P. J. O’Rourke is not really mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but he’s working on it. You can tell from the title of the first chapter in his car-nut memoir: “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.”

Alas, tempest fidgets, as the Romans used to say — sort of — and we come upon another, very different chapter. In this one, “the drugs are mostly Lipitor,” the wing-wang is not so cooperative as it used to be, and spilling drinks is no problem if he uses the sippy cups left over from the kids’ toddler days. Once he became a solid family man he began buying solid family vehicles like a Dodge Grand Caravan and a Jeep Cherokee, but he calls them “brat buggies” because his heart is buried at Rent-a-Wreck with the cars he loved in his heyday: real American cars, “cheap to make, simple to fix, and easy to hot-rod.”

His grandfather had the Buick dealership in Toledo and the whole family worked there, so cars are in his blood just as surely as gasoline was in his stomach when he fixed a vapor lock by unhooking the fuel line and sucking gas through it. He also perfected his “bootlegger’s turn” — hit 70, shift to neutral, cut the wheels to the left, then slam on the brakes. “This can be done on dry pavement,” he advises, “but it works best on loose gravel and schoolchildren.”

In 1977, Car and Driver commissioned him to take a 1956 Buick from Florida to Los Angeles and write up the trip. He got there in eleven days with a breakdown per day. Besides the vapor lock, the engine overheated and he had to get out and pour water over the radiator every few miles; the dash lights refused to work unless the driver’s door was opened, so he had to open it while driving to read the temperature gauge to see if the engine was overheating again; in Santa Fe all four wheels came unaligned and splayed in four different directions; and, finally, the reverse gear gave out just as he got to Los Angeles. It was so far gone that the car couldn’t even be pushed backwards in neutral, so he had to maneuver through heavy traffic without being able to back up. (He goes himself one better in this department with the story of a Fiat that jammed in reverse gear and had to be driven backwards to the garage.)

Nothing delights him more than traveling to the ends of the earth, provided they are accessible by car. He waxes ecstatic about off-roading in places like Baja California, where it’s hard to tell the off-roads from the roads. Give him a four-wheel home where 1,400-pound moose roam across the highway, like New Brunswick, and he’s ready to roll, maybe over and over. Better yet, put him behind the wheel in one of those places routinely described as “teeming,” like India, land of what he calls “ReinCARnation,” and watch him drive the “Grand Trunk,” where laden elephants, oxcarts, and pack camels amble along and sacred cows graze on what is laughably called a thruway. It would be sheer joy to report that P.J. hit a sacred cow, but he did not, though the car in front of him did and nobody seemed to mind.

In addition to the drive-a-logues, he offers practical advice on the intimate side of car nuttery. Your true car nut has only one pick-up line: “Wanna go to Mexico?” Furthermore, a young man should date only girls who will have sex in the front seat. The ones who insist on getting in the back are the nice girls who expect marriage. This I can verify. Expressing doubt about the number of lovers a lady has had is verboten because a lady never loses count. So, too, is expecting her to remain in the front seat, because a lady always gets in the back. If any man questions this, she will rap him on the knuckles with her fan.

P.J. is hilarious on the bureaucracy of driving, as when he describes the written portion of New York’s driver’s-license exam, which contains such questions as “What is the purpose of the steering wheel?” This, he says, tells us all we need to know about New York driving. He much prefers the driving and the drivers at the NASCAR races in Charlotte, N.C., where he found himself drawn to the South and Southerners and experienced an inchoate sensation of happiness that he analyzes in the book’s most moving passage:

What was the difference between the South and the rest of America? . . . There wasn’t any. The South is the rest of America . . . what we’ve had all along in this bizarre, slightly troubling, basically wonderful country — fun, danger, real friendliness, energy, enthusiasm, and brave, crazy, tough people. . . . Put us all together and we’re the biggest, baddest, best sons of bitches anywhere. . . . Nobody’s eating roughage, running marathons, and taking yoga classes down there. People still drink, still smoke, still have guns, and still believe in a personal God who listens to them. They’re not worried about the future. This country didn’t come from people who worried about the future. It came from people who whipped the future’s ass.

Funny this book may be, but it is first and foremost an angry book. “I take the demise of the American car personally,” the author admits. “I’m looking around furiously for someone or something to blame. Ralph Nader for instance. What fun it would be to jump on him with both feet and send the pink Marxist goo squirting out of his cracked egghead. And let’s definitely do that even though Ralph is seventy-five and insane.”

But Nader alone doesn’t satisfy, because there are legions of Naders now. O’Rourke calls them “Fun-Suckers,” the neo-prohibitionists and nanny-staters who “achieve power without merit” by going around “saying how unsafe this fun thing is and how unhealthy that fun thing is and how unfair, unjust, uncaring, insensitive, divisive, contagious, and fattening every other thing that’s fun is.” Fun-Suckers have always been with us, he says, but until the 18th century they were held in check by ruling classes composed of powerful aristocrats for whom having fun was the whole point of life, from gorged Romans trundling to the vomitorium to medieval nobles lustily claiming their droit du seigneur. But then came democracy, and raising hell for the hell of it fell upon hard times. Democracy gave the Fun-Suckers freedom, equality, and a platform — just what they needed to run for office and make everybody miserable.

The car was bound to be an irresistible target because it figures in so many of the problems that Fun-Suckers dream of solving, not the least of which is the American love of independence. To turn us into passive zombies they can control, they pass laws decreeing that babies must be “strapped, belted, buckled, and bound into lonely, isolated rear-facing infant carriers where they grew up without normal social contact or human interaction, causing them to become the passive teen video-gaming thumb-twiddlers and pasty Facebookers. . . . These pallid adolescents are easy prey to the brandishers of Nerf hope and the loose change makers who are sucking fun in the Obama administration.”

Another weapon of the Fun-Suckers is making fun-lovers feel self-conscious about looking ridiculous. Kids must now wear “bike helmets, knee and elbow pads, shin guards, safety goggles, and steel-toed boots to use the teeter-totter at the playground, after which they have to wipe themselves all over with Purell hand disinfectant.” (P.J. doesn’t say, but this scaredy-cat sissification might explain the “playground bullying” that Fun-Suckers are so eager to stamp out.)

He believes that the current crop of Fun-Suckers wants to nationalize the auto companies and foresees the 2010 Obamamobile as lightweight, with a small footprint, and able to run entirely on alternative energy: “When I was a kid we called it a Schwinn.” As for styling, it will be done by the same people who brought us the Vietnam Memorial. “Your new Impala will be a simple slab with the names of everyone ever killed in a traffic accident engraved on it.”

This man really does love cars, so some readers will be lost when he lapses into good-ol’-boy mode, e.g., “a hydraulic-fluid-filled device with variable pitch blades that delivered power from the 322-cubic-inch V-8 . . .” I have no idea what that means, but I can see Russia from my house.

His prose occasionally goes over the top, as in his description of the pink goo oozing from Ralph Nader’s crushed skull, but he atones for it with this: “The American automobile industry . . . will live on in some form, a Marley’s ghost dragging its corporate chains at taxpayer expense.” I forget whether that’s called a simile or a metaphor, but an English sentence never had a better tune-up. P. J. O’Rourke might be mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but he can write like an angel.