Man's relationship with cars (Peter Sloterdijk)

It is an obsessive relationship.

The person and the vehicle form a unity in which the vehicle can assume the role of the better ego.

It is the faster and more kinetically powerful self that imagines itself in the automobile.

I see the unity of person and vehicle as already prefigured in Plato.

In general, in every culture that invented the wheel, the wagon and riding, and developed the centaur motif, man with his small strength rides on a bigger animal energy, transformed into a hybrid creature with a human front and the lower body of a horse.

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Any theory that characterizes cars as a means of transport leaves out a whole dimension: the car is a means both of intoxication and regression.

It is a uterus on wheels that has the advantage over its biological model of being linked to independent movement and a feeling of autonomy.

And this goes even further: a car is a Platonic cave built around the individual driver, but we don’t sit welded into it. Instead, this private travelling cave offers us the view of a world passing by.

The car also has phallic and anal components – the primitive-aggressive competitive behaviour, and the revving up and overtaking which turns the other, slower person, into an expelled turd, almost like in defecation.

'Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews 1993 - 2012' by Peter Sloterdijk https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GTYJ4TS