cmkeller, you’re right, I overstated my case. Let’s just say that it would take a lot longer to get different states in the USA than it would take me to get different cantons in Switzerland. I realize that road trips in the USA are usually a lot longer. I also re-read your post more carefully and I see that your bingo card didn’t contain all the states in the USA, so that makes it more playable. (And I bet you anything it works a lot better on the east coast (of the USA) than it does on the west coast.) If someone had a list of all 50 states and said “game is over when all 50 squares have been checked off”, then the game would never end.
“This is the game that never ends…it goes on and on, my friend…”
Depends what you like. I have two kids, so we’ve listened to Harry Potter and other good kids’ books.
“Prairie Home Companion” compilations work pretty well, because they were made for radio, after all.
I get histories and biographies for my commute, but I bet that wouldn’t go over real well.
Obviously stay away from self-help mumbo-jumbo that tends to litter the audio-book landscape.
We played it where the hard letters (Q, X, Z) could be found on license plates.
In the version of [*B]slug bug *** that I was taught (by a couple of 9-year old girls), you have to say the color:
“SLUG BUG YELLOW!!!”
Then, you get to hit the other contestants.
I take it a step further to ensure I never get hit. If someone called it, I would follow up with more detailing: “Slug bug, yellow, moon roof, tinted windows, broken tail light. I WIN!!!” Be emphatic with the last part so your travel buddies know there’s no way to argue your victory. It really irritates my 10-yr-old brother when I do that. 
Road games: the acronym game. Pick a word/brand/arrangement of letters that you see (we usually pull them from semi’s) and decide what those letters stand for. The stupider the funnier, and don’t overthink it. (I have no examples because now I’m overthinking it.)
We also play “three trailer”: watch for trucks hauling three trailers. It’s just like slug bug - “Three trailer Fed-Ex! I win!” Bonus points if it’s UPS (just because they were the company we created the game with on a road-trip to Portland - seeing one now warms my heart with memories).
Pseudo-random tangent: When you guys were kids, did you ever do that thing where you stared out the window at rows & rows crops, watching for that one moment when they’re exactly perpendicular to the road & you could see all the way down the crop alley-thing for a nano-second until the next one took it’s place?
Man, I hope that made sense. I’m a little too groggy this morning to explain it any better. Just curious—
…“rows & rows OF crops”…
sheesh
I just had to comment that this is actually in California, but most of us locals associate it with the drive to/from Vegas, so thinking it was in Nevada isn’t surprising. It’s actually fairly close to the Nevada border.
Unfortunately, I have nothing useful to contribute to the topic itself. 
I do that every time I drive past a field. It’s ineffably cool.
Twenty questions can be especially fun if you leave off the obvious (no “John Travolta”) and go for the weirdest thing you can come up with that people have still heard of. I once kept folks guessing for a long time with “The air in the holes in Swiss cheese.” Emotions, temperatures, substances, and the like are all fair game. If you play this way, you may need to be very generous on your yes-no answers, sometimes giving some elaboration.
Another game: take the letters at the beginning of a license plate and make them into a word. VTX becomes Vortex. AJB becomes Adjustable. That sort of thing. I’m not sure how tot turn this into a group game, but it’s something I do to amuse myself on long trips.
Daniel
You have no idea how happy that made me.
We play this one, except when you use a name that has both first and last names starting with the same letter, it bounces back to the person who gave the letter to you. So from Jayrot’s example, the name Barry Bonds would send it back to the person who said Craig Biggio, and it would keep going backwards until someone else used a double name.
I like crambo, which is similar to I-Spy. You think of a word, and then say another word that rhymes with it. Then the other players have to guess your word, but they can’t say the word directly, they have to describe it. When someone guesses, it’s their turn to choose a word.
So you might get a round like:
The word rhymes with dress
Is it another word for newspapers?
No, it isn’t the press
Is it what you write on letters?
Yes it is an address
I like it because the guessers have to do more than just say what they think the word is.
The way we play, Barry Bonds would make the rotation go the other way, since the first & last names start with the same letter.
Another game is the Three Things. This is really only interesting if everyone playing knows a lot of the same people. You give one of the players the names of three people, and they have to decide which one they would have sex with and never see again, which one they would live with forever but never have sex with, and which one they’d toss off a cliff.
Birdmonster, I also do the crop row thing. In fact, I have to make an effort not to do while I am the one driving the vehicle.
Not really a game, but more like a structured conversation that we do on long road trips involves money. You start with a small sum, say $5, and everyone has to answer the question “If you were given $5 right now, what would you buy?” At the little amount, the answers are pretty routine. You increase the amounts to $50, $100, $500, $1000 and so on.
The rules are that the things have to be things that exist, so you can’t buy a time machine, and they have to be for sale, so you can’t buy the Mona Lisa, as presumably it isn’t on the market.
I know this sounds a little dry, but as the numbers get higher, we have a lot of fun figuring out how to spend our money. You have to spend all of it, so if you “buy” something that costs $21,000, you have to figure out what else you could get for $4000. We’ve gotten into very heated debates about how much you would have to pay for, say, a giraffe, plus how much it would cost for the permits, and then how much it would cost for upkeep and property where you would be allowed to keep your giraffe legally.
I can’t believe I’m actually admitting I even played this game, but hey, you asked.
“Poochie, Poochie.”
You spot a dog on the trip, you call “Poochie, Poochie.” This goes on until you pass a cemetary. First one to spot it calls, “Bury Your Poochies!”
The caller gets a 3-Poochie bonus. Tally up how many poohies you’ve called. Best score is the winner.
Apparently in addition to license plate bingo, you can also play license plate poker, with a couple modifications (no suits obviously). Never tried it, but there’s a famous episode of an old radio show where the plot turns on just such a game.
I wouldn’t be too surprised to see Hawaii license plates in many parts of the country; I see them in my Pennsylvania town fairly regularly – it’s because of the Army base here. People get transferred here from Hawaii all the time and drive around with their old plates.
We play the license plate game, although rather than bingo we try to collect all 50 states.
Our more violent games, with the violence increasing depending upon who you’re playing with:
Cruiser Bruiser involves finding PT Cruisers, with the convertible worth 2.
PunchBug ,with varying values based upon the rarity of the VW vehicle:
New Bug: 1
New Bug Convertible: 2
Old School Bug: 3
Old School Bug Convertible: 4
Punchbus: 5
Old School Wagon: 6
Karmann Ghia: 7
The “Thing”, aka “The Holy Grail”: 8
There’s also Pididdle and Pidink (headlights and taillights), with the exceptionally rare Pidinkle being worth 3 shots. Last but not least, there’s Beaverwood, which involves finding a car with the old fake wood paneling, each of which is worth one pop a piece.
My sister and I end up black and blue after long drives, let me tell you. When Aaron gets bigger I’m going to get crushed, I just know it.
We tend to rotate through several guessing-style games:
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N-Questions where we go for anything (doesn’t have to be a material thing, could be a concept or something imaginary or something as bizarre as a book title) and don’t count the questions, just keep going until one of us gives up or guesses whatever it is.
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Initials. One says “I’m thinking of an Initial-Initial” (example: EP) The other(s) respond by saying something like "Did you have a hit song named “Hound Dog”? Then the one with the initials either says, “No, I’m not Elvis Presley” or “Yes, I’m Elvis Presley” or “I don’t know.” In the third case the person guessing gets to ask one specific yes-no question about the person. You keep going until the person is guessed or everybody gives up.
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Props. Somebody will name an outstanding prop or setpiece from a movie and the other(s) tries to guess the movie in as few “props” as possible. Example “shower curtain” should bring Psycho pretty soon or else lead to other props like “stuffed bird” or “wad of money in a purse” or whatever.
I do this when I’m just driving by myself.
I’ve found that a good way to make it a game is to say “whoever comes up with the longest word” or “gets a word the quickest” or, and this invites plenty of debate, “the strangest word.”
So for longest word, if you have PLE, one person may say “apPLE.” Somebody else has to beat the length. “PLiablE.” Longer. “PaLEstine.” Longer. “PLEistocene!” Then the fingers come out. “PaLEolithic…damn, it’s [counting on fingers and one toe] eleven letters, just like pleistocene…”