In recent days I've found myself divesting myself of my dear car of many years and, finding the carless life unimaginable, quickly buying a new one to last me into the foreseeable future.

Even if light rail ever came my door (unlikely, given that I live in an unfashionable frost pocket in one of the government-neglected favelas of Woden) I'd still want my own horseless carriage.

My recent flurry of car-selling and car-buying (and the way in which at the moment the government and opposition are trading inanities about electric cars) has got me thinking about our cars and our sometimes complex relationships with them.

Parting with my old car has been a wrench. And if we become especially attached to our cars, especially cars we've beetled about in for many years, it may be because we come to be, literally, what we drive.

There is an unforgettable passage in Flann O'Brien's persuasive, darkly comic novel The Third Policeman in which we learn that there is a mature-age man in the Irish village who has become "half a bicycle". Michael Gilhaney, nearly 60 years of age, has spent 35 years going absolutely everywhere, including along rough and rocky tracks, on his bicycle.

And when you understand how everything is composed of tiny atoms, the local science-minded police sergeant explains to an underling, how those atoms are always "never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back, you can see how those who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them".

"You would be surprised," he continues, "at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles ... and you would be flabbergasted at the number of bicycles that are half human, almost half man, half partaking of humanity".

The sergeant saw these sorts of "interchanges going on everywhere" between all sorts of people and things. And so surely the same sorts of interchanges occur between drivers and the cars they have driven for ages, sometimes along juddering roads.

What's more, there's surely also an interchange of emotional atoms. Some of us treat our cars as our offices, as our sheds, as important private rooms.

Then, too, in my old car I listened to and was thrilled and moved by thousands of hours of grand, emotion-stoking classical music. My Holden Barina was in that sense my private concert hall.

And oh the harrowing things we may use our cars for! The guilt-ravaged adulterers chug to their trysting places each in his or her own separate Audis (university research shows that Audi owners are especially likely to be unfaithful to their partners). The grieving pet owner takes the beloved dying cat or dog to the vet then drives away, weeping, taking home the little corpse shrouded in its blanket.

Our cars may know us in our most intimate moments.

My Barina knows all my secrets, but can be trusted (for Holdens are famously trustworthy, unlike those kiss-and-tell Nissans, those back-stabbing Kias) not to whisper them to its new owner.

My sense that cars are somehow living things is endorsed by a new posting by Neuroskeptic, The Driver Is The Brain Of The Car, in the ever-stimulating online science magazine Discover.

"Suppose, if you will," he invites, "that alien scientists came down to Earth and began to study the local lifeforms.

But let's suppose that these aliens arrive by the side of a busy expressway [here Canberrans might like to imagine Hindmarsh Drive] and stay there. Our extraterrestrials might conclude that cars are the dominant inhabitants of Earth."

"[The aliens notice that] cars clearly exhibit intelligent behaviour, being able to navigate around obstacles and follow complex instructions on road signs. How, the aliens may wonder, do the cars manage this?

"After some experimentation, the aliens would eventually work out that it is a carbon-based organ inside the car - aka the driver - that is controlling the vehicle.

The driver is the one making the decisions, and the rest of the car is just following its commands. The proof of this is that if the aliens remove a car's driver, it stops moving. The aliens conclude [reasonably] that the human driver is the 'brain' of the car."

Neuroskeptic goes on to make some points (lost on me) about neuroanatomy.

But overall his piece leaves us with his poetic and strangely plausible idea (one that the policeman in The Third Policeman would surely endorse) that motor traffic along highways is a migration of purposeful, living, chrome creatures, not unlike the determined A to B migrations of wildebeest across tracts of Africa.

Your columnist offers this thought to you in the hope that it adds some poetry (putting you in touch at last with your inner wildebeest) to what till now has been the everyday drabness of your commuting.