Speed tourism: The German Autobahn as a tourist destination and location of “unruly rules”

Abstract

The German Autobahn has inspired many people’s imagination with its lack of a general speed limit, the quality of its road surface as well as its allegedly well-behaved drivers. One of the consequences of this positive reputation has been the emergence of a phenomenon I would like to call “speed tourism.” In this article, I treat speed tourism as a special form of tourism that involves viewing the driving experience as an opportunity for either testing the capacity of one’s own car or driving it at high speed as a way of experiencing the native culture at firsthand. I explore speed tourism as an alternative way of getting to know the real Germany as a tourist. Based on an analysis of several of its peculiarities, I argue that the Autobahn can be understood as a location where tourists can mix with “locals” while keeping a distance from them, since the interaction is restricted to learning and obeying the country’s rules of the road. The Autobahn then becomes a time-bound “dream location” created by the ideal of limitless driving freedom on the one hand and the paradoxical requirement of unruliness in relation to strict rules on the other; together, these are believed to offer an “authentic” driving experience according to local cultural customs.

Introduction: the myth of the Autobahn

The German Autobahn is a controlled-access highway built to enable smooth, hindrance-free driving on at least two lanes in each direction. At first sight it appears very similar to freeways in Australia or the United States, motorways in the United Kingdom, or expressways in many Asian countries as well as almost anywhere else in the world. Indeed, “Autobahn” is not a special road at all but merely the German term for a highway. In many instances the Autobahn looks like a normal road with two or three lanes in each direction and a barrier down the middle. However, it is associated with one characteristic in particular by people from all over the world, namely, speed. In fact, to many visitors the very word Autobahn is a synonym for “no speed limit.”

Although the history of the Autobahn goes back to at least the 1920s, ¹ it was in 1974 that German roads were brought to the attention of large numbers of people even outside the country by the hit single “Autobahn” released by the German pioneers of electronic music Kraftwerk (cf. Schiller, 2014). Since then, people from other countries and continents traveling in Europe often seem to come to Germany with the Autobahn as one of their travel destinations, perhaps even their main one. This is not surprising given that anyone planning to go on holiday in Germany will already have read about the Autobahn in travel guides and how the Autobahn experience can be combined with traditional sightseeing routes. ²

Many webpages and blogs also discuss stretches of the Autobahn where, they claim, it is especially easy to drive fast. This is accompanied by a series of recommendations regarding the times of day (or night) when it is probably easiest to do so. Such online texts also include information about the road surface, the quality of the tarmac, as well as reports about how well-behaved drivers on the Autobahn generally are, for instance by discussing the German rule of keeping to the right-hand lane except when overtaking. Overall, driving on the Autobahn as a tourist is, as one Canadian commentator put it, “a badge of honor, a bucket list experience for many” (Bubbers, 2018). Indeed, the very word “Autobahn” seems to be synonymous with freedom from limitations that are prevalent in the visitor’s home country. In this sense, it can be said that the Autobahn is a classic tourist destination in that it evokes a distinction between the ordinary experience of driving back home and the extraordinary experience of driving in an exotic place (i.e. one with no speed limits). However, as this article seeks to show, it also appears to be more than this.

Of course, by now most people know that there are sections of the Autobahn where no speed restrictions apply. What seems to be less well-known (or perhaps acknowledged) is that there are many stretches of road that have very strict speed limits, just as there are stretches where roadworks are in progress, not to mention the presence of many other cars on the road that hinder a person from driving at high speed. Nowadays, there are numerous blogs, YouTube videos, articles, and even books featuring tips for driving on the Autobahn. Against this background, this exploratory article argues that one of the consequences of the myths surrounding the Autobahn is a phenomenon I would like to call “speed tourism.” I address speed tourism as a type of niche tourism, that is, as a special form that has emerged over the years. Unlike sex tourism, heritage tourism, or wildlife tourism, the term (or the phenomenon of) speed tourism has not received any attention in scholarly writing to date. I analyze speed tourism as a niche form that allows the tourist to experience driving as an occasion for testing the horsepower of their own or a rental car and to drive it at speed, all as a means of experiencing the local culture. In other words, I treat speed tourism as an alternative mode of getting to know the “real” Germany, analogous to the alternative tourist’s aim of getting to know the “real” local culture, in this case getting to know themselves and their cars better. This may in turn help to throw into relief broader issues related to traveling and speed in modern societies more generally.

In addition, I discuss how speed tourism offers several new facets of the tourist experience not found in other forms of self-drive tourism, not least of which is the experience of having “been there and done it,” the sheer thrill of having tested one’s driving prowess right there on the ground (or, to be more precise, the tarmac)—this itself constituting the actual destination of a vacation. This is altogether different from driving along scenic routes or following themed trails (cf. Hardy and Gretzel, 2011). Even roads such as the historical and much sung-about Route 66 between Chicago and Los Angeles are driven mainly for reasons of nostalgia and for the scenery and the varying landscapes encountered along the way. Journeys of this kind generally also include visits to nicely restored hotels or historical gas stations that once served as settings in famous movies. As John Urry noted, it is through an automobile’s windscreen that we can see a key component of tourist experiences in the 20th century (Urry, 1990; cf. Mauch and Zeller, 2008). The Autobahn experience builds on but also departs from that.

The present article is located broadly between literature and research on the “mobility turn” in different fields of study (Elliott and Urry, 2010; Merriman and Pearce, 2018; Rau, 2010; Sheller, 2012; Urry, 2007) and writings about the general experience of freedom associated with going places by car (cf. Butler and Hannam, 2012; Meyer, 2016). Overall, the article contributes to the study of what Adrian Franklin (2014), for the field of tourist studies, has labeled “tourism mobilities II.” The latter refers to the tourist experience solely in relation to other places, while the particular focus here is on the special tourist experiences that are expected to be found in certain places with their potential to provide an additional, “unofficial” thrill. This article thus contributes a novel take on “drive tourism” and pitches new issues into the debate (cf. Prideaux and Carson, 2011), which has so far focused mainly on matters of sustainability and flexibility (for an overview, see Fjelstul and Fyall, 2015), often with a focus on caravan tourism (for a sociological perspective, see Beilharz and Supski, 2017) or (mainly) African safaris (e.g. Hays, 2012).

In addition, the seeming unique driving experience of speed tourism can historically be located in the context of the road trip which has established itself as a defining phenomenon of Western culture during the 20th century (cf. Clarsen, 2008; Pearce, 2016; Seiler, 2008). Further links can also be made with the early 20th-century “speed trials” that saw drivers throughout Europe undertaking extraordinary feats of speed and especially endurance to cover relatively huge distances. Placed in such historical context the German Autobahn today may be one of the very few opportunities remaining for drivers to test themselves and their cars on public roads specifically in terms of speed. More broadly, the article contributes to literature from recent decades on the changing role of acceleration and speed in everyday life (e.g. Adam, 1998; Rosa, 2015; Tomlinson, 2007) as well as to debates on sense of place, place attachment, and access to different public spaces (among many others, a range of perspectives can be found in McCarthy, 2019; Massey, 2005; Veen and Eiter, 2018).

Dipping into online forums, blogs, vacation videos, and newspaper clippings, I explore and reconstruct different characteristics of speed tourism and how they relate to one another. In order to capture a range of attitudes to the Autobahn by tourists traveling in or through Germany by car, I sampled multiple news and video presentations on YouTube pertaining to experiences on the Autobahn. I relied extensively on videos and blogs in which experiences of driving on the Autobahn are shared, as well as German newspaper clippings on political issues related to tourists driving on the Autobahn. It seems sensible to use these sources given that nowadays such media are a major—for many people, the primary—form of communication and exchange about visits to foreign countries. In order to allow for some form replicability, I relied on qualitative content analysis of a random sample of user comments related to the videos. However, in the case of comments on YouTube I started with those 10 comments that led to the most extensive discussions. I then looked at similarities in arguments in replies that were most often used and how these replies build on each other. Besides obvious statements on speed and Autobahn in the comments’ section (manifest content), I also followed more latent content issues to get a better grasp of any underlying meaning behind the statements of YouTubers and their commentators. Such an approach promises to provide valuable insights into a thus far un-researched field of study (on the limitations of such research strategies, see Thelwall, 2018). For the goal of an exploratory paper such as this one, the comments and reports on travel websites, blogs, and YouTube thus offer a suitable basis for (1) establishing the existence of the phenomenon, (2) highlighting a number of characteristics and varieties of tourism on German highways and, albeit to a lesser extent, (3) identifying the responses to speed tourism phenomena on certain highways given by German regulators and policy makers.

The journey is the reward, the road the destination

I first became aware of the Autobahn as a tourist attraction through repeated tales recounted by non-German colleagues and friends in general and, more recently, also by people from countries bordering Germany who had bought a new car and had actually gone across the border to test it on the German Autobahn. Another source of inspiration for this article came from colleagues from overseas who were in Germany to give a lecture at a university, one of whose favorite personal topics of conversation was the Autobahn experience. What surprised me especially was that many of these visitors were not the usual petrolheads or fast car fanatics but, in some cases, people who in their own home country did not even own a car. In particular, visitors from Asia and North America seemed delighted to have an opportunity to see what it is like to drive on the German Autobahn as one of the must-see tourist attractions on their travels—even on a par, perhaps, with such well-known attractions as the Eiffel Tower or the Neuschwanstein Castle.

Cars have become a part of everyday life and are now integral to most cultures around the globe. Even more so, as Gijs Mom (2014) has argued, the history of the automobile is less to be explained as a purely technological process. Instead, it should be seen as a cultural triumph where the way how car owners understood, felt, and drove their cars became the main push factor so that the car technology as we know it today has derived from (everyday) culture (cf. Cross, 2018). Despite criticism of individual car ownership for reasons of traffic congestion, environmental pollution, and safety, the fascination with cars shows no signs of waning, and despite the popular hypothesis that we have reached “peak car” (i.e. that the distance per capita traveled using motorized vehicles has peaked and is now falling), it seems unlikely overall that the automobility regime is set to come to an end anytime soon (cf. Focas and Christidis, 2017; Green et al., 2018; Hoffmann et al., 2017). This may especially be the case since the main focus of cultures of automobility in the industrialized countries has now shifted from status and personal freedom to the notion of “cocooning,” the car as a place to “unwind” (Bijsterveld, 2010). This may increase the appeal of cars as a form of personal space and may even serve to drive future technological innovations such as the driverless car (Wells and Xenias, 2015).

It is against this backdrop that I scrutinize cultural assumptions, beliefs, and practices held by tourists who drive on the Autobahn and view it as part of their vacation experience—perhaps even as their main destination. After all, a car can be a home away from home, a bastion of personal space, a safe haven, an escape from predictability, a means to meditate, a place to enjoy music, an expression of style, or simply a thing that can be fun to have in itself (cf. Collin-Lange, 2014; Hagman, 2010; Kent, 2015; Sheller, 2004). In this sense, journeying by car is closely linked to the experience of traveling in a foreign place and wanting to be somewhere else (than home) yet without being cut adrift from a familiar environment (Baranowski and Furlough, 2001). There is also a link here to the shifting nature of studies on tourism, which have recently come to focus especially on the emotional and sensory dimensions of the tourist experience (Cohen and Cohen, 2019).

Been there, done that: the Autobahn as event

Back in 1999 a colleague from California who had been invited to give a talk at my then university in northern Germany arrived on campus in a rental car that he had picked up at the airport. He did so with obvious pride and satisfaction and talked about how great it was driving along the Autobahn. I did not give all this too much thought at the time, but a day after he left, I received an upset phone call from him. Apparently, he had been stopped by the police while speeding and had had to pay a steep fine in cash on the spot. As he recounted this, he complained that the impression he had had was that you can drive as fast as you want. This was the first time I realized what kind of image of the German Autobahn people from elsewhere may actually have. Over the years since that incident I have had several of these experiences where visiting foreign academics came to workshops having hired a car and having had the same assumptions about the issue of driving at high speed. By now I assume that most visitors to Germany know that there are speed limits on Autobahns and that there are only certain stretches where you can drive faster. However, given the many videos and travel reviews on the web about experiencing the Autobahn, it is still clear that the almost mythical aura attached to having “been there and done that” is still very much alive. Thus, my first step in getting to grips with the phenomenon of Autobahn tourists is to focus on the event character (Pearce, 2018) of “having driven there.” My suggestion is that each and every Autobahn journey can be thought of as a unique event within the vacation experience of visiting drivers and passengers alike, and that this event may or may not be connected to the experience of driving at high speed generally and in one’s own car in particular. Furthermore, as Lynne Pearce (2016) has shown in her book Drivetime, there are wide ranges of emotional states associated with driving at speed that can include connotations of “madness” as an altered state of consciousness on the one hand, but also of the sharpening of analytic and cognitive skills on the other.

What is interesting here is that, in many cases, it does not seem to be that driving at high speed itself is necessarily the most important thing about experiencing the Autobahn as a kind of a special event or even an “altered state” (Pearce, 2016: 181), but rather the fact of having been in a place where you could do so—if you wanted to or had the “guts” or the skills or the right kind of vehicle to do so. After all, roughly half of the videos in which people report about driving on the Autobahn for the first time as a foreigner ³ are not focused on driving at high speed themselves but on having been there per se and of having been part of the fast driving culture for at least a few minutes. An explanation on one blog states that sometimes one might drive a bit faster, “but most of the time, we were comfortable at about 135–45, which is about 85–91 mph. With that, we were blown by many times.” ⁴ So, the “having been there” person is not on the Autobahn to drive fast themselves, but to be in the same location as those who do and, by being there, to observe other fast cars passing by. It almost appears, judging by the comments of those visitors, that what they enjoy is rather like being on a wilderness tour or perhaps on a safari, where they get right up close to the “wild” and fast-moving (native) drivers, but without necessarily following them for very long. Thus, this type of Autobahn experience is partially constructed by the spectacle of observing other drivers driving fast, at least faster than in the tourist’s home country. The tourist’s own “wildness” then is demonstrated in that they occasionally drive just a little bit faster than is allowed in their home country. Thus, mastering the German Autobahn without even attempting to drive fast is part of the “having been there” approach. Beyond this, driving on the Autobahn appears to be rewarding and pleasant in itself, so that other (tourist) destinations seem to acquire the character of an “optional extra”—at least they are not mentioned much in reports of having been on the Autobahn.

In the following I discuss the first results of my exploratory research of the Autobahn as event. I will do so by indicating some thematic connections, which are then further explored in each thematic subsection. These include (1) the Autobahn as an event organized around ideas of the car (the following two sections) and (2) different definitions of the road that are exceptional and thereby support or even produce this fascinating phenomenon of speed tourism (next two themes). Based on these four themes I would like to stress three phenomena that reach across the themes: First, there is the idea of the car as machine (using cars as intended); second, the idea of the car as its use (driving autobahn as a test of the car); and third, we find the notion of road laws as confounding common understanding of what I call “unruly rules,” that is, the idea of Autobahn as controlled lack-of-control. The fourth and final theme therefore revolves around the variable enforcement of German road laws (speeding, racing, etc.) that have led to several paradoxical developments in recent years.

When in Germany, do as the Germans do: using cars the way they were intended

Several blogs and videos reflect on what it is like to live in Germany for some time and to experience driving on the Autobahn. To some of the originators of these accounts, it is important to stress that it takes time to get used to a different driving style, but that the required patience is rewarded eventually—at some point, you will be able to make cars go as fast as they are supposed to go. As one YouTuber stated: “Here you can drive cars the way they are supposed to be driven.” This statement is especially convincing when one realizes that many US soldiers stationed in Germany bring their muscle cars (e.g. Ford Mustangs or Corvettes) with them. The above driver, a US soldier stationed in Munich, continues:

When you think about it, when your car is able to go 240 k or 120 miles per hour but you are never able to go 120 miles per hour? . . . but in Germany, where they have certain sections with no speed limit you are actually able to drive your car, you know, more to its capacity. And it really opens up something. It’s not like you’re racing or you try to like beat somebody on the Autobahn or something, but you are actually able to use your car. You are actually able to use the speed that God intended to give it. ⁵

At last, then, modern cars can be used for what they were made to do: getting from A to B fast, in an exciting and much more efficient way. Individuals driving on the Autobahn thus also seem to seek out an experience that is as close to “authentic” as possible—“authentic” in the sense that they can finally drive the way driving should be, and in line with what their car is capable of achieving. This experience of driving a car beyond the bounds of usual car driving practice, or at least beyond what is legal in one’s home country, may suggest a redefinition of the driver as someone capable of doing new things.

While Marc Augé (1995) once prominently argued that hotels, airports, and harbors as well as highways have become interchangeable non-places, in the case of the German Autobahn as a tourist destination it seems rather that the unfamiliarity of something that at first sight seems very familiar (after all, it is just a road) turns the Autobahn into an exotic site where place and speed are performed in a new way. Other drivers resident in Germany are identified as “natives” ⁶ by their number plate, the age of their car, or the fact that they have individualized features such as bumper stickers or some other customized novelty that make them distinct from plain old rental car owners. ⁷ These drivers then become the other, the natives who know how to drive: Germans are considered to be especially good drivers because of having passed a strict driving test (with practice and theory components) and having had many years’ experience of life on the road with no speed limit. Thus, some videos show tourists waiting specially for a fast German car to come past in order to follow it. German drivers are almost treated as teachers, as driving instructors. The Autobahn thus seems to serve as a contact zone where tourists seek to do as the natives do.

All the tourist guides I found explained that what a tourist needs to know about driving on Germany’s major highway included the rule (or at least the recommendation), “when in Germany, do as the Germans do.” This clearly includes trying to go with the flow by following other drivers. Many blogs and websites claim that an important reason why Germany can survive without general speed limits on their Autobahns is simply that German drivers are better drivers due to the amount of time and effort that went into earning a German driver’s license. ⁸ A result of this, however, is that German drivers may appear more aggressive compared to drivers in other countries. The recommendation is to not “take it personally. It is just the way they drive. . . . Just learn to go with the flow and realize that you are not in your home country.” ⁹ In general, it seems important for tourists to not drive like a tourist on the Autobahn so they are not spotted as coming from elsewhere. ¹⁰ However, several travel guides also point to the fact that driving at high speed might be a goal for tourists, given that most Germans seem to stick to a speed of around 150–160 km/h (90–100 mph) on the unlimited stretches of the Autobahn. This, as one travel website explains, may be “faster than you’re typically allowed to go, but definitely a practical not-super-fast speed where you retain a lot of control.” For inexperienced tourist drivers who may be afraid of high speeds, the recommendation is that “you could drive on the Autobahn only a bit faster than the way you drive on highways at home. And not be too out of place.” ¹¹ What is also interesting is that silence seems to be an important issue while driving. When driving on the Autobahn, both passengers and driver often remind each other that they need to concentrate, but also that they want to be able to listen to the engine’s revs and the roar more generally.

“Special occasion” tourists: testing a new car

Many reports and videos can be found on the Internet that were posted by people who bought a new car and then enthusiastically say how the first thing they did was go to Germany to test “what they [the cars] were really made for.” In the case of drivers from the Netherlands this may seem not very surprising, since the Netherlands is a relatively small country and the roads in neighboring Germany are often used for transit purposes. However, many tourists are from further away. For instance, one telling story among many others is from a car enthusiast from Finland who posted a video on YouTube with the following comment:

So, me and my dad got a spontaneous idea to go to Germany to test our car’s maximum potential. We ourselves live in Finland, so we took the ferry to Sweden. From there we drove across Sweden, Denmark and then took the final ferry to Germany. We circled Germany driving almost every Autobahn there is. It was a fun trip and the weather was good. ¹²

The car’s specifications, a Jaguar XF S, are listed beneath the description of the video. The movie then shows some shaky dashcam shots of the Autobahn trip, directed mainly at the tachometer to prove the high speeds reached with their new car.

Furthermore, many foreign buyers of German luxury sports cars such as Porsche travel to Germany to pick up their cars in the factories located in Stuttgart and Leipzig. One of the reasons seems to be to test the cars in their “proper” environment, namely, on the nearby Autobahn, where they actually belong and for which they were made. Often the unveiling of the car is filmed, as are the driver’s first forays with the new car on German roads. Numerous videos can be found on YouTube posted by people from all over the world, showing them picking up their new Porsche at either the Leipzig or Stuttgart factory through the “European Delivery Program.” Once the new car owners have experienced “the beautiful roads” ¹³ in Europe, they take the car back home to their own country, for example, to North America by ferry.

The immediacy of the road: unruly speed becomes the rule

In his well-known book The Culture of Speed, John Tomlinson (2007) identifies two contrasting characteristics of speed in the contemporary world. The first is what he calls “machine speed.” Here, speed is seen as progress, rationality, and a more efficient and perhaps even linear development that involves getting from A to B (Tomlinson repeatedly mentions “straight streets” in reference to Le Corbusier, example pages 32–34). The second kind is what he calls “unruly speed,” and this is associated with ruptures, excitement, and risk. It is also connected to sensual-aesthetic experience, especially experience in the moment. In the Autobahn experience as perceived by tourists from outside Germany, however, it seems that the two sides of Tomlinson’s fundamentally different manifestations of speed actually merge: the adrenalin rush of the moment is manifested in the seemingly higher rationality of strict adherence to rules on the Autobahn.

Unlike in Tomlinson’s juxtaposition, “unruly speed” here does not seem to be at odds with the modernist discourse of reason, regulation, and control. After all, in many if not most of the reports about the Autobahn, the strict rules that apply in this place are discussed in great detail. Thus, unruly speed becomes the rule on the Autobahn and therefore a part of order and control. The latter include the rule that it is illegal to stop on the Autobahn except in emergencies. Another important rule that explains why driving at high speed is actually possible without many accidents is that it is illegal to pass a vehicle on the right (with the exception of traffic moving at a very slow speed). ¹⁴ This also means that for slower traffic it is mandatory to stay in the far-right lane. Driving in the left lane or the middle lane of a three-lane stretch of the Autobahn is a breach of this law. ¹⁵ Also, rear view mirrors need to be double-checked and the use of indicators is mandatory when changing lanes. The rule here is that one should check the mirrors first and only indicate when it is clear that the overtaking lane is free for at least some time (in order not to distract drivers overtaking at speed in the fast lane). Furthermore, since running out of gas on the Autobahn is illegal, tourists are advised to check their fuel gauge frequently. Similarly, it is also stressed that bicycles, motor-assisted bikes, mopeds as well as pedestrians are not allowed to use the Autobahn at all.

While Tomlinson also believes that unruly speed will soon be subjugated by machine speed, at least the Autobahn experience suggests otherwise. After all, for tourists driving more than, say, 120 km/h or 130 km/h, the legal speeds in their home countries, it appears that Tomlinson’s “unruly speed” and “machine speed” become a combined feature of a single harmonious experience. Tourists are allowed to do something that is not allowed in their own home country. However, to do so they need to strictly obey rules that do not exist in their home country. In this way, the Autobahn experience becomes a hyper-experience, as it connects several place-bound novel forms of behavior that go beyond the ordinary way of doing things back home.

Speed limits for tourists (only) or “free driving for free tourists”?

What unites all these forms of speed tourism is that the discourse of speed limits and of (foreigners) driving at speed on the Autobahn has become a political issue in Germany. The case of Autobahns 5 and 81 in southwestern Germany near the German–Swiss border is perhaps the most well-known in terms of political debate about the need for regional speed limits. ¹⁶ Whereas critics of a general speed limit often use the 1970s slogan “Free driving for free citizens” (Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger), it seems that this should not apply automatically to tourists. Many stretches of the Autobahn near Germany’s borders with neighboring countries that did not have any speed limits in the past now have very strict ones. This includes virtually all the country’s borders. Moreover, the German traffic police specifically target speeders from certain countries, including Switzerland, a place known for its very strict speed limits on its motorways (120 km/h) and its system of severe driving penalties.

The popular German Autobahn A81 is a case in point here, as a speed limit was imposed on it in 2017. The federal state of Baden-Württemberg even launched a special Swiss-focused information campaign. Autobahn 81 branches off in the north at Autobahn 3 near the city of Würzburg and ends at the border to Switzerland in the southwest; it had long been a favorite destination for speed-hungry Swiss drivers. This apparently included illegal races. In November 2017, the German Green Party and Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) agreed that a speed limit should be introduced on an 18-kilometer stretch of this route. Originally, the ministry of transport had even argued that a 42-kilometer stretch should have a speed limit of 120 km/h—just like in Switzerland. This was accompanied by a high police presence and the installation of speed cameras. This initiative was not without civil society opposition. The commentary and letter to the editor columns in southern German and even Swiss dailies led to fierce exchanges, with many German commentators feeling they were being prevented from enjoying their well-earned pleasures of driving by a few “unteachable” Swiss tourists. ¹⁷ Opposition parties such as the Free Democratic Party (FDP) suggested harsher fines for speeding tourists instead of a general speed limit, which they labeled a “senseless sledgehammer” (sinnfreie Verbotskeule) which may turn out to be the harbinger of a general speed limit.

However, harsher fines for speeding tourists can also lead to overreactions. On 1 May 2019, some 100 sports cars (mainly from Norway) were observed “racing” at speeds of more than 200 km/h along Autobahn 20 in the far north of Germany. ¹⁸ The A20 is well-known for its long stretches with no speed limit and its relatively low volume of traffic. Since the drivers of these sports cars were not doing anything illegal, the police tried to prove that what they were engaged in was an illegal race. Actually, the 100 sports cars were part of “Eurorally,” an annual event organized by a Norwegian company “for car enthusiasts who like to travel by car to experience new destinations alongside other petrol heads,” as the company’s website states. ¹⁹ The 2019 Eurorally route went from Oslo to Prague. The police intervened after receiving phone calls from concerned citizens who claimed they had seen drivers racing against each other. However, the police were later unable to find any official witnesses to support the claim of an “illegal race.” The desperate attempt made to prove that a race had taken place, undertaken with the help of mobile control stations, helicopters and staff from the German Federal Police, was mocked in many German blogs and comments sections. Even the comments section in the liberal Berlin-based newspaper Der Tagespiegel was full of amused responses to the incident, for example, that the mere appearance of sport cars clearly makes people feel so threatened that they feel they need to call the police, and that the police probably had nothing better to do on that day. ²⁰

However, most of the comments made by Germans about foreign drivers speeding along the Autobahn—as in the case of the German–Swiss border—involve telling speed tourists to stay at home: the fear here is that bad driving by tourists could lead to fast driving acquiring an even worse reputation, with the danger that a general speed limit might be imposed on the Autobahn in the future. This fear needs to be understood against the background that recent debates about speed limits on German Autobahns initiated by the Green Party and the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Environmental Action Germany (DUH) are also occasionally supported by the argument that Germany is the only country in Europe without a general speed limit on its highway system and that this may lure visitors from other countries who want to drive fast but do so irresponsibly.

Discussion: authentic driving and new rules for the unruly

Given the above observations, it seems reasonable to assume that the “speed tourism” identified here can be considered a non-destination-based tourism comparable to safaris (cf. Hays, 2012) as well as—albeit to a much lesser extend—to road trips and speed trials in the early 20th century (cf. Pearce, 2016). As with safaris, the element of continuous movement on roads specifically designed for the purpose defines speed tourism as a unique travel experience. Unlike safaris, however, speed tourism does not imply stopping often to enjoy the scenery but rather traveling as smoothly and sometimes as fast as possible. Thus, it does not involve leaving the road at points other than the official off-ramps (slip roads), unlike in safaris where the uniqueness of the tourist experience often comes about by leaving the well-trodden paths of other travelers. The uniqueness of the Autobahn experience sought by tourists is different from this. On the Autobahn, tourists believe they can do things that are not permitted in their own home country. However, although the Autobahn may lack a fixed entry location (you can enter it in numerous places) and may at first sight even seem to be indistinguishable from other roads in appearance or character, it becomes a very real “dream location” once you enter it as a tourist with the aim of experiencing (allegedly) limitless driving. It is a “dream location” in several ways. Driving on the Autobahn seems to offer a perfect way of getting to know the real Germany with all its interesting paradoxes, especially the tension between strict rules (as a precondition for ultimate freedom) and the unruliness unleashed by this very freedom. While Germany seems overly regulated and obsessed with “green” behavior, there are small, much fought-over spaces that appear to offer certain kinds of freedom. It is these small spaces such as the Autobahn that alternative tourists are keen to get to know. Perhaps it is the paradox inherent in the “no speed limit” rule that epitomizes Germany for many tourists. After all, tourists on the Autobahn sometimes pride themselves on getting to know “real German culture” beyond the usual tourist hot spots. The Autobahn thus can be seen as a tourist attraction without any fixed location (given that it is a country-wide network) but one that also has restrictions, some of which are temporary (e.g. speed limits imposed when traffic is heavy) and which therefore bring in an element of unpredictability and surprise to this tourist experience.

Unlike consuming a certain drug (e.g. drinking alcohol, smoking dope) to which different restrictions apply than in the tourist’s home country, the Autobahn is not something to be consumed in the classical sense; instead, you consume it by driving on it in a way you are not able to in your home country. You would not normally take pictures of it because of its beauty (such as on hiking trails) but rather because of the thing done on it, that is, driving fast (thus the tachometer is a common image on videos and in photobooks). It thus also becomes a dream location in yet another sense. Whereas Augé’s notion of non-places refers to spaces of transience (in addition to mentioning modern highways, his examples are airports and modern shopping malls) that are not significant enough to be regarded as important “places,” I argue here that the Autobahn can also be understood as a space of transience for speed tourists, but that this is also the main reason why they are on it, that is, the tarmac as destination. Thus, as such spaces of transience Autobahns are not merely a means to an end such as shopping or simply moving from A to B. They are not non-places but rather dream locations where hypermobility can be experienced in more ways than one: the reason why tourists come to the Autobahn is to move along it as fast as possible; paradoxically, however, this means rapidly leaving behind the very place they wanted so dearly to be. The Autobahn as a “real” dream location for speed tourists engenders such a strong emotional bond because one can legally enter it, drive on it, and leave it faster than anywhere else in the world. Indeed, the designated acceleration lane upon entering the Autobahn not only has no general speed limit, it is also the only place where a driver is allowed to overtake on the right in order to merge into the Autobahn’s moving traffic.

This localized unruliness of being able to leave behind what you wanted to experience gives entering the space a particular thrill. For some speed tourists the Autobahn becomes a separate and adjacent dimension beside regular travel time and space. Much like the notion of hyperspace in science fiction, driving on the Autobahn requires from drivers a considerable amount of planning and of learning new rules, with any error carrying the risk of dire consequences. This, however, may also be the special (adrenaline) kick tourists hope for. The Autobahn can thus be understood as a location where tourists can mix with “natives” while simultaneously staying apart from them, as the interaction is restricted to observing others while obeying the country’s rules of the road—official ones as well as rules learned via Internet forums and blogs—and to watching and sometimes trying to keep up with the speed of the locals. The Autobahn then becomes not merely a time-bounded place based on the ideals of limitless driving and freedom but also one based on the experience of unruly driving in the sense of “authentic” driving, since it allows the driver to push their car to its capacity while following new rules that are often learned during the process.