Write Your Congressman: The Thrill Is Not a Data Set

To the Honorable Member of Congress:

We write on behalf of the plainest thing a driver still owns and is quietly losing: the joy of the drive itself, the pulse and the focus that come with it, which belong to the person in the seat and to no one else.

Read what two makers said within a week of each other this spring. By Polestar's own account, it and Oxford's SDG Impact Lab opened a pilot study to measure the thrill of driving through signals in the brain and the body. That study has run since March and closes this month; it has found nothing yet, and its results are promised for the fall. By Land Rover's own account, a week on, the Range Rover SV Ultra arrived with seats whose wellness modes could offer measurable benefits for a passenger's heart-rate variability. One maker sets out to measure the joy. The other tunes a seat to move the pulse toward a number it can name. We charge neither with any wrong, and we name no rival beyond the two who said it out loud. We say only that the instinct runs one way, and that it runs at the driver's inner life: to make it a thing first measured and then tuned.

Here is the plain trouble. The feeling of driving has been the last thing a man carried that was not yet a spec, not a reading, not a line in a file the maker keeps. When the joy becomes a data set and the pulse becomes a target, the driver stops being the person a car is built to move and becomes the thing a maker studies and tunes.

We propose no statute, and we will not pretend a bill could keep a man's own heart his own. No law measures a thrill. We ask only for the plain right a driver is owed: that his joy and his pulse and his focus stay his, off the ledger, out of the tuning file, not a number the maker measures, tunes, and keeps. A car should move you. It does not get to instrument you.

Let the thrill stay the driver's. Write back to us when you have.

Respectfully, The Editors