Subaru: Be Part of the Problem

I was really struck by this ad from Subaru when I saw it because they are actually calling attention to how dangerous our roads are. Of course, their answer to the problem of dangerous roads is not to make roads safer. That would be ridiculous. No, to protect the people you love, buy a Subaru, obviously.

By the way, did you know there are a lot of people out there with guns (at least in the United States). What can you do about it? Buy a gun to protect yourself from all the people with guns!

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 41,241 people died from motor vehicles in 2024. That same year, 44,447 people died from firearms. That’s a difference of only 3,206 people. Put another way, for every 100,000 people living in the United States, the CDC estimates that cars killed 12 people, and guns killed 13. Cars are basically as deadly as guns.

Now you might say, “But Evan, no one needs to own a gun, but we all need to own cars.” Which is true. Sort of. The only reason we all need to own cars is because we’ve built a world predicated on the idea that we all own cars to get around. But the sprawl in which we’ve all lived our entire lives is not a law of nature, it is an accident of history.¹

Subaru are right that our roads are frightening. I’m scared every time I go out on the road—especially if I’m not in a car. But the solution isn’t “buy a safer car”. The solution is to make the roads safer. Lower speed limits, install traffic calming devices on the roads and speed governors in cars. Maybe best of all, eliminate the need for people to drive everywhere. The fewer people that drive, the fewer crashes we’ll have.

We shouldn’t have to put our lives and the lives of our loved ones at risk every time we want to visit friends, or go to the grocery store. And we shouldn’t have to spend $35,000² on a new car to keep ourselves safe. We need an environment where we are safe by default, inside or outside a vehicle. Why do we accept a built environment that is designed to prioritize a machine that poses, for all practical purposes, as much of a threat to our safety as guns do?

Subaru wants you to be the part of the problem, not the solution. They want you to embrace the motonormativity and isolate yourself inside the confines of their shiny new car where you’ll be “safe”. Of course they do, can you imagine what would happen to their bottom line if people didn’t have to own a car? Sales might plummet!

But safety shouldn’t be limited to those who can afford it. Our mobility should not be limited by our ability to drive. Yes our roads are dangerous, but they don’t have to be. We don’t have to accept the car-brained idea that the way to protect ourselves from cars is to buy a safer car. Most of us in North America are stuck in a car-centric environment. To get out of it we need to start paying attention to the assumptions of motonormativity that pervade our culture, and then we need to reject those assumptions.