Drive & Listen Review: The Hypnotic Virtual Road Trip That Sends You Around the World

An honest look at drivenlisten.com — the immersive website that pairs dashcam footage of global cities with live local radio, offering an armchair travel experience unlike anything else online

What Is Drive & Listen?

Drive & Listen is one of those rare websites that perfectly captures a feeling — the gentle, meditative pleasure of cruising through an unfamiliar city with a local radio station playing and no particular destination in mind. Created by Erkam Seker, a developer from Istanbul who was studying in Munich when pandemic travel shutdowns began in 2020, the site was originally born out of homesickness. Unable to go home, he created a way to virtually drive the streets of Istanbul — and then the world.

The concept is deceptively simple. You select a city, and the website plays a dashcam-perspective video of a real drive through that city’s streets, synchronized with a live-streaming local radio station. The camera angle sits at driver’s-eye level, giving you the exact perspective you’d have behind the wheel. You are, for all intents and purposes, on a road trip.

The Experience: What It Actually Feels Like

Opening Drive & Listen is the closest thing the internet has produced to genuine armchair travel. Selecting Tokyo drops you into rain-slicked streets with Japanese pop drifting through the speakers. Choosing Istanbul floods your screen with golden evening light on the Bosphorus while a Turkish radio host chatters cheerfully. New York at night, with jazz trickling in from a downtown station, is genuinely cinematic.

The site allows you to control playback speed — slow things down for a contemplative crawl or speed up for a more energetic city tour. You can also toggle between local radio, ambient street sounds only, or a combination of both. These small controls make a big difference in setting the mood for any given session.

The video quality across cities is crystal clear, the camera position is consistently well-placed, and the overall effect — motion, sound, real streetscapes — creates a remarkably convincing sense of presence. Losing an hour to a virtual drive through Oslo or São Paulo is not only possible; it’s practically guaranteed.

City Coverage

Drive & Listen has expanded dramatically from its origins, now featuring over 1,000 cities across every inhabited continent. Many major cities have multiple routes, giving repeat visitors fresh perspectives. Coverage spans from the expected (New York, Paris, London, Tokyo) to the genuinely surprising (Ulaanbaatar, Tbilisi, Havana, Kathmandu).

Who Is It For?

Drive & Listen has an unusually broad appeal. Travelers who miss a city they’ve visited — or long to visit — will find it a genuinely moving experience. Remote workers who need ambient focus without silence find the combination of moving scenery and low-key radio ideal for concentration. Insomniacs have reported that a slow virtual drive through a quiet city at night is more effective than white noise apps. Language learners can tune into radio stations in their target language while watching the culture play out on screen.

It has also found a following among the simply curious — people who never intended to spend three hours exploring the back roads of Latvia by dashcam but somehow ended up doing exactly that.

Pros & Cons

Verdict