A Vehicle Reframed?: Culture, Materiality and Making of Meaning on the Road Towards Electric Automobility

Abstract

In light of progressively worrying signs of climate devastation, increased attention has been directed towards solving the environmental challenges posed by privatised individual mobility. Over the past 20 years, not only have electric vehicles (EVs) appeared as a potentially viable solution to this particular mobility challenge, but Norway has also emerged as a central player in this purported mobility transition. It is within this context that the domestication of EVs is analysed, from a user perspective.

To this end, a perspective on electric automobility is presented. As an assemblage of new EV technology and the established system of automobility, electric automobility finds itself between the novelty of new technologies, users, institutions, policies and practices on the one hand, and the obduracy of the established system, established practices and preferences, established patterns of movement, existing politics, automobility culture and a century of car-centric urban development on the other. In addition to the idiom of co-production, the thesis employs a variety of sociotechnical approaches from science and technology studies (STS), as it explores the interweaving of users, technologies and policies; changing practices, identities and preferences; and engagement in environmentality and/or technology.

The overall findings are synthesised from three individual papers, covering different aspects of electric automobility. In Paper 1, the domestication of EVs is analysed with particular focus on how gender is co-constructed in the intersection of users and technology. Paper 2 zooms out to gain an overview of the matter of sustainable transition itself, where claims that EVs represent a revolutionary niche that is set to upend the automobility system are examined. Finally, in Paper 3, a specific subset of EV drivers with a particular interest in technology is studied, and a more general perspective on how this interest is partially powering both EV proliferation, and a broader energy engagement, is presented.

These papers are complemented and expanded upon with a cross-cutting essay in order to present an overarching perspective on electric automobility. Taken together, while promising new associations are engendered in the meeting between EV users, their vehicles and the surrounding society, this work simultaneously gives reason to pause, as this new automobility is disconcertingly similar to the old one.