Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, symbolic struggles over the relationship between the neoliberal form of modernity and personal car ownership created complex discourses that brought together social and political theories, urban studies, geography and psychology. Starting from the mid-twentieth century, cars emerged as symbols of modernity, wealth, social segregation, Western ideals of mobility and freedom in the Middle East. Thus, personal car ownership became an important currency in determining class relations and the interactions between individuals in the public sphere. In Iran, the Pahlavi State’s vision of modernity that centralized authority around secular infrastructures invited Western firms to develop a significant automotive industry until the Islamic Revolution. Despite the fluctuations in the car production market between the 60s and 90s, Iran has re-developed its domestic car industry over the past few decades, becoming the fastest growing car industry in the region. In addition to the visible, physical impact that the car has had on road-making and urban design, the easy availability of automobiles re-shaped the experiences of space, distance and time, addressing more subjective responses to desires, emotions and consumer tendencies. Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, filmmakers who are commonly identified with the Iranian New Wave movement, experimented with the aesthetic possibilities of the moving car-space in their films Taste of Cherry (1997) and Taxi Tehran (2015) respectively. In Kiarostami’s minimalist fable of fate, the middle-aged main character Badii drives his private car around the outskirts of Tehran in order to find someone to bury his body after he commits suicide. Throughout the movie, Badii recruits several people for the job, all of whom share the car-space with him as passengers and talk about the religious injunctions against suicide in Islam. In Panahi’s recent Taxi Tehran, the director drives around the bustling city of Tehran in disguise as a taxi driver, engaging in political, intellectual and everyday conversations with his passengers. This paper will present a comparative analysis of the social satire in these internationally acclaimed movies to show how the interior space of the moving car transforms into a plot-generating device by segregating the modern individual from the social world. It will contrast the aestheticization of the car interior as a space to negotiate peculiar pathos about the modern human condition with the earlier symbolic perception of cars as fetishized objects of modernity.