Drive around a foreign city with a local radio station playing without leaving your couch.
Have you ever wondered what it feels like to drive through a city you’ve never visited? Not the postcard version or the curated highlight reel, but the real, unhurried experience of cruising down an ordinary street accompanied by local radio? It turns out you can do exactly that from your living room. A simple website called DriveAndListen.app pairs dashcam footage from cities around the world with live local radio, and the combination is genuinely transporting.
The premise is straightforward. You pick a city, the dashcam footage starts rolling, and a local radio station begins playing through your speakers. That’s it: no narration, no edited “best of” sequences, no influencer pointing at landmarks. You just watch the road unfold while listening to whatever locals are listening to right now.
What surprised me most was how different each drive feels. In Delhi, I was swept into choreographed chaos, horns layering over Bollywood pop. Izmir was a complete shift in mood, with sunlight bouncing off the Aegean and Turkish pop drifting through the speakers as the road curved along the waterfront. Pulling up Havana treated me to a ride in a vintage car: I watched the peeling-pastel facades of the old city slide by, set to the tunes of a salsa station.
Note: you’re not locked into anything. If the radio station isn’t doing it for you, you can flip to another one, exactly like you can in a real car. Some cities have a dozen or more choices, ranging from news talk to traditional music to whatever the local Top 40 happens to be. The city list is genuinely global, too: Tokyo, Lagos, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Stockholm, Saigon, Mexico City, and dozens more.
Travel content online tends to lean hard into spectacle, with drone shots and hyped-up narration. DriveAndListen does the opposite. You notice the laundry on balconies, the shape of street signs, the body language of people waiting at crosswalks. It’s also a surprisingly practical tool for trip planning, telling you more about a neighborhood than any guidebook can. Pour a coffee, pick a city, and go for a drive!
Twist’s Take: This app lets you (virtually) drive around a foreign city accompanied by a local radio station.