My point about the glove box was regrettably unclear; it's not about "access to my stuff" so much as it's about "insulation from other people's stuff." In a shared car, the dirty Kleenex you find under the seat will be someone else's dirty Kleenex, not yours or your spouse's or your child's.

I'm not standing up for cars here. I'm not a motoring enthusiast. I simply think that the reason cars have been adopted so widely is because of the way their particulars fit together with human psychology, specifically with issues of control and self-esteem.