As personal and private, but also public-sphere objects, cars cannot be divorced from the enveloping automobile hegemony in which we find relations of dependence, collaboration and interaction in order to sustain ourselves and our vehicles. It has to be said, of course, that cars are also, in and of themselves, loaded with risks relating to the environment, or injury and death. At a more banal level, cars reference personal freedom, functioning as little more than a mode of transport and mobility, but for many, what they represent and signify are vital elements of consumption: some use cars as a way to confer status, while for others, being anonymous, or unnoticed, is more important.

Sociology offers opportunities for understanding and exploring aspects of everyday life, trivial and spectacular, some of which are problematic, while others problematise particular identities. Here, examining our relationships with cars helps situate identity as something that is lived, refined and developed in a relational, not necessarily transactional, manner. Through the dissection of the complex, intersecting and even conflicting aspects of a city's car culture and reputation, the car emerges as a means through which insights into human behaviours and attitudes can be gleaned, thus enabling individual and collective human identity to be explored. It follows, then, that cars can be seen as active and meaningful objects that impact and help crystallise notions of ‘Us’, ‘Them’ and ‘the Other’. Here, the articulation of identity includes processes of car customisation as well as the more ordinary aspects of car usage. As a result, some dimensions of car culture are connected to particular sociologically grounded vantage points: taste, social class, consumption and conceptions of race continue to shape experience through the conduit of cars.

This book has produced discussions that tap into broader debates about how identity is worked on, projected and received. Despite the potential limitations linked with a relatively closed, or narrow, geographical site, the material has wider reach and appeal, not only within the realm of academic research, but especially within public discourse, in which ethnicity and class often feature as being self-evidently in need of repair.