Francis Curzon, born in 1884 and later named the fifth Earl Howe, loved a souped-up Bugatti. And he loved to drive fast. He was famous for his “great skill and daring” on the racetrack, and also, eventually, for crashing into pedestrians—knocking down a boy in Belfast, Northern Ireland; slamming into a horse-drawn cart and killing a peasant in Pesaro, Italy.

These incidents (and 10 more) were recounted in a 1947 polemic by J. S. Dean, chair of the Pedestrians’ Association in England. Dean took particular issue with an assertion the earl had once made that the “recklessness” of pedestrians was the main safety problem on Britain’s roads. People who drive cars, Dean pointed out, do consider themselves to be “pedestrians” in other situations—that is, when they themselves are walking—and they agree that safety laws are important. Still, no matter what they may say, they continue to do whatever they want. Dean asked: “What are we to do with these people with their split minds?”

If the term had been available to him, he might have used the pejorative car brain to describe the conundrum he was observing. In the past five years or so, the term has become a common joke in left-leaning online spaces devoted to public transportation and urban planning, including the Facebook group “New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens.” Car brain also appears daily in the even more explicit Reddit forum r/fuckcars (404,000 members). It describes both a state of mind (“you’re car-brained”) and a type of person (“she is a car brain”). Obviously, the term is rude and very smug—in the same vein as the guys who wear One Less Car T-shirts while riding their bike. But there is also something true about it: Reason is failing in the face of the majestic automobile. People make excuses for cars and remain devoted to them, despite the incontrovertible evidence that they’re extremely dangerous.

This is an unresolvable tension of life in the United States. It’s been that way as long as there have been cars to drive and crash, and it’s especially notable now. An estimated 46,270 people were killed by cars last year. In 2019, deaths numbered 39,107. Car deaths drastically started to spike in 2020, a phenomenon that at first some ascribed to one of the many riddling consequences of the pandemic. Americans were driving much less than usual in the early days of COVID, but those who did take their cars out were found to be driving more recklessly and even faster than they were before, perhaps because everyone was simply more anxious, or perhaps because the roads were more open and people felt free to speed, or perhaps the threat of a deadly virus made other threats seem less consequential. Those explanations became less convincing, however, as pandemic restrictions faded yet car fatalities continued to rise. The number of people killed by cars in 2022 is 9 percent higher than in 2020.

[Read: We should all be more afraid of driving]

Of course, one problem with these numbers is the simple fact that cars are necessary. Americans have to get places, and in much of the country there is no other way to do that. Sometimes, becoming “car-brained” is just what you have to do to get through the day without constant dread. I grew up in a rural area, and was happily car-brained as I commuted to my job at the mall. Now I’ve been living in New York City for the better part of a decade and am rarely in a car. I find myself acutely terrified by the idea; I feel sharp, pit-in-the-stomach anxiety whenever a phone call to a family member produces the knowledge that they will soon be driving somewhere. Yet I still love cars. I plan imaginary road trips as I fall asleep. I sigh with envy when I see someone pull into a Wegmans parking lot. I used to have a red Hyundai Elantra; when I say Hyundai Elantra, I say it like I am saying the name of the one who got away.  

A new study attempts to model the confusion I’m feeling. Co-authored by Ian Walker, an environmental-psychology professor at Swansea University, in Wales, the preprint is titled “Motonormativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard.” It was based on survey data collected in the U.K., but nonetheless has some relevance: Walker and his team created pairs of questions designed to suss out the existence of a pro-car bias in society. The questions range from clever to somewhat chin-scratching. For instance, should people smoke cigarettes in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the smoke? Forty-eight percent of respondents strongly agreed that they should not. Should people drive cars in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the exhaust fumes? Only 4 percent strongly agreed that they should not. If you leave your car in the street and it gets stolen, is it your fault? Eighty-seven percent said no. If you leave anything else in the street and it gets stolen, is that your fault? Forty percent said yes.

Walker did not attempt to hide his bias. He was already familiar with the idea of car brain, he told me, and the term motonormativity was his “technical attempt” at expressing the same idea. “The harms of motoring are very much just seen as an aspect of life,” he said. “We’ve lost the ability to look at it objectively.” When I reasoned that some people in the U.S. have to drive, he suggested they could move—it’s not “as if we’re in Soviet Russia and the government allocates us to houses,” he protested. I pushed him on the survey questions; it makes more sense to leave a car in the street than it does $50. He countered that I was only proving his point. “That’s what streets are being used for at the moment, but I don’t think they’re intended to store property,” he said. “The paper is essentially suggesting that we make special pleading.” And that’s what I was doing: treating cars as an exceptional category.

Walker’s perspective may seem extreme, but there has been resistance to the “pro-car narrative” from the very beginning. In the first decades of the mass-produced automobile, but before the Eisenhower era of rapid-fire highway construction, screeds against cars were somewhat common. In 1931, The Atlantic published “Our Delightful Man Killer,” an impassioned essay about pending motor-safety regulations that emphasized the absurdity of the 33,000 fatalities counted the year before. (This number is even worse than it sounds, because the country’s population was about 123 million at the time, compared with 335 million today.) “The trouble lies deeper than in bad driving,” the essay concluded. “It lies in the fundamental incompatibility of machines and men, steel and flesh, in a running mix-up on the highways. Nothing on earth can make their intimacy safe.” A similar, gorier essay appeared in Reader’s Digest a few years later—this one suggesting that “if ghosts could be put to a useful purpose, every bad stretch of road in the United States would greet the oncoming motorist with groans and screams and the educational spectacle of ten or a dozen corpses, all sizes, sexes and ages, lying horribly still on the bloody grass.”

[Read: Car-rental companies are ruining EVs]

Almost 100 years later, the cognitive dissonance has become, if anything, more pronounced. Motor vehicles are a leading cause of death in the United States, according to the CDC. They’re in the top 10 for all age groups from 1 to 54 years old, Matthew Raifman, a researcher at the Boston University School of Public Health, pointed out when I reached him for comment. Many other top causes of death—cancer, heart disease—are talked about all the time as serious public-health problems that need radical solutions. “Why are we not doing that for motor vehicles?” Raifman asked. “It’s weird to me that we’re okay with this top-10 cause of death that’s sitting there year after year.”  

Some believe that new technology will help solve this problem. But as the first self-driving vehicles arrive on our roads, they’ve only underscored the hubris of car culture. Earlier this year, The New York Times’ Christopher Cox interviewed Tesla owners who had been in accidents caused directly by malfunctions of Tesla’s $15,000 Full Self-Driving feature, and found that many were willing to explain the car’s dramatic errors away. They weren’t skittish about getting back (as human observers) behind the (autonomous) wheel. One man was still using “Mad Max mode,” in which his Tesla would aggressively pass slower moving cars on the highway. Tesla did not respond to my requests for comment.

More recently, The Washington Post reported that Tesla’s autopilot features had been involved in at least 736 crashes since 2019, far more than had been previously known. While the meaning of the number is still obscured by some missing information about how Tesla’s software was being used and how it might have failed, what’s obvious is a surprising level of comfort with danger: In one crash described in the report, the driver had affixed small weights to his steering wheel to get around the system’s requirement that a human always be hands-on, ready to take over for the robot.

The strangeness of “car brain” will persist well into the future. Driving is dangerous. Driving is terrifying. Still, I want to be going 80 miles an hour through a desert. I want to turn a radio dial! I want to keep personal items in a glove compartment and hit the open road with a huge fountain soda. (Can I have next week off?) I’m lucky to be healthy and young—if suddenly I were to die, it’s statistically most likely that it would be because I was in a car crash. I know this. My car brain doesn’t.