Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

The electric vehicle revival reflects negotiations between public policy, which promotes clean, fuel-efficient vehicles, and the auto industry, which promotes high-performance vehicles. Electric cars were once as numerous as internal combustion engine cars before all but vanishing from American roads around World War I. Now, we are in the midst of an electric vehicle revival, and the goal for a sustainable car seems to be within reach. In Age of Auto Electric, Matthew N. Eisler shows that the halting development of the electric car in the intervening decades was a consequence of tensions between environmental, energy, and economic policy imperatives that informed a protracted reappraisal of the automobile system. These factors drove the electric vehicle revival, argues Eisler, hastening automaking's transformation into a science-based industry in the process. Challenging the common assumption that the electric vehicle revival is due to the development of better batteries, Age of Auto Electric instead focuses on changing environmental and socioeconomic conditions, energy and environmental policies, systems of energy conversion and industrial production, and innovation practices that affected the prevalence and popularity of electric vehicles in recent decades. Eisler describes a world in transition from legacy to alternative energy-conversion systems and the promises, compromises, new problems, and unintended consequences that enterprise has entailed If there is an overarching theme in the history of the electric car, it is the reversal of fortune. In 2005, there were a little over one thousand electric vehicles of various types on US roads. By 2020, there were nearly two million, and the global stock of electric passenger vehicles numbered more than 10 million, with China accounting for nearly half the fleet. This dramatic growth represents one of the marked events of the early twenty- first century and one of the most remarkable industrial- technological and social developments of recent times. In its own ways, the revolution in electric cars is as disruptive and as sweeping as the revolution in information technology that preceded it, with important implications for the material culture of the personal passenger automobile, for infrastructures of industryand energy conversion, and for the environment. Cover Half title Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments 1 | Introduction 2 | Reconsidering The Automobile 3 | Defining Appropriate Technology 4 | Forcing The Future 5 | Hydrid Politics 6 | Bounding Battery Risk 7 | Fuel Cells, Hydrogen, And Environmental Politics 8 | Kyoto Cars 9 | Art Of The Possible 10 | Computers On Wheels 11 | Motor City Twilight 12 | Electric Cars And The Business Of Public Policy 13 | Silicon Valley Takes Charge 14 | The Life Electric Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index "In Age of Auto Electric, Eisler argues that electric vehicle revival was driven not by better batteries but by the interplay between changing environmental and socio-economic conditions, energy and environmental policies, systems of energy conversion and industrial production, and material practices of innovation"-- Provided by publisher