11 best podcasts for road trips: long stories for long drives

The problem with a long drive is never the first hour. It is hour four, when the playlist has looped, the passenger has gone quiet, and there is still most of a tank to burn. What you want then is a story that has not finished yet.

Every show below runs long on purpose. Several of them build one subject across four, five or six episodes, which is most of a day behind the wheel. Eleven podcasts, all of them still publishing this month.

Last Podcast On The Left

Three friends, an alarming amount of research, and the grimmest material in podcasting handled with jokes.

Marcus Parks, Henry Zebrowski and Ed Larson have been doing this since March 2011, and the split between the three of them is the trick. Marcus does the reading, and he does a frightening amount of it. Henry does the voices, the conspiracy theories and most of the noise. Ed, who was Henry’s college roommate, is the one keeping the other two roughly on the road.

The heavy hitters are multi part and they are long. Their series on the My Lai massacre ran across four Fridays in August 2026, with the last two parts at close to two hours each, and it is not played for laughs at all: Charlie Company, Lieutenant William Calley, the helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson landing between the soldiers and the villagers, Seymour Hersh breaking the story, the cover up that followed. That is one subject and most of a day’s driving. Their Jonestown and Manson runs work the same way.

The rest of the week fills in around it. Side Stories, on Wednesdays, is Henry and Ed going through whatever has surfaced lately, which in September 2026 meant the return of the Burbank butt sniffer and a Wheel of Fortune announcer scandal. Last Update on the Left, on Tuesdays, brings in people who actually worked the material: Jeff Guinn, who wrote The Road to Jonestown, came back in September to go over Jim Jones again, and former LAPD detective Greg Kading, who ran the task force on the Tupac and Biggie murders, has been on to explain what his investigation actually found.

So a normal week is around four hours, and there are more than a thousand items in the feed behind it. Cults, demonology, Bigfoot hunters, chaos magic, serial killers, war crimes: if it is dark and strange they have almost certainly covered it. They tour the Side Stories show as well, so there is a decent chance the road trip could end at one.

Maybe you shouldn’t play it during a family trip, though.

Casefile True Crime

One case, told straight through, by a narrator who has never told anyone his name.

If Last Podcast on the Left is the version with jokes, Casefile is the version with none at all. The Australian host started it in 2016 while he was housebound recovering from surgery, and he has stayed anonymous ever since. The show says that is deliberate, so the attention stays on the victims and the survivors rather than on the man reading. Listeners settled on calling him Casey because he never gave them anything else to go on.

Each case is researched and written by a named team, Milly Raso, Erin Munro and Eileen Ormsby among them, and the running times reflect the work. Case 344, on the anthrax letters that followed September 11, is just under two hours. Case 345, on the four young men killed in Barking in east London, runs an hour and a half. There is no recap, no chat, no cold open. The story starts at the beginning and keeps going.

That is what makes it the right thing for the dark stretch of a drive, the part after sunset when nobody in the car is talking anyway. Cases come from Australia, Britain, the United States, Japan and well beyond, so you are rarely being told something you already half know. Mike Migas, who has produced and scored the show since it began, keeps the music underneath and the silences long, which is exactly what you want when the only other sound is the road.

SmartLess

A trio of friends brings you laughs and top conversations with a mystery celebrity guest.

Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett have one rule, and everything else follows from it: whoever booked the guest does not tell the other two who it is. The reveal happens on tape. So the first few minutes of every episode are three old friends reacting to a surprise, which is a small thing that carries the whole show, because nobody is working through a press release.

The guest list is why it holds up over distance. Inside a few weeks in 2026 they had Sandra Bullock, Tim Robbins, Andrew Garfield, Sharon Horgan and the physicist Brian Cox, so one week is a film star talking about work and the next is somebody explaining the universe from the passenger seat. Episodes run about an hour, one a week, and SiriusXM subscribers get them early and without ads. It stays easy company: funny most of the time, and occasionally, without warning, not funny at all.

Ready for your SmartLess road trip adventure? We’ve curated the ultimate Smartless episode guide.

Armchair Expert

The messiness of being human with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman.

Dax Shepard talks to people for two hours and never pretends he is above the conversation. He will bring up his own sobriety, his own worst decisions, whatever the guest has just admitted to, and that is usually the moment an interview stops being an interview. Monica Padman is the counterweight. She comes back afterwards to correct him, on tape, in the fact check, and she is the reason the show never turns into one man’s monologue.

The length is the point here. A single stretch of 2026 took in Lizzo for two and a half hours, Gal Gadot and Dave Franco for two each, and the law professor Ray Madoff on how the very wealthy avoid tax. Then on Fridays there is Armchair Anonymous, where listeners phone in on one theme, bad teachers, summer flings, and the whole thing lands under an hour. Long haul and short hop in the same feed, which is genuinely useful when you do not know how long the next leg is.

The show moved from Spotify to Amazon’s Wondery in 2024 and took its back catalog with it, so more than a thousand episodes are sitting there in order. It is more than any single road trip needs, and that is the right problem to have.

Craving more Armchair Expert for your journey? Discover our curated list of Armchair Expert episodes that promise to be the best companions for your road trip adventures.

We’re Alive

This intense audio drama mixes survival stories and a zombie apocalypse to deliver a unique show about resilience.

We’re Alive is a full cast audio drama rather than a podcast with a story in it, and the difference is obvious inside the first minute. Kc Wayland writes and directs it, and it is scored and mixed like a film, so a helicopter behind you in the mix genuinely sounds like a helicopter behind you.
The original run, A Story of Survival, is 48 chapters. A group of survivors fortify a building in Los Angeles they come to call the Tower, and work out fairly quickly that the infected are not the worst thing outside it.
After that it branches. Lockdown traps inmates and guards together in a jail as the world ends around them. Goldrush jumps seventeen years past the main story. The current series, Scout’s Honor, reached its eighth chapter in August 2026, so you can still catch up and then wait with everybody else.
Chapters run from about twenty minutes to an hour, there are more than 240 items in the feed, and they are numbered, which matters more than it sounds when you are driving. You start at chapter one and you never have to touch the phone again.

WA is the best audio drama show to ever hit the airwaves. Everything from the writing all the way down to the sound of a squeaky chair is just perfection. Each of the series brings you characters you love and/or hate. I’ve listened to the show a couple times through and each time I learn something new. 

Listener review

Behind the Bastards 

A fun and fascinating look at the lives of history’s most infamous characters.

Robert Evans wrote for Cracked for years and then spent years reporting from real war zones. Behind the Bastards is what you get when those two jobs are combined in one person.

Every subject gets two episodes, one on Tuesday and one on Thursday, around seventy minutes each, with a guest comedian who has been given no warning at all about what is coming.

In 2026 that has meant Francis Galton, the Victorian who invented eugenics and the correlation coefficient in roughly the same decade; Percy Fawcett, the explorer who walked into the Amazon and never came out; and a two parter on the websites that hosted an international rape network, which is as bad as it sounds and is reported properly.

Sophie Lichterman produces, and she and the guest are the release valve. The jokes are not there to make the material lighter than it is. They are there so you can keep listening to it.

Which is the argument for it on a drive. Two parts back to back is nearly two and a half hours, and it will still be the thing you are arguing about the next time you stop for fuel.

Well researched, darkly humorous stories about terrible people past and present. Some are well known and some you may not have heard of, all will have you questioning how people can be so evil.

Listener review

American History Tellers

Learn everything about the key moments in American history and how they shaped the world we live in today.

American History Tellers is built in seasons rather than episodes, which is the single most useful thing about it in a car. Lindsay Graham, who is not the senator and says so in the show’s own description, narrates one subject across five or six parts of about forty minutes each. One season is an afternoon of driving with no decisions to make.

The range is wide: the Cold War, Prohibition, the Gold Rush, the Space Race, and in the summer of 2026 a run called Frontier Legends that gave an episode each to Wild Bill Hickok, Bass Reeves, Butch Cassidy, Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill Cody, and spent as much time on what the myth did as on what the person did.

It is a Wondery production and it sounds like one. Scripted, scored, with voice actors reading letters and testimony, so the car is listening to something made rather than something recorded. That matters if one of your passengers has had enough of two men talking. More than 250 episodes are up, which means finding a season you like is the beginning rather than the end.

What I love most about this podcast is Graham’s ability to add eyewitness perspectives to historical events. How did it feel to BE there in these moments, to live through these times? I also appreciate that he takes events that might have been just a sentence or two in my history textbook and expands on them. I was a history nerd before I started listening to Graham, and I’ve already discovered so much about America’s past that I didn’t know.

Listener review

The Rest Is History

Two historians who take four or five episodes to finish a story, which is most of a day’s driving.

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook do not do a topic a week. They do a series. The Roman civil war between Marius and Sulla took them four episodes over ten days in the late summer of 2026. Elizabeth I against the Catholics took six. The Troubles in Northern Ireland took four. Queue one of those up before you pull away and you have five to seven hours of a single story, told in order, by two people who have obviously read everything.

Holland is a classicist who translated Herodotus for Penguin and wrote Pax, on Rome at the top of its arc. Sandbrook writes about Britain since the 1950s and also writes history for children, the Adventures in Time books. Between them they cover about three thousand years, and they disagree about most of it. Dominic will call something overrated, Tom will defend it, and neither of them is performing the argument.

It is a British show, made by Goalhanger, and that is part of why it travels so well. The reference points are not the ones an American history podcast reaches for, so even a familiar subject arrives from an angle. The British Academy gave it the President’s Medal in 2023, the first time that had gone to a podcast, and Apple named it Global Show of the Year in 2025. None of which matters much at hour three of a drive. What matters is that there are more than seven hundred episodes behind you and the current series is not finished.

The Dollop

Laugh and learn with this podcast, sharing bizarre American history stories in a fun, hilarious way.

The setup has not changed in more than 750 episodes. Dave Anthony picks a story out of American history, and Gareth Reynolds, who has been told nothing about it, hears it for the first time with a microphone in front of him.
Gareth is effectively the listener’s seat in the car. He asks the question you were about to ask, guesses wrong, and gets steadily more appalled as Dave keeps going. That is the entire engine, and it only works because Dave genuinely does the reading.
Recent runs show the range. A three part series on the Zoot Suit Riots in the summer of 2026, a live episode on Mary Dyer, and a crossover with Revisionist History about Staten Island during the Revolutionary War. There is a second strand in the same feed too, The Past Times, which brings a guest comedian in each week.
Episodes run around seventy minutes and there are hundreds of them, produced under All Things Comedy. For a drive it is close to ideal. You laugh, you find out something genuinely unpleasant about American history, and nobody has to look at anything.

This is a great show for that “hahahahaha oof” feeling. And a great place to learn a bunch of facts that you’ll have to pretend you read in a book when you argue with your family abt American history.

Listener review

Normal Gossip

A fun twist on everyday life, funny, relatable, and full of stories that turn the ordinary into something worth talking about.

Normal Gossip has one format and it is close to perfect. A stranger sends in a piece of gossip about people you will never meet. The host tells it to a guest who knows nothing about it, slowly, and the guest reacts. No celebrities, no stakes, nothing to look up afterwards. A recent one was about a director, a dramaturg and a disco production of Les Misérables.

Kelsey McKinney created it with Alex Sujong Laughlin and hosted it through its first run, then handed it on at the end of 2024. Rachelle Hampton presents it now, with Se’era Spragley Ricks and Jae Towle Vieira producing, and it is still made by Defector, the writer owned outlet its staff founded after they walked out of Deadspin. Season ten started in July 2026, so there is a natural place to start.

For a road trip it does the one thing nothing else on this list does. It is low stakes. Episodes run about fifty minutes, there is no arc to keep hold of, nobody dies, and you can start on any episode in the feed. When everyone in the car has had enough of serial killers, this is what you put on next.

The hook of this show is juicy gossip, but what makes it work is Kelsey’s brilliant storytelling. The stories are rich in detail and funny turns and the podcast does an excellent job of not flattening the characters out into archetypes or reducing the stories to narrative cliches. It keeps everything hilariously unpredictable, and feels more true to the shining messiness of life. 

Listener review

Darknet Diaries

Hackers, privacy, and cybercrime in a podcast that makes digital security thrilling and easy to follow.

Jack Rhysider put out the first episode in October 2017 and the formula has barely moved since. One story per episode, usually told by the person it happened to, with Rhysider narrating the parts they cannot.
He came to this from inside a security operations centre at a Fortune 500 company rather than from journalism, and it shows in which questions he asks and which ones he does not bother with. The episodes are slow, carefully built and heavily sourced, which is why there are only about 180 of them in nine years. One or two a month, and worth the wait.
The recent run gives you the shape of it. Episode 178 is Nickolas Sharp, a Ubiquiti engineer who decided to teach his own employer a lesson about its security and ended up in court. Episode 176 is a man served with a National Security Letter by the FBI who set out to change the law instead of quietly complying. Episode 174 is six years of Sophos fighting a state backed group that kept coming for its firewalls.
There is also a new five part limited series called LOW, and the whole back catalog exists in Spanish, which is worth knowing if the car is not all English speakers.

Jack hosts and guides the stories of this show with exquisite precision and candor. Good interviews are not all equal. Some people simply lack the curiosity and or skill needed to really get honest chronicles and open conversations. Not Jack. So I applaud the team that makes the show for creating an environment and a series that does it right. We get to share in the glory of having truths and prickly, dark, difficult questions and topics explored and laid out in the light. This kind of journalism, if one can call it that, is precisely what the world needs more of.

Listener review

Three to start with, all from the early archive:

• Episode 17 – “Finn”: A bored fourteen year old hacks a Twitter account in class and gets very much more than he bargained for.
• Episode 32 – “The Carder”: The Secret Service hunt for Roman Seleznev, who was stealing credit card numbers at industrial scale.
• Episode 27 – “Chartbreakers”: Rhysider notices the Apple podcast charts do not look right, and works out who is gaming them and from where.

That is eleven shows, and between them they cover most of the moods a car goes through: the first hour when everybody is still talking, the middle stretch when nobody is, and the last leg in the dark when you need something to hold on to. One piece of practical advice. Pick a series rather than an episode, download it before you leave, and you will not care what the reception is doing halfway across a mountain. Safe travels and happy listening.

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