By discovering unconscious ritualistic actions in everyday driving such as preparing for the morning commute, we seek design opportunities to help people achieve critical emotional transitions such as moving from an anxious state to relief. We have gathered and analysed data from workshops and phone interviews from a variety of vehicle and public transport users to capture these key ritualistic scenarios and map their emotional transitions. Design ideation is used to generate concepts for improving the in-vehicle user experience through redesign of vehicle layout, environment and analogue and digital interfaces. We report a set of human-centred design approaches that allow us to study the details of action, objects, people, emotions and meaning for typical car users which are indispensable for designing driving experiences and are often overlooked by the car design process.