Car Sex and Refuelling Anxiety?

Over the last month, two car-related things caught my attention.

1. The Times reported that barely more than one in four people aged 17 to 20 now have a full driver’s licence, and 6/10 young drivers suffer from ‘fuel station anxiety’.

2. Jeep released an advertisement for the 2026 Grand Wagoneer that markets the vehicle as the best car to have sex in.

So how does a car advert about fucking connect to the catastrophic decline in youth driving?

The Jeep ad highlights a clear generational fracture in the automotive industry. It’s a perfect artefact: brilliant marketing to one generation that inadvertently exposes how thoroughly the next is missing out on an important rite of passage.

“The Family SUV,” starring comedian Iliza Shlesinger, is based on a real review extolling the Grand Wagoneer’s “extracurricular possibilities.” It’s cheeky, self-aware, and targeted with surgical precision at people who still remember when cars were spaces of sexual possibility, when obtaining a driver’s licence meant freedom, and when the back seat was a site of transgression.

The ad works because it connects with a generation that came of age when cars were essential infrastructure for freedom. And it creates FOMO for a generation that is missing out on that by not driving cars. It makes explicit what car advertising has always implied: the automobile is sexual infrastructure.

The cleverness of the campaign is that it works as aspirational nostalgia. It pokes fun at the usual advertising car tropes of features and vanilla aspirational lifestyle imagery of speed, adventure and performance.

It sells the message that cars are about having fun in. Remember...