Driving a car involves considering it at different spatio-temp\-oral scales, and somehow leads to behavior such as the parallel parking maneuver, the three-point turn, free Euclidean driving in a desert, following a road, and translationally passing other vehicles at high speed. In the study of autonomous systems, it is desirable to find a representation in which such different behaviors of a single system can be related to each other, and to find precisely how and under what conditions a change of representation and corresponding choice of motions occurs. In this paper, we formulate an abstraction mechanism based on approximations of flows of commutators of vector fields. %(the paper also contains an explanation of these relatively unknown notions). We apply it to the goal-directed motion of a car and show how the environmental constraints induce, through this abstraction mechanism, a recognizable hierarchy of descriptions of the car's motion.