How ‘Big Car’ poses an existential threat to humanity

By Jessica McKenzie | November 21, 2025

“Christine” is a horror movie about an evil car, but the film could also be read as a parable about our deadly obsession with motor vehicles. Share

The title character of Christine, the 1983 film by John Carpenter based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, is an evil car—specifically a red 1958 Plymouth Fury. Christine is possessive, vindictive, and violent—murdering, or trying to, anyone who insults or injures her. After teen nerd Arnie lovingly restores the vintage automobile to her former glory, his infatuation with his four-wheeled companion threatens his relationships with his family, his best friend and new girlfriend, and, eventually, his life.

My only humble quibble with this premise is that the film presents Christine as uniquely destructive, instead of emblematic of the deadliness of all cars, and our obsession with them.

If you find yourself wanting to object, or to roll your eyes, consider this: Since the invention of the car, somewhere between 54 and 69 million people have died in traffic crashes; 6.3 to 9 million people have died from traffic-related air pollution; and as many as 5.7 million people have died from vehicle-based lead exposure. All told, cars have killed somewhere between 61 and 83 million people. As David Obst observes in his new book, Saving Ourselves From Big Car, cars have killed more people than World War II.

Obst is no stranger to going up against powerful forces. He’s worn many hats in his time—author, editor, film producer—but is perhaps best known for being the literary agent for Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and Daniel Ellsberg, and for publishing and distributing Seymour Hersh’s exposé on the My Lai massacre. His only regret with this new book, he confided, is that Big Car collectively shrugged.

“I’m kind of disappointed and shocked that I didn’t get Big Car to come after me,” he said. “They just kind of ignored the book.”

Obst is not the only writer to take aim at car culture this year. There’s also Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Carsby Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay, and Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek. But I was intrigued by Obst’s explicit framing of the car as an existential threat. Because while Big Car kills many of us quickly, in deadly collisions, it is killing many more of us slowly, by polluting the environment, warming the Earth, sowing misinformation and doubt about climate science, and impeding attempts to redress these harms.

“I don’t think of the car as a villain,” Obst writes in his introduction (here, we may disagree). “Like you, I use my car almost every day. However, I now understand the price we’re all paying for it. It’s much too high. If we don’t stop Big Car, Big Car will destroy us.”

I recently reached Obst by phone to ask him about how he arrived at this thesis, whether it’s confusing to have the umbrella term Big Car when it overlaps significantly with the widely used phrase Big Oil, and where we go from here.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jessica McKenzie: Could you start by defining Big Car?

David Obst: Let me begin with a very brief history of how Big Car came into being. It all starts at the beginning of the 20th century, when the biggest cities’ biggest problem was the horse. New York City had 130,000 horses a day coming into the metropolitan area, each leaving 26 pounds of manure, and the cities became unlivable. So they invent the car. The first cars were electric, but as the need for precious metals for World War I grew, they quickly disappeared. For a short time, the external combustion engine—steam—prevailed, but it took forever to start them, and they weren’t convenient. The internal combustion engine eventually wins. It becomes the technology that Henry Ford adopts to mass produce cars.

One of the major themes of the book, and I’m probably leaping a little bit ahead, but this answers your question of, ‘What is Big Car?’ Because Big Car is not just the automobile manufacturers; it’s also the people who work with them. There’s the gasoline people, the insurance people, the asphalt people, the machine parts people, the lobbyists. All of these, taken together, have formed a kind of unholy alliance, which is going to make the Doomsday Clock speed up considerably.

And the reason for that is: Cars are not safe for human beings. The average vehicle on the road now is about equivalent to the size and weight of a German Panzer tank during World War II.

To go back to the early history of the car—in 1925, the internal combustion engine has prevailed. But it’s not an efficient user of its fuel, which was gasoline. You’re probably too young to remember, but cars were constantly backfiring and belching because it didn’t burn cleanly. So, in 1926, three wonderful corporations band together—Standard Oil, General Oil, and DuPont—and they form the Ethyl Corporation. The Ethyl Corporation comes up with a wonderful additive that allows internal combustion engines to burn fuel cleanly, and that additive was lead.

One of the things the Ethyl Corporation was able to do was to keep all the data on the effects of lead on human beings covered up for over 70 years. No research lab, no scientists, no university, no journalists ever knew the price we were paying in the name of their profit, and it was only through happenstance and the fact that there was a big oil spill in Santa Barbara, where I am, and Richard Nixon came out and was so appalled by it that for some reason, he formed the Environmental Protection Agency. Someone once described Nixon as the kind of guy who would chop down a redwood tree and then stand on the stump and give a speech about conservation.

As a result of that, the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, which stipulated that every car that came off production line five years in the future must have a catalytic converter built into it [to reduce toxic components in auto exhaust]. The Ethyl Corporation was okay with this, because the catalytic converter hadn’t been invented yet. They assumed they’d have another decade before they would have to take their product, leaded ethyl gasoline, off the market. But Revenge of the Nerds is swift, and they did invent it, and it went into cars. In 1975 when these new cars came into gas stations and unsuspecting motorists filled their tanks with leaded gas, it would go into the engine and smother the catalytic converter and cause the car to die in the gas station. And gas stations just went crazy over this. So they had to very quickly change the nozzle size so that you couldn’t put leaded gasoline into a new car. And that’s how we finally got rid of leaded gasoline in America. [Editor’s note: Although leaded gasoline began to be phased out in the 1970s, it wasn’t fully banned until 1996, and even then there were still exceptions for small aircraft, farm equipment, and marine engines. Efforts to eliminate leaded fuel from aviation are ongoing.]

RELATED:

Michael Mann to Bill Gates: You can’t reboot the planet if you crash it

McKenzie: Getting lead out of gasoline is one of the big wins against Big Car that you cover in the book. But in spite of that, you still describe Big Car as an ongoing existential crisis facing humanity. You write in chapter three, “This book is a story about how our addiction to the car can potentially wipe out humans.” Even as someone who’s pretty familiar with anti-car discourse, I don’t see many people go this far. How and why did you land at that conclusion?

Obst: The reason that I say it’s an existential threat, and it still is, is that cars kill an exorbitant number of people. There’s no other industry in the world that kills the number of people that cars do that are allowed to call it an “accident.” “I was in a car accident.” No, you weren’t. You were in a car crash.

So just the rectification in names is something that we’ve got to begin to do. There’s no such thing as a car accident. The 50,000 people each year who die on the road are not victims of accidents, like when you spill your coffee. [Editor’s note: Estimates vary, but between 40,000 and 46,000 people die in car crashes in the United States every year. Globally, more than one million people die from traffic-related incidents every year.]

McKenzie: One thing that occurs to me is that virtually everyone in the United States uses a car in some form or fashion at some point, which means everyone has survivorship bias. Because people don’t think of cars that way. They think “Oh, I won’t die because I haven’t died yet.”

Are you at all worried that people will dismiss you as being overly alarmist?

Obst: Well, I’ve been that way since I started my career.

You know, when I did the My Lai massacre story with Sy Hersh, which, for readers who are younger, is a village in South Vietnam where American soldiers brutally killed over 400 women and children one afternoon, we were brutally attacked for being un-American. How could we accuse American boys of doing that? Well, because they did it! Because it was fact. I worked with Daniel Ellsberg, taking the Pentagon Papers out and distributing it to newspapers. And they said, how can you do something that is traitorous? And I said, “No, it’s communication.” People have to know what’s going on, and the government came after me really hard. In fact, I was indicted by a grand jury and almost had to go to jail because of that.

I’m used to being on the wrong side. When I represented Woodward and Bernstein, for All the President’s Men, nobody thought Watergate was going to be an important story. When I took the original Watergate, All the President’s Men book proposal out to publishers, I was turned down by the first seven publishers I showed it to.

I’ve just been very lucky in doing the right thing at the right time. I stumble across things, and then knowing what to do with them helps, too.

This book began inadvertently in that I was driving with my granddaughter from Santa Barbara, where we live and where God would live if she could afford it, down to Los Angeles, and we hit a horrible traffic jam. And I turned to her, and I said, “I hate traffic.” And she said, “Pop-pop, you are the traffic.”

I said wait. How did this happen? Because I grew up in Los Angeles. I was a kid from that culture, and the deeper I went into it reminded me of what corporations will do in the name of profit.

McKenzie: Your first book was about corporate malfeasance, right?

Obst: Yes, I did a book with a wonderful economist named Robert Heilbroner, and it was called, In the Name of Profit: Profiles in Corporate Irresponsibility. And it was stories about the absolutely horrible things that companies did at public expense to make profits, and nobody had ever been punished for any of these.

I also did a book back during that time, which your readers will thoroughly enjoy, called Ecotage!, which was a cross between ecology and sabotage, and I ran a nationwide contest for the best ideas of how you could mess with corporate America, who were defiling our environment. And I got thousands of entries and published it as a book.

McKenzie: How very Edward Abbey of you.

Obst: I’ve always been a political activist in the sense that I understand capitalism is the system we’ve all chosen to live under, but there’s a couple of flaws in that system, which, unless they’re watched very closely, can cause us all great, lasting, damaging harm. Big Car has taken advantage of these and will continue to take advantage of these to the point where I really do feel that if we don’t do something fairly soon, we will become extinct as a species.

A couple nights ago I was watching NBC Nightly News, and on it, they had the head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump come on, and he said the same thing that Trump has said, which is that climate change is basically a hoax, that it’s invented by the Chinese to try and get our market shares, etc. The next four stories were about windstorms, fires, flooding.

It’s like, what world do these people live in?

McKenzie: So many of the companies that you’ve identified as Big Car, like ExxonMobil, Shell, Occidental, Chevron, they’ve already been grouped by climate activists under the umbrella of Big Oil. And I was wondering whether you thought at all about whether that was double dipping in some ways, to hitch Big Car to Big Oil. Why do you think it’s useful to think of them as Big Car?

RELATED:

Get ready for climate change! Before it’s too late

Obst: Big Car was a larger tent to put them into, because Big Car also has to do with the people who build our roads. Prior to 1956, American roads were pretty decrepit. Dwight D Eisenhower, two-term president and also Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, comes back from the war, and he said, “Did you see those autobahns?” Which was something that Hitler had begun to build in order to get troops rapidly from point A to point B. He said, “We’ve got to have an American autobahn.”

Eisenhower’s first attempts to pass a national highway act are soundly defeated in Congress, because it’s going to cost a lot, and truckers think that they’re going to have to pay in a fair amount of it. And then Eisenhower is so brilliant, he changes it to the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act [Editor’s note: Officially known as the Federal-Aid Highway Act] and makes it into something that is to protect Americans when we have a nuclear attack from the Russians, which, in 1956 everybody thought was inevitable.

McKenzie: As an editor at the Bulletin, that was one of the factoids that stuck out to me, that the height of every bridge is set to accommodate an ICBM missile on a flatbed truck. I thought that was incredible.

Obst: And it’s still the case today. Every bridge you drive under is exactly the same height as it was back then, because we had to have our missiles. So he’s able to get this through in America, lays enough road to kind of strangle the environment, kill off wildlife, disrupt communities—primarily of poor people, because they gave the rights of eminent domain to local jurisdictions, which then plow through African American and Latino neighborhoods to build these ribbons of concrete. And it has a profound effect on the society. People leave the cities, you have what’s known as “white flight” out of urban America into the suburbs. The tax base in these cities shrinks down to nothing so that vital public services such as public transportation no longer have adequate funding, and cities begin to deteriorate. Urban blight becomes a norm.

The opposite is happening in the suburbs, because businesses follow people out to the suburbs, and build shopping malls, they build hotels like Howard Johnson’s, they begin to put together fast ways of being able to feed people in their cars, and it changes the whole construct of what it is to be an American. And many would say for the better at that time, because growing up as a suburban kid, you really had enormous advantages. You didn’t have to worry about crime or pestilence or any of the big city problems, but the price we’ve paid is enormously high.

McKenzie: One of my frustrations when I talk to people about car culture is sort of this failure of imagination in terms of what anything resembling a post-car world might look like. And I sympathize with that. I grew up in Kansas. My parents live on a dirt road maybe 10 miles from town, but I don’t see why the fact that they can’t really live without a car should make a difference for a city like New York or even Kansas City becoming more accessible to people who don’t have a car or don’t want a car.

Obst: We’ve become so car dependent that we can’t think of any other alternative. And I write in the book that almost all of America has an addiction to the automobile, and like an addiction, if you ask people, they’ll say, “Well, no, I don’t need my car,” or “I could stop at any time.” But neither of those are true.

McKenzie: You have a chapter on the future of mobility. What does a moving towards a post-car future look like?

Obst: When I finished the book, I turned it into my publisher, and they said, “this book is a bummer. You got to give some hope.” So I spent another six months traveling around to try and find alternatives for using the personal automobile in communities. And I was able to find was some very positive things that are happening in the world. For example, in Taipei, Taiwan, you don’t really need a car anymore, because there’s bikes everywhere for you to be able to use. In Copenhagen, you don’t need a car. There’s an entire community now in Tempe, Arizona, that has made living in that community, the price you pay is you can’t have a private car.

McKenzie: I feel like the headwinds are maybe even stronger than they have been. In September, the Trump administration canceled multiple federal grants earmarked for street safety measures, pedestrian trails, and bike lanes, and their explicit justification was that these efforts were hostile to motor vehicles.

Obst: I agree. Right now, under the Trump administration and the people who are running it, it’s not going to be good for the next couple of years. But eventually the price of not doing anything is going to be too high for people to afford, and the only way out is to stop putting all this pollution into the air. And eventually somebody is going to realize that is a truism that has to be followed, or we will become like the other 99.8 percent of all species that have lived on this planet and go extinct.

McKenzie: Do you have any last thoughts that you’d like to share? What’s next for you?

Obst: I’d like to tell your readers about a program that will be starting in January called Universities Speak. It’s a conglomeration of the top college newspapers in America sharing stories about the impact of what Trump has done to their campuses: cuts in funding for research labs, for collection of statistics, and other things having to do particularly with the environment.

We will flood the media with these stories for as long as we can, because these are stories that are not being covered by the mainstream press or even regional presses. We’re not distributing until January, but we have all the top college papers in America working with us. I would urge your readers to reach out to their own colleges and get them to join us.

Together, we make the world safer.

The Bulletin elevates expert voices above the noise. But as an independent nonprofit organization, our operations depend on the support of readers like you. Help us continue to deliver quality journalism that holds leaders accountable. Your support of our work at any level is important. In return, we promise our coverage will be understandable, influential, vigilant, solution-oriented, and fair-minded. Together we can make a difference.

Make your gift now