Much of the debate on sustainability is predicated on the belief that environmental demands lead to the production of sustainable technologies that induce environmental benefits. This fails to account for the influential ways technologies are used in practice, and the interactions between users and technologies that shape their environmental effects. This article uses the example of how cars and their drivers together accomplish the practice of driving through their interactions with each other, and explores the implications this has for generating (...) environmental outcomes. We draw on a body of literature that argues how together, users and technologies participate in carrying out practices that actively shape outcomes, and we show how and why this applies to sustainability. The article presents the case of the Toyota Prius, analyzing Toyota's intent in designing a sustainable car and contrasting it with the perspectives of thirty-eight of its drivers. We find that the possibility for fuel and carbon reduction is coproduced and is a result of complex interactions between technology, drivers, and driving practice. (shrink)

La idea de progreso es una de las nociones más influyentes, pero también más polémicas, del mundo moderno. Ello se debe en buena medida al carácter ideológico que subyace a su empleo en diferentes contextos. En este artículo se examinan cuatro paradojas que ha generado la aplicación de la idea de progreso, cuyos efectos negativos se hacen sentir cada vez con más fuerza hoy en día. Se muestra también cómo esta idea, pese al creciente descrédito que la rodea, continúa ejerciendo (...) una poderosa influencia en la vida contemporánea. (shrink)

This wide-ranging introduction to the special issue on Automobilities examines various dimensions of the automobile system and car cultures. In its broadest sense we can think of many automobilities - modes of autonomous, self-directed movement. It can be argued that there are many different car cultures and autoscapes which operate around the world, which cannot be seen as making driving a uniform experience of movement in a controlled 'no-place' space. Yet, there clearly is an increasingly globalizing car system, conceptualized as (...) a powerful socio-economic and technological complex which sustains the car as a key object of mass production and mass consumption, which has impacted on spatial organization through roads, city layout, suburban housing and shopping malls and demands new forms of social life, sociability and time-space flexibility. This automobile system currently accounts for some 1.2 million deaths through traffic accidents a year world-wide, with the reversal of the long normalization of this form of 'mass murder,' now seen as a key topic for public health authorities. At the same time while it is potentially possible to subject cars to greater surveillance and systemic control through information technology, this in itself may not automatically lead to a reduction of accidents. In recent years the car has become a complex communicative platform for multi-tasking, a command centre for telephone, television, Internet etc., a place of work and instrumental tasking; but also a place of dwelling and refuge, a comfort zone for emotional decontrol via the sound system. Something which requires a more flexible driving habitus in which the senses are reconfigured and extended through the technology, as driving increasingly depends on the software as we move to intelligent cars and roads. Yet this is also something which generates an expanding set of new risks. The logic is for the driver to become the auto pilot and the automobile to become a sort of datasuit wrap. Yet it is not surprising that this view of the controlled safe car should also summon up its opposite: the car as dangerous and powerful, as a vehicle for excitement and speed. Especially so given that car racing practically originated alongside the birth of the automobile and is now itself a massive global industry whose imagery is central to the marketing of many types of cars. (shrink)

The car has become ubiquitous in late modern society and has become the leading object in the ordinary social relations of mobility. Despite its centrality to the culture and material form of modern societies, the relationship between the car and human beings has remained largely unexplored by sociology. This article argues that cars are combined with their drivers into an assemblage, the ‘driver-car’, which has become a form of social being that brings about distinctive social actions in modern society – (...) driving, transporting, parking, consuming, polluting, killing, communicating and so on. To understand the nature of this assemblage a number of theoretical perspectives that describe the interaction and collaboration between human beings and complex objects are explored; the process of driving, ‘affordance’, actor-network theory, and the embodied relationship between driver and car. This theoretical account of the driver-car is intended as a preliminary to the empirical investigation of the place of the driver-car in modern societies. (shrink)