Fear of Cars

Which fear each word actually names

The dictionaries are unusually tidy here. Wiktionary defines amaxophobia as a fear of being in or riding in a vehicle and lists motorphobia as one of its hyponyms, which makes the pair a genuine hierarchy rather than two spellings of one idea:

• amaxophobia, the wide term, covering any vehicle a person can be inside
• motorphobia, the narrow one, defined as a fear or dislike of automobiles or of riding in one
• vehophobia, defined separately as a fear of driving a vehicle

The third word divides the field differently again, by the seat rather than by the machine. A person can be afraid to drive and comfortable as a passenger, or the reverse, and only vehophobia says which. This catalogue files the driving version under amaxophobia, because that is the name the clinical literature on collision survivors uses, and the wordbooks' hierarchy and the clinic's usage do not match.

What the printed encyclopedia does with the word

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias defines motorphobia in three words, a fear of automobiles, and adds one clause worth having: the fear may also extend to other vehicles, such as buses. That clause is the encyclopedia quietly conceding the same point the dictionaries make, which is that the object will not stay still.

Its supporting reference is stranger than the entry. The work cited for motorphobia is The Teenager's Survival Guide to Moving, by Patricia Cooney Nida and Wendy M. Heller, published in New York in 1985. A phobia entry in a reference work on anxiety is resting on a book about how to cope with a family relocation.

That is not an isolated defect so much as a description of how this vocabulary was assembled. Words entered the lists from wherever they happened to be printed, and a term can carry the appearance of clinical standing while the citation underneath it points at a paperback for adolescents.

Where the waggon comes from

The etymology of the broad term is older than anything with an engine. Amaxophobia was formed in English from the Ancient Greek hámaxa, a waggon, joined to the usual suffix. The fear it names is therefore, literally, a fear of being carried on a cart.

Wiktionary adds a note that says a great deal about the phobia vocabulary in general. The etymologically consistent spelling would be hamaxophobia, with the initial aspirate the Greek word actually has, and that spelling is not attested outside word lists and dictionaries. The correct form exists only where words are collected, and the incorrect one is the one people use.

Vehophobia is built from a Latin root instead, veho, and sits beside the Greek pair without matching them, which is the same collision of languages that gave this catalogue aquaphobia next to hydrophobia.

Why motorphobia has studied nobody

The catalogue's neighbouring entries show what a well-documented traffic fear looks like. Fear of driving has real prevalence work behind it, because a large share of it follows a collision serious enough for hospital assessment, and reported rates run from a quarter to three quarters of those injured. Agyrophobia has a clinical observation attached to it: refusal to cross a street alone after an accident is read as caution when it is avoidance, and it disappears during assessment.

Motorphobia has neither. No case has been published under the name, no prevalence has been measured, and no diagnostic manual carries it. The fear it describes is presumably common, because cars are dangerous and everybody knows it, but the term has never been used to study anybody.

What remains is the ordinary position for a word in this catalogue. A fear of cars is filed as a specific phobia if it reaches a clinic at all, alongside the fear of trains and the rest of the transport fears, and the three Greek and Latin names for it work as index entries rather than as diagnoses.