AAA: Automobiles, America, Ancestry

3/20/2025

There is nothing like the distinct American pleasure of fast food after a long day of school. My destination of choice: Sonic Drive-In. For the uninitiated, I present a brief exposé of the Sonic experience:

You drive up to a rectangular building, with 30 car-sized docking stations: Sonic's hallmark architecture.
You extend your arm out the car window. At the convenience of a button press, you place your order. You're told it'll be on its way. (Think WALL-E.)
Attendants, called "carhops", are dispatched who (yes, this is real life) glide on rollerblades holding red trays of food. This is as precarious as it sounds, but of course depends on the tenure of the carhop.
At this point, your experience is order-dependent. My go-to: a grilled cheese that packages American cheese and Texas toast together with such delight and consistency that it's aggressively habit-forming. All of that, wrapped in a creepy, thin sort of tinfoil, insulating the sandwich and imparting a signature artificiality, setting it apart from anything bread-based you could assemble at home.

Given my predilection, Sonic was the default destination for everything from car dates to after school snacks. I sometimes still yearn for a Sonic grilled cheese. There's something about comfort food in the comfort of your car that feels, well, comfortable!

In case you were wondering, the innovation of the drive-in, as opposed to the drive-thru, is that you can truly be at rest in the interim between ordering and receipt. There's no need to carefully manage the foot on the brake in synchrony with the forward march of cars. Instead, one can orient their attention to any number of solitary car activities, from a quick nap to a scrolling session. But if you're big on drive-thru, worry not, Sonic offers that too! You've got options to choose your flavor of convenience. I'm not sure if Sonic (or rather their parent firm, "Inspire Brands") is mission-oriented, per se, but if they are, the statement should be read:

Empowering suburban Americans to enjoy classic diner fare, in the solitary comfort of their vehicle, without needing to move their bodies, or exert any physical effort in general.

But what cost does convenience incur? Superficially, there's a physical cost: the space occupied, concrete poured, and neon-yellow plastic required to erect a Sonic Drive-In. In all my years of driving-in, I've never struggled to find a spot. Actually, I've never even seen more than half of the car-docks full. Beyond land use, drive-ins are energetically wasteful: as passengers await and consume their food, docked-car engines idle, pouring out greenhouse gases wholesale. Meanwhile, the A.C. blows cold and iPhones charge.

Despite my language, I don't find these "costs" so expensive. That is, while Sonic's footprint is needlessly large and sprawling, there exist innumerable, more egregious offenses of land use in the suburbs. By comparison, Sonic is only a minor offender. As for exhaust emissions, I'm told the ozone layer is out there, but I've never seen it, so the car fumes too are a forgettable externality. More specifically, they aren't costs that would occur to me when I, having received my order, unravel the creepy tinfoil and lay hands on the buttered toast. This wasteful excess isn't in my face; it doesn't demand urgency; in fact, I'd have to intellectualize tremendously to find it personally bothersome. It's something else entirely that's put a bad taste in my mouth: Sonic's self-isolationism.

Let me explain. Sonic offers a dining experience that waives the need to see or interact with anyone but the carhop. After getting their fix, diners roll their windows up and smack their food away without social repercussions or interruption, pausing only to supply oxygen to their vital organs. What's troubling is that self-isolationism is operationalized under the guise of convenience. Needless to say, I wish Sonic was more transparent with their (my) mission statement.

Following the chain of causality from Sonic leads to a singular device: the automobile. Decades of urban planning and national projects in the US have centered squarely on cars (i.e. how to support more cars traveling greater distance in less time.) A century after Ford's Model T, we find ourselves motoring about in sprawling concrete jungles which we cutely refer to as "suburbia."

America boasts 61,000 square miles of paved concrete and asphalt, burying plant life, splitting habitats and introducing metal shells flying at 70mph to the ecological system. Air pollution from private cars has become the major factor hurtling us towards climate catastrophe. If you don't buy the doomsday stuff, mortality research suggests that the burning of fossil fuels presents "the most significant threat to children's health." Car-centric development is also discriminatory, along both racial and socioeconomic lines. Twentieth century freeway projects bulldozed through Black and low-income neighborhoods, to the benefit of white, middle-class Americans.

Though, I find the subtle stuff to be much more sinister. Engine noise is reported to directly cause stress and illness. The operation of cars alters our psychology and changes behavior: heightened feelings of threat, frustration raise our cortisol and incite our stress response (e.g. road rage). Increasingly, journalists and academics claim car-centric development has thrust us into an epidemic of loneliness. Why sit down and sit down face-to-face with humans, when you have Sonic, and can sit in your car, face-to-windshield?

O.K., I've berated Sonic enough. To drive my point home here, consider these other ridiculous emergent properties of suburbanization:

Pick-up and drop-off carpool lines for school in which parents wait for hours, managed by administrators clutching walkie talkies.
Massive ~~parking lots~~ asphalt heat syncs, with single-digit occupancies.
Cul-de-sacs — seriously, who came up with this?

The problem, especially for young people, is that we've never known anything different than the suburban configuration. Until recently, I never thought Sonic strange; I came from the burbs and the burbs were all I knew. In my driving-in days, recently granted the supreme freedom of a driver's license (which I'd received before noon on my sixteenth birthday), cars and suburban infrastructure offered unparalleled opportunity for exploration, independence and self-discovery. I would have, without hesitation, brushed off arguments that characterize Sonic as perverse and lonely. Now, aged 21 years, I have awakened to the absurdity.

Ever since I've had access to YouTube, I've been obsessed with college commencement speeches. Though I have many favorites, it's David Foster Wallace's 2005 speech, This Is Water, to which I constantly return. He argues that the value of a true education lies in learning to consciously choose how to think, to be aware and empathetic to others' experience, and to overcome our hard-wired self-centeredness. It's my single most-recommended piece of literature.

As a college senior, I find it unbelievable – after years of listening to these addresses – that I am fast approaching one which is actually directed to me. In some ways, I feel learned, prepared to depart and get out there. But mostly, I am despondent. I don't want to leave this place, and I'm afraid of what will happen when I do. Nearly 100% of undergraduates at Stanford, my college, live in dorms or houses mere minutes apart. We have roommates and communal bathrooms (admittedly this is getting a little old). We eat in dining halls and socialize in common rooms. We pedal on bicycles, exposed to the elements, without A.C. The campus, with its mission-style architecture and 262 days of annual sunny weather, has to be the nearest approximation of academic Disneyland. Of note, the nearest Sonic is over an hour away by car.

Stanford has given me community, a physical closeness and togetherness with people that I'm not sure I'll find again. As I re-enter normal American life, the land of cars and suburbs, I'll be forced to confront an escalation of loneliness which it threatens to impose. It scares me.

Here's a portrait of loneliness escalation. The average American commute requires a car; so at first, the college graduate asks, "what can I afford?" Later, the question (rationalization) becomes: "since I spend so much time in here, why not drive in comfort? If I seek to minimize my commute, the home I desire is all but guaranteed to be expensive, so I must further self-isolate and work hard to afford it. Then it's: why not drive in style? How about in luxury? But since it seems irresponsible to put so many miles on the luxury one, why not buy a second – a comfort-style hybrid for the commute?" All can be had for a price. So too, the gated communities, extra bedrooms for kids/guests/parents, or being located in a neighborhood that, God forbid, is pedestrian friendly and has good public schools. To quote Wallace's speech at Kenyon:

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.

For Wallace, "forces" primarily means "craving and the worship of self" (a.k.a. the pursuit of our ambition). And, for me, "tiny skull-sized kingdoms" refer to that apex suburban setup – the house with serious acreage, the four-car garage, etc. This charade ends up physically separating us and straining our communities. It demands self-centeredness and results in loneliness.

Leaving college is frightening, but it's the inevitability of automobile-induced loneliness that generates despondence. At some level, there is nothing to do about this recognition except swallow it whole, forget about it. And trust me, I've been trying, but Sonic and other suburban artifacts seem so perverse now that I wonder: how have we managed to arrive here? Are these observations at all useful? Might I just be a grilled-cheese addict in withdrawal?

If there's one occasion to go to Sonic, it's when the rain is torrential. You drive into a car-dock, shielded by a bright yellow awning. Suddenly, it's not raining anymore, at least not on your car, so you consume your food without exposure to a single drop of water. No adversity. Sonic is perhaps the only restaurant which can make this "eat while dry when raining" claim; no, not even drive-thrus.

On one such rainy occasion, I enjoyed a burger with my Papa, except he accidentally ate my burger. He wore hearing aids, which was hard to believe, since he didn't seem to hear anything I said. Worse, he had this difficult to parse, congested-sounding voice, with a Texan accent lathered on top. Put together, these facts made the "you're eating my burger" conversation rather challenging, so I cut him some slack. We were separated by seven decades. When I was in my tweens, Papa was in his early eighties. His life was action-packed: he served during WW2, founded an oil infrastructure company, and volunteered for decades with the international commission for Boy Scouts. When he reached the age of retirement, my family jested with him that he'd done all there is to do. But this time allowed him to focus voraciously on perhaps his first love: automobiles.

Dick's Car Garage, an automotive history museum, was his retirement project. Among some 300 rotating classic cars on display, my favorite was a custom Duesenberg, built for gangster Matt Kolb who was killed by Al Capone. In the foyer of the museum hung five trophies, one for each of Papa's championship titles in the Great American Race, an event where entrants would compete in a cross-country journey in old classic cars. The museum was his pride and joy, though he admitted it was also an "incurable disease" – despite its thousands of visitors per year, it always reported a precipitous loss.

For Papa, it would seem categorically false that cars themselves are a disease in American society. Pronouncements of their detriment to the environment, health, urban design, and culture would be entirely lost on Papa. They'd be lost on him not because he was some old-timey Republican who thought global warming was propaganda (even if he did), but because they encapsulated economic opportunity, because he himself was enabled by them, and, in the case of classic cars, because they're art, cultural relics that preserve the past.

How could I blame him? At scale, widespread adoption of vehicles – first enabled by Ford's Model T – are attributed to bringing about the American middle class. Rural Americans, like Papa, could save to purchase a car, which would enable them to fetch better wages in urban areas. With time, cars got cheaper, so more Americans bought them, thus requiring more skilled labor to increase production, and the positive feedback loop churned on. "Fordism" was termed to refer to economic change of the period and the automobile became an eternal symbol of American cultural life.

For Papa and his 20th century contemporaries, cars democratized the American dream. While they would have acknowledged the harms of automobile externalities, the harms paled in comparison to the humanist benefits. In their time, it might have been possible to project ahead decades to ideate how cars might injure society, but how could they act on these anxieties? Automobiles' immediate effect was acutely beneficial; their downstream effect was unknown.

Here are the facts, plain and dry – the way my sister takes her Sonic cheeseburger. Somewhere between Ford and today emerged gated communities, cul-de-sacs and the rest of the suburban stuff. Given the historical importance, past generations think of this stuff fondly. Today, drowning in myriad suburban-borne dysfunction, the harms are more apparent and demand increasing concern. Concerned though we might be, as individuals, we're stuck with cars and their baggage.

It must be stated that humans do not a priori need Sonic and the rest of it. We were just born into it. Modern American life, owing much of its present shape to suburbanization, has morphed and mashed our culture so much that we're led to believe that we need all of this stuff to live. We've fallen asleep at the wheel.

Perhaps it's best put with an automotive analogy. It's as if one is driving a car down a windy path in the woods, in the middle of the night, the destination miles out. One can only see immediately ahead. With erratic rhythm, the present driver vanishes, replaced instantly by another. The immediate past is available solely by rearview mirror; all before is lost to darkness. The trouble is, the road ahead is long and the view is pitch black. One bad decision leads to another – it's all too easy for the engine hum to start sounding like a lullaby – and eventually, the car's docked at Sonic, encasing a lone passenger, a grilled cheese and a mint.

Originally published on Substack, March 20, 2025.