they produce and mediate social meaning. They’re prostheses, not possessions. They blur object and identity. A Tesla doesn’t mean anything on its own; it means what it does in traffic, in headlines, in social discourse. Meaning is performative. Fluid. Contingent. The car doesn’t just drive—it speaks, absorbs, and recirculates ideology.
That’s what makes the Cybertruck so volatile. Its design—monolithic, brutalist, unpainted—was always going to be polarizing. But in practice, it’s become a kind of post-ironic meme-object. Tech bros love it. Boomer uncles hate it. Some see it as Mad Max futurism. Others, a stainless-steel tantrum. Regardless of interpretation, the Cybertruck is a reaction vehicle. It solicits readings. It turns parking lots into battlegrounds of semiotics. Whether you think it’s a brilliant design or a punchline, its presence demands a response. The car is no longer neutral. It is provocation on four wheels.
Contrast this with the quiet meaning of a well-kept 1996 Lexus LS400. To the untrained eye, it’s just an old sedan. But to those who know, it’s an echo of Japanese perfectionism: tight panel gaps, whisper-quiet ride, timeless restraint. It may belong to an older professional who sees no reason to change what works—or a young car enthusiast who picked one up for $5,000 and refuses to upgrade. In both cases, it says: I care about quality, not status. It’s the anti-Tesla. Prestige by not caring about prestige.
The same duality applies to the stanced Civic. Lowered suspension, stretched tires, excessive camber—everything that violates practical design. To outsiders, it looks broken. To insiders, it’s badge-less rebellion. These cars, often built from Craigslist shells and eBay parts, are love letters to underdog ingenuity. They signal a refusal to play by bourgeois rules. You can’t lease this kind of identity. You build it, scrape by speed bump by speed bump. To a certain demographic, it’s more honest than a new BMW.
Then there’s the Rivian R1T. It looks like a truck. It is a truck. But it also costs nearly $90,000 and charges silently in driveways flanked by teak hot tubs and xeriscaped gardens. It’s Patagonia on wheels—adventure-coded, REI-aligned, made for dirt roads that lead to second homes in Telluride. Where the Hummer once said “power,” the Rivian says “purpose.” Or at least, it wants to. The truck may never tow a thing. But it communicates its owner’s desire to be rugged and responsible, with money to spend and eco-cred to project.
This is the new automotive fluency. Cars still tell stories. They just do it more subtly—or more weirdly. A Subaru Forester with faded equality stickers. A 2023 BMW M5 with the badges removed. A pink-wrapped Lamborghini Huracán that might belong to a TikTok star—or someone who wants you to think it does. The readings are endless. But they still matter. In a culture flattened by digital uniformity, the car remains an expressive holdout. A physical object that still says something, whether you want it to or not.
Nowhere was this performative identity more exaggerated—and later, more vilified—than with the Hummer. Born from the military HMMWV, the H1 was made possible by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s offhand desire to own one. AM General obliged. In 1992, a 7,000-pound diesel monster entered civilian garages. It had no right to exist—but that was the point. Owning one wasn’t about transport. It was about declaring that you could. That you were untouchable. That you were a winner in a world of soft sedans.
The H2 democratized that arrogance. Launched in 2002 under General Motors, it looked tough but rode on a Tahoe platform. That didn’t matter. What mattered was presence. Celebrities drove them. Rap videos flaunted them. The Hummer became a rolling billboard for American excess. It guzzled gas. It blocked driveways. It parked across two spaces. People bought it not despite these things—but because of them. The H2 was SUV as middle finger.
But that middle finger came with consequences. As climate awareness crested in the mid-2000s, the Hummer became a villain. Activists keyed them. Dealerships were firebombed. Websites like FUH2.com encouraged people to flip off every H2 they saw. The vehicle that once symbolized American dominance became a symbol of ecological arrogance and tone-deaf affluence. By the time gas prices surged in 2008, it was over. GM shuttered the brand. The last H3 rolled off the line in 2010 to muted headlines and a cultural shrug.
But America rarely kills its icons. It repackages them. In 2020, the Hummer returned—as an electric supertruck. The GMC Hummer EV weighs over 9,000 pounds, produces 1,000 horsepower, and can crab-walk sideways. It’s a contradiction on wheels: an environmental performance vehicle that still screams indulgence. It’s the same bravado as the original, now baptized by electrons. GM’s marketing doesn’t apologize. It leans in. The message: this is what sustainability looks like if you can afford to be excessive about it.
The Hummer EV exemplifies a broader trend: the aesthetic of virtue layered over the performance of excess. You can have your 35-inch tires and claim your carbon neutrality too. It’s a luxury rebrand for the ESG era. What was once ridiculed as waste is now sold as innovation. For some buyers, it’s a get-out-of-guilt free card. For others, it’s irony. Either way, the truck becomes an emblem not of restraint, but of how restraint is now marketed: louder, bolder, and battery-powered.
Europe, by contrast, remains suspicious of such ostentation. There, practicality and refinement still dominate the automotive class code. A BMW 1 Series hatchback might be considered tasteful. An old Volvo estate, aspirational. Giant American-style pickups are dismissed as brutish, wasteful, and impossible to park. In Paris, an S-Class might whisper money, or it might be a taxi. In Milan, a beat-up Fiat Panda might scream it. There, excess isn’t glamorized. It’s suspect. Luxury must appear earned—or hidden.
In Sweden, a CEO might drive the last-generation Saab 9-5 sedan. In Germany, engineers prefer wagons to SUVs. In Denmark, the true luxury is a license plate: car taxes are so high that modest vehicles become status symbols simply by existing. And in London, congestion charges and environmental levies ensure that a Porsche Cayenne is read not as prestige, but as defiance. European car culture isn’t classless. It’s just more fluent in understatement.
In China, the opposite dynamic prevails. There, the car is a visible marker of having arrived. 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 length of the wheelbase carries meaning. 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 yet, even in China, the script is changing. Geely owns Volvo and Polestar. EVs like the Nio ET7 or the Xpeng G9 are reshaping what prestige looks like. Domestic automakers once considered inferior now build luxury sedans with biometric start systems and AI voice controls. Status has shifted from imported combustion to homegrown electrons. Owning a Tesla still means something—but increasingly, it means you didn’t get the memo. The Chinese luxury buyer wants a national car that says: I’ve made it here, not there.
Back in the U.S., identity still plays out through customization. Lowriders are not just Chicano heritage—they’re rolling murals. Tuners stretch every dollar of boost from aging Japanese platforms. Hot-rodders wrench their Americana into V8 jazz. These aren’t car owners. They’re curators. And the mods matter. A Civic with Type R badging better back it up. A Silverado with stacks is no longer just a truck—it’s an exosuit for culture war cosplay. In these scenes, every decal is code. Every drop is dialect.
Online forums cement these codes. FerrariChat, Mustang6G, Honda-Tech, and JeepForum are not just databases of torque specs and wiring diagrams. They’re identity engines. Inside, members trade knowledge, flex builds, and enforce standards. What’s tasteful? What’s played out? What makes you a poser? Culture is negotiated in pinned threads and build logs. Offline, the same rules apply. The cars at Cars & Coffee meets don’t just park. They signal. To attend without knowing the difference between an M340i and an M3 is to risk being corrected by someone with an Arai helmet and opinions.
This segmentation extends to identity politics. Subaru’s calculated courtship of lesbian buyers in the 1990s wasn’t just a marketing footnote—it was a tectonic shift. Ads featuring same-sex couples and license plates reading “XENA LVR” helped reposition Subaru as the brand that sees you. It wasn’t accidental. Research showed lesbians bought Subarus. Subaru responded with acknowledgment, not erasure. The payoff wasn’t just loyalty—it was cultural relevance. The brand became shorthand for inclusion before other automakers even dared whisper the word.
Ford later picked up the torch—ironically at first. When an online troll called the Ranger Raptor “very gay,” Ford replied with a rainbow-wrapped “Very Gay Raptor.” What started as a clapback became a full campaign. The rainbow truck toured Pride parades, festivals, and dealerships. It was absurd. It was effective. It signaled something important: the car isn’t inherently masculine, or heteronormative, or even serious. It’s a costume. And anyone can wear it.
BMW and Mercedes have released Pride ads. Hyundai sponsored the GLAAD Awards. GM’s Olympic campaigns featured same-sex families. Lexus ran “chosen family” spots. Representation moved from niche to normalized. The message evolved: your identity isn’t a liability at the dealership. It’s part of the sale. And that inclusivity matters—not just to buyers, but to the broader story the car tells. A Rainbow Raptor isn’t just paint. It’s narrative armor.
This shift mirrors how personalization has changed luxury. Once, exclusivity meant scarcity. Today, it means authorship. A Rolls-Royce Bespoke buyer isn’t choosing leather color—they’re commissioning identity. A Jeep Gladiator with mismatched body panels and $50K in modifications and recovery gear isn’t random—it’s a badge. Personalization has become the new status. Whether you’re building a $300,000 track weapon or wrapping a leased GLE in matte purple, the point is the same: to make it yours.
Hollywood has always understood this. James Bond’s Aston Martin is elegance with teeth. The Fast & Furious franchise turned cars into avatars of family, honor, and NOS-fueled catharsis. Pixar’s Cars anthropomorphized grille and headlight until even children saw cars as people. The car is rarely just a ride. It’s a statement. A partner. Sometimes, a plot.
Even in horror, the car speaks. Christine kills. Maximum Overdrive terrorizes. The car becomes a character precisely because it always was. It’s what picks you up. What waits outside. What carries your body—and your narrative. In Knight Rider, K.I.T.T. was smarter than most of the cast. In Mad Max, the V8 Interceptor is not just remembered. It’s mourned. When Max loses the car, he loses part of himself. That’s not fiction. That’s ownership.
We carry these archetypes with us. They show up in parking lots, not just film. A blacked-out Suburban carries government officials. A gold Camry signals disinterest. A three-row Acura suggests upward mobility with optional ambient lighting. The meanings aren’t always fair. But they’re always present. Everyone reads cars. And everyone is read.
Even those who claim not to care are participating. The tech executive in the 2006 Outback? That’s a move. So is the urban dad in a boxy Volvo wagon. So is the grad student on a Lime scooter. Each choice carries weight—sometimes financial, sometimes symbolic. The man driving the manual E30 through midtown traffic isn’t just commuting. He’s performing memory. And maybe some low-key judgment.
Attempts to reject automotive identity only reinforce it. Choosing not to own a car? That’s classed, too. Riding a bike, using rideshare, taking the bus—these are not invisible choices. They speak to values, constraints, geography. The refusal to drive is still a message, especially in America, where the car remains a synecdoche for agency itself. The car is freedom. Not owning one is, often unfairly, read as its opposite.
So yes, the car is still one of our loudest symbols. Even in a world of digital sameness, even as clothing styles converge and personal data becomes the real luxury item, the car remains legible. It’s expensive, visible, and mobile. It makes noise. It takes up space. It cannot be muted. And it cannot be mistaken for someone else’s. You wear it. You curate it. You are it.
Look again at that Los Angeles intersection. The Impala isn’t just history—it’s alive. The Tesla isn’t just electric—it’s contested. The Lamborghini isn’t just fast—it’s theatrical. Each car tells a story. And each story reveals what we fear, desire, perform, and defend. In America, the car is never just a car. It’s autobiography in motion. Class, culture, and self-image—compressed into four wheels and one silhouette, stopped at a red light, waiting to be seen.