An irresistible picture of Nabokov in, bien entendu,  not the driver's but the passenger's seat of that Buick. Route 66, if I am not mistaken, but the picture could also have been taken outside Albany (to and from that fair field of Karner blues), or Jackson Hole (to or from the house of stingy James Laughlin), or Telluride, or any number of places, including West Wardsboro (Karpovich's dacha -- see  that emblematic couple in "Pnin"), or  Ithaca itself, places immortalized even if not named, in "Lolita" and in the list of lepping places found in VN's etymological works, such as  that light-green Genus Lycaeides Hubner MCZ publication.

... not the driver's but the passenger's seat ...

Oh, I see. I'd been wondering why ol' Vivalcomb was trying to drive a car with no steering wheel and looking the wrong way.  --Mary Jackson

Nabokov is sitting in the Danger Seat,  or the Siege Perilous, as another Russian, Eugene Vinaver, put it in his famous recension of Malory. (It was Vinaver who invited Nabokov to speak at the University of Manchester, at a time when Nabokov was hoping to leave Paris for England). Not for the faint-hearted, the siege perilous is located on the right in America, and left in England, the opposite of what students of politics in both countries would expect.