13 of the Best Songs about Cars and Driving

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Songs about the open road have been around since … well, at least since Walt Whitman wrote his ‘Song of the Open Road’ in 1856. In popular music, too, songs in praise of cars, roads, driving, and the power and speed of automotive engineering have a pretty considerable pedigree.

Here’s my pick of the best car songs. Songs designed for playing with the windows down as you drive down the freeway or the autobahn, songs celebrating the freedom of the road, and songs designed to ‘drive’ you wild with joy and exhilaration.

1. Jane Wiedlin, ‘Rush Hour’.

Let’s begin with a quintessential drive-time song, ‘Rush Hour’ by former Go-Go’s member Jane Wiedlin, from 1988. Why does ‘rush hour’ sound so much more fast-paced and thrilling than the reality, which frequently involves sitting in near-stationary traffic, sometimes for a lot longer than sixty minutes?

This song was written in order to imbue this phrase with the meaning it should have. And a track about the pleasure of driving in the rush hour with a loved one has a video in which Wiedlin is seen … why, swimming with dolphins, of course. Perhaps the freeway was jammed?

2. Joni Mitchell, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’.

This is probably Joni Mitchell’s best-known song. It’s a song about not taking things for granted until it’s too late and we’ve lost them, but it’s also an example of an environmental protest song, and – given the last verse – a song about losing the love of your life because we took them for granted, too. Mitchell wrote the song in 1970.

Curiously, the ‘big yellow taxi’ which gives the song its title doesn’t appear until this final verse, and given Mitchell’s Canadian origins, may even be a sly reference to the yellow police cars in Toronto in the 1970s! Has the singer’s ‘old man’ got in trouble with the law?

3. Tracy Chapman, ‘Fast Car’.

This is the 1988 song which catapulted Chapman to stardom, and is one of many standout tracks on her debut self-titled album. It’s been covered a few times, but all cover versions fail to capture the raw emotion in the original (the song was autobiographical in many respects, recalling Chapman’s childhood and upbringing).

The ‘fast car’ is a symbol of her desire to escape her current situation and be free, and to believe that she could be someone important in the world.

4. Madness, ‘Driving in My Car’.

A joyous paean to the pleasures of driving in a car, this 1982 song comes complete with beeping horns and jangling accompaniments. The 12” single of the track reworked the lyrics (to the same music) for a track titled ‘Riding on My Bike’, but it was the car version that captured the public imagination.

5. The Beatles, ‘Drive My Car’.

The opening track from the Beatles’ 1965 LP Rubber Soul, this McCartney-penned song sees a woman who is (according to her) destined for movie stardom offering the male singer a chance to become her chauffeur. McCartney later observed that ‘Drive My Car’ was an ‘old blues euphemism’ for sex, which gives a whole new meaning to the idea of an automatic.

6. Cyndi Lauper, ‘I Drove All Night’.

First recorded by Roy Orbison in 1987, this song was actually first released as a cover version by Lauper, in 1989 (Orbison’s original was belatedly released in 1991, three years after his death). Both versions put the ‘power’ into the power ballad, but Lauper’s lyrics have a vulnerability which is captivating and enchanting.

7. Chris Rea, ‘The Road to Hell’.

Undoubtedly the best song written about the M25 – the orbital motorway opened in 1986 and circling London – probably because it’s the only song written about the M25 (although early 90s dance act Orbital named themselves after the same motorway). The singer-songwriter who also gave us the archetypical Christmas driving song (‘Driving Home for Christmas’, of course) here captures the spirit of modern depression and anomie, using the road as a useful metaphor.

According to Songfacts, Rea wrote ‘The Road to Hell (Part 2)’ while stuck in traffic on the M4 motorway in England, which connects London to the southwest coast. While stuck there, he came up with the idea for the song, and wrote the lyrics at the intersection of the M25 on the outskirts of the capital.

8. Willie Nelson, ‘On the Road Again’.

Here’s a 1980 classic from a giant in the world of country music – and it was written on a sickbag. Nelson was approached to write a song about life on the road performing at different bars and clubs and theatres, and this song was the result.

9. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Drivers License’.

This 2021 track catapulted the teenage Rodrigo to musical stardom. It’s actually a very poignant song about young love, but doomed and lost love: the singer now has some freedom thanks to her driver’s licence and wants to drive to see her sweetheart, but their relationship is already over and she is musing upon a love that is already gone.

10. Gary Numan, ‘Cars’.

In 1979, the English synthpop trailblazer Gary Numan scored two number one hits in the UK: the Philip K. Dick-inspired ‘Are Friends Electric?’, which was credited to Tubeway Army, and this solo number one hit which lauds the virtues of the twentieth century’s ultimate machine. The science-fiction author J. G. Ballard – another important influence on Numan, and the author of the controversial 1973 novel Crash – would doubtless have approved of the song’s message. Listen to the last minute or so and try not to get goosebumps.

11. The Cars, ‘Drive’.

A song about driving, by a band named The Cars? This had to make the list!

This 1984 ballad was memorably used over footage of the Ethiopian famine at the 1985 concert Live Aid, which was set up by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for the starving citizens of that African country. It was an odd choice, in many ways, because ‘Drive’ is all about a man witnessing the slow ‘car crash’ of a woman’s life as she veers out of control, making one poor choice after another. Still, it sounded good on the night.

12. The Cool Notes, ‘In Your Car’.

Here’s another neat Ballardian hit fusing sexual desire with the motorcar – and fittingly, the video for this underappreciated gem from 1985 was filmed under the Westway Flyover in London, which was the setting for Ballard’s modern-day Robinsonade, Concrete Island (1974). The addressee of the song is trying to woo the singer into his car – in order to get into her knickers. But she’s having none of it …

13. Kraftwerk, ‘Autobahn’.

Before they made Autobahn in 1974, the German synth pioneers Kraftwerk had made three albums which emerged from the experimental prog rock scene of the early 1970s. The first two of these have beautiful covers featuring dayglo traffic cones, already signalling Kraftwerk’s interest in the motorcar.

Their breakthrough record cemented (or tarmacked?) that interest, with side one of the original LP being taken up by the title track. By turns exhilarating, meditative, relaxing, and moving (listen from 3 minutes 30 seconds in and prepare to be enchanted and stirred to your very core), the 20+ minutes of ‘Autobahn’ capture through a largely instrumental piece the magic of the motorway. The (few) lyrics show the influence of the Beach Boys on the German musicians.