When Henry Ford invented the model T, mass-produced cars flooded main streets that were originally intended for pedestrians and a few horse-drawn carriages.

So now you had hundreds of cars on the streets that couldn't accommodate

all of them. And people were killing each other in their cars, they were killing children who were playing in the streets, and so what local governments did right away was to enact a long list of traffic laws.

The traffic code became bigger and bigger and all of a sudden everybody became a misdemeanor offender

offender. Everybody broke traffic laws and was a huge problem. How do you get respectable citizens to obey traffic laws and they

realized they needed the police to enforce them?

Hey everybody, I'm Aaron Napaestack and this is the war on cars. For a hundred years, the

car's been sold to Americans as the ultimate freedom machine.

Yet no part of American life is more heavily policed than driving.

You know, we've all seen the shaky videos of terrible traffic stops where police pull

someone over for a broken taillight or a failure to signal. Then the next thing you know

bullets are flying and an unarmed person is dead inside the car. That

someone is usually a person of color and that police officer is almost never held accountable.

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the right of all

Americans to be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures by police.

And yet it often feels like this reasonable searches and seizures by police.

And yet it often feels like this guarantee

doesn't really exist when Americans are driving.

That voice you heard at the top is historian and legal scholar

Sarah Sayo. She's a professor at the University of

Iowa College of Law and she is the author of Policing the Open Road, how cars transformed

American freedom.

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