Can Your Car Be a Third Place?
“I personally think what we know today as cars will change drastically,” the CEO of Rinspeed told The Verge in 2017. “They will be automotive, you’ll be expecting a completely different interior, and it's a march not only of mobility and technology, but mobility and third living spaces.”
At that year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Rinspeed debuted the Oasis: a translucent, self-driving pod with a dashboard furnished by succulents and a windshield that you could access augmented reality on. Of course, the Oasis wasn’t available for purchase or operation then and probably won’t be for decades at best, assuming that technology, laws and customer appetite catch up to Rinspeed’s whimsy. In fact, the showcase was, by the company’s admission, more suggestive than serious.
For that reason, it’s easy to write off the Oasis as nothing more than an art project because, at the end of the day, CES is a forum for Jetsons-style futurism. It’s where companies court attention and investors alike in a crowded room by overpromising comfort and convenience. At the same time, it’s a peephole into the priorities to come. And Rinspeed wasn’t the only one at CES promoting cars as more than a means to get around.
At the unveiling of its own show car, Bosch predicted that, soon enough, cars will be regarded as the “third living space.” Fiat Chrysler billed their minivan as “an open and serene atmosphere that provides an alternative environment between work and home.” Hyundai wants to “blur the line between mobility and living and working space, integrating the car into the daily lives of users” with its podlike autonomous car.
For these presenters, reimagining cars as mobile living rooms comes at a time when self-driving technology is hitting the streets. Freeing the main — and often only — occupant of a vehicle from the responsibility of operating it opens up exactly the possibilities entertained at CES. “The effort to redefine cars as social spaces is rooted in a much older idea about what we would do with our time once untethered from operational demands of driving,” The Verge noted. “And without those controls, where else will our attention turn but to each other?”
Then there’s the ubiquity of smartphones and in-car entertainment that makes downtime in a car a lot more palatable, even preferable. “Now, while the kids are at sports practice, the car becomes my workspace,” the CEO of Xperi said. “It’s quieter than my office, and the sound system is a lot better, too.”
A 2022 Xperi survey even concluded that “Consumers, especially younger drivers, are moving from viewing their vehicle as simple transportation toward seeing it as a space where they can relax and escape,” a finding they attributed in part to advancements in both vehicular and mobile technologies.
Most importantly, this suggestion that the car could become a third place comes at a time when Americans are spending more than 70 billion hours inside their vehicles. In addition to commuting, there’s time spent waiting in school pick-up lines, at drive-thrus and while idling between appointments. Outside of home and work, the bulk of people's time is spent inside a vehicle, and while cars share little in common with traditional third places, hanging out in one’s car is, for many Americans, a formative social experience. Bosch and Rinspeed didn’t have to convince anyone that cars are more than a mode of transportation; Americans have already felt this way for a while.
Why Are People Spending So Much Time in Their Cars?
The supermajority of Americans own a vehicle and use it daily to accomplish anything from getting to work to picking up a sandwich. Yet, it wouldn’t be accurate to assume that Americans categorically prefer running errands in a car. Can you really exercise preference when you don’t have another choice?
Zoning codes, for example, segregate homes from businesses from schools from churches so strictly that the distances between these once-local amenities can only be comfortably traversed by car. No longer is the church or cafe embedded in the community. It’s a drive away. And since it’s a drive away for most, if not all, there needs to be a means for parishioners and patrons to store their vehicles once they arrive.
The more that driving between destinations is accommodated in this way, the more it becomes mandated. This is both true in terms of policy — like with parking regulations that mandate a minimum number of spots every business, developer and institution must provide, regardless of their needs — and in terms of geometry. The more space is ceded to cars, the greater the distances between destinations, the more necessary vehicles are for travel. Of course, the more vehicles there are on the road, the more congested the roads become and the more palatable doubling down on the infrastructure that started this feedback loop seems.
This begins to explain why people spend so much time on the road, but there’s another consequence to building our environments this way: non-places. Non-places are the filler in the landscape between places. Some examples include parking lots, parking spots, the patches of grass between fast food chain restaurants along a stroad, medians, the auxiliary roads built to house ever-elongating school pick-up lines, and all the land underneath and around highway overpasses. Put another way: Places build wealth. Non-places consume wealth.
Americans spend a lot of time idling in these non-places, often alone in their cars. Some might kill time in a parking lot between appointments because their cars house all the creature comforts they could ever need, but there’s also no better place to wait in a strip mall. The landscaped buffers between stroad-side drive-thrus technically qualify as green space, and they may even be very well maintained, but they’re hardly parks anyone would visit, let alone relax in. Consider even how common it is for Americans to eat in their parked cars. Would you risk sauce on your new suit if there were a more pleasant and convenient place to chow down a dozen feet away?
“My car has totally been like a third place for me,” a co-worker admitted when I brought up my plans to write this piece. She instantly recalled dozens of times she’d hung out with friends in a car with “no place to be,” as she put it. It’s a widely shared sentiment, and it demonstrates how the proliferation of non-places not only makes our cars more prominent in our lives but also spells the decline of actual places. It’s possible that, even if presented with a better option, she and her friends would’ve still opted for Friday nights in a strip mall parking lot, but the truth is that there wasn’t a better option to begin with.
The Danger of Cars Being Third Places
This is the reality that backdrops the “innovations” exhibited at CES in 2017. Companies asking people to reimagine the car as a venue for social connection and escape are doing so at a time when there are fewer physical places to do so without the help of vehicles in the first place. They’re not offering a fanciful car to supplement a diet rich in attractive public spaces and third places, they’re offering a substitute for the lack thereof.
This isn't just worrisome on a psychological or social level. The United States has one of the highest number of traffic fatalities per year of any country, accounting for over 40,000 deaths annually.
Building an environment that mandates car usage forces everyone — from the emotionally raw mother who received the worst phone call of her life to the exhausted delivery driver who's been picking up extra shifts — onto the road to put themselves and others at risk of joining this statistic. It robs the elderly and nearly 10 million Americans who reported a travel-limiting disability of any sense of autonomy. “Grandma may have a big, beautiful house in a quiet suburb, but if she can’t drive, she’ll basically be trapped at home unless someone comes to visit her,” Collin Woodard wrote for the car-enthusiast magazine Jalopnik. “Sure, she can order clothes online and have groceries delivered, but humans need social interaction, and they shouldn’t have to choose between putting other people in danger and total social isolation.”
Of course, for the presenters at CES, self-driving technology would address that. However, it’s worth fighting for a future where autonomous vehicles can actually take you somewhere worth being. Not to mention, wouldn’t you want a future where you have the choice to drive less, not more?
Learn how to build real third places on October 31 in the Local-Motive session “3 Quick Steps to Building a Third Place Through Tactical Urbanism.”
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.