Driving to Detroit : An Automotive Odyssey

Hazleton is transfixed by the essence of the road and its machine, and her ability to place readers beside her in the passenger seat is provocative. When her father dies in faraway England, we become her confidant as she turns to contemplate her own grief and loss. "Journeys have a way of creating their own momentum," she writes. And although these departures from the strictly automotive theme may seem at first a distraction, they are very much a part of the larger journey of self-discovery that the American road has often held for many who have traveled and written about it. The insights she brings to characters, scenes, and sketches elsewhere become all the more meaningful. We see that, indeed, this romantic machine, the automobile, has a darker side. Just three hours from returning home, there is a wonderfully distracting radio program, an icy road, a sudden skid... Hazleton's journey dares to veer from the well-platted grid of first intentions into the back roads of the soul. A journey well worth taking. --Byron Ricks

Book Description
Leaving her home in Seattle in midsummer to drive "the long way round" to the Detroit auto show, Lesley Hazleton embarks on a five-month journey to visit the holy places for cars -- where they are raced, displayed, crashed, tested, and made -- as she seeks to understand our deep fascination with automobiles. Her quest takes her on a road trip that teaches her not only about cars and the peculiar passions of car lovers but also about herself.

A committed environmentalist in thrall to the internal combustion engine, Hazleton explores her own worship of speed during assaults on the landspeed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats; negotiates the famed off-road Rubicon Trail across the Sierras; finds the exact spot where James Dean died in his Porsche Spyder; and attends a crash conference in Albuquerque, where her discovery that "when metal and flesh collide, metal always wins" sheds light on our erotic fascination with the automobile. She crushes cars in a Houston junkyard; works the nightshift at the Saturn plant in Tennessee; and in Detroit, turns away from the glitz and gleam of new metal to watch what happens when a car is driven into a million pounds of concrete. Along the way she corresponds with a class of eight-year-olds, befriends a priest who fixes his parishioners' cars, and encounters people and places where cars are created, worshiped, celebrated, and even feared. Throughout her journey, Hazleton's ability to make us see and smell and hear what is unique about each place she visits keeps us riveted, eager to move on with her to the next town on the map.

Halfway through this extraordinary adventure, Hazleton's father, the man who taught her to drive, dies suddenly, and her trip becomes a journey of grief and memory, a deeply personal odyssey that after thirteen thousand miles almost costs her her own life on an ice-bound highway. What begins as a romance takes her deep into the heartland of obsession, evolving into a meditation on life and death as she delves into the soul of a nation and its machine.

Whenever Ms. Hazelton mentions other people, she sneers briefly and moves on. Most of those people sounded more interesting than Ms. Hazelton.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon is a much better travel experience book. He talks to people and finds interest in what they say and do.


I Only Finished it Because I'd Bought it   January 8, 2000
 11 out of 13 found this review helpful

There's nothing like a little intellectual arrogance from across the pond to get under my skin. What's been highly acclaimed by others as an introspective journey into Ms. Hazleton's self is instead a rambling stream of (un)consiousness that's so chock full of errors that it just adds up to one big irritation.

I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but when a person who is an automotive journalist, private pilot, environmentalist, car enthusiast, and supposed "keen observer of human nature" sets forth so many incorrect or just plain goofy interpretations of events that even I pick up on them, I wonder how she's gotten the gigs she has. Let alone if she deserves them.

Here's a quick example:

To press home a point, she says "As Rambo said, 'I'll be back'". Sorry, Arnold as The Terminator said that. This from the keen observer of our woeful American popular culture.

As she passes the aviation boneyard in Arizona, she's suprised by the "lack of rust" on the aircraft. Being aluminum, they don't rust very often. Remember, she's an auto journalist, enthusiast, and private pilot.

The list goes on, but you get the idea.

The irony is that in decrying the very inventions she herself can't seem to live without and in having, at best, a shaky command of the facts, her attempt to scale a flagpole that rises above the teeming masses like me to point out our ignorance just gives us all a better view of her backside.


Penetrating, most entertaining analysis of American culture.   November 21, 1999
 5 out of 8 found this review helpful

Driving to Detroit is about automobiles to about the same extent as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repairing is about motorcycles. Driving to Detroit is about America. It is a deeply penetrating, highly compelling, extremely entertaining analysis of our culture. People who like Barbara Kingsolver's fiction or William Least Heat Moon's travel journalism will love this book. It belongs in the travel and sociology sections of bookstores, not hidden among auto-repair manuals in the transportation section which is where I always finally find it when I want copies for nieces and nephews and other friends.

Ms. Hazelton writes with honesty and elegance. She exposes the strength and beauty of our special kind of aggressiveness in America, but she also exposes its ugly side -- with delicacy and compassion. She is a consumate journalist, and a thoroughly competent psychologist. She misses nothing, but has a remarkable flare for knowing how much to reveal and in what kind of time frame. I find that subtle insights created by her apparently innocent descriptions of people and events are still seeping through the layers of my awareness, bursting into consciousness and amazing me at the oddest times.

Unfortunately, books like this one don't fit into the kinds of simplistic niches that make marketing easy. Driving to Detroit is about psychology, and sociology, and culture, and education; and human decency, and conflict, and generosity and opportunism; and automobiles.


Essential reading for anyone who loves cars   March 18, 1999
 2 out of 7 found this review helpful

In chronicling her far off-the-beaten-path 13,000 mile journey from Seattle to Detroit, Ms. Hazleton both celebrates and skewers the American love affair with the automobile.