This chapter opens with a reflection on theories of modernity and their relevance for understanding multiple automobile modernities (3.1). The readings in this part focus on three texts, one novel, one web series and one film: Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home (2017), David Batty’s Black As (2016) and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). All chapters interrogate specific instances of automobile modernities that counter ideas of progress and development often associated with automobile modernity. The analysis of Carey’s historical road novel highlights the involvement of Indigenous people in automobile modernity (3.2). My reading of Black As explores the aesthetic potential of the road narrative to stage slowness, friction and repair as an alternative to the dominant narrative of speed and freedom on the open road (3.3). This chapter closes with a reading of Miller’s film which underscores the metaphorical implications of the car as a cocoon: fragility, permeability and transformation (3.4). Overall, this chapter highlights automobile modernity’s complexities and ambivalences and hones in on the potential of road narratives to reimagine what it means to be modern.