Summary
Historical context
Electric cars have a long, non-linear history: the first date back as far as to the 1830s; as cars they were popular in the late 1880s, until progress with internal combustion engines and mass production of cheaper gasoline cars led to a massive decrease of electric drive vehicles use. Since more than a decade, electric cars are again promoted and produced at increasing scale. At the same time, production and charging infrastructures are emerging. This is combined with promises of high-tech and innovation in drive engine, battery, design, autopilot and safety technology, as well as cleanness and efficiency in economic and environmental terms. Increasing presence of electric cars in everyday life, on the streets, in innovation and industry policies on national and EU level, less in mass media (TV series).
Research focus
This research combines the three dimensions of how electric car use is changing the way people use and more generally relate to cars, how electric car use is changing the governance-in-action for those who pioneer their use, and how electric car use is influencing the transition of energy systems:
- This research aims at outlining possibilities for understanding the new current efforts to hype and to use fully electric cars as an emerging cultural phenomenon in some main mundane dimensions.
- Users/drivers need to some extent to redefine how they “deal” with cars in the broadest sense, since the new technologies built into them do only allow for some continuities, whereas other aspects (like route and distance planning, charging, selling cars and battery technology, for instance) need to be reinvented in very practical terms.
- These people are pioneers in many respects. They need to change individual and collective mind-sets, and they do so deliberately. How do they manage to handle the new technology?
- The focal governance dimension addresses the entire spectrum of establishing and maintaining the social order within which car drivers conduct their electric car practice; this includes how actors dealing with electric cars submit to norms and structures as well as how they themselves structure the conditions and change norms of using electric cars.
- Governance is thus not alone understood in a broader systemic perspective, but also from a micro-sociological and situated, interactional and institutional, as well as cultural point of view.
- Governmentality of electric car use, in particular.
Main focus
- Appropriation of technology into actors’ situated and embodied practices (incl. driving & household); domestication (Silverstone/Haddon 1996)
- How embodied skills, routines and habits evolve in ongoing interaction with a person’s physical and social environment (van Dijk 2016)
- Aspects of changing cultures of „doing automobility“How learning/knowing to use an electric car involves also governance and gouvernementalité, and which traits of meta-governance are also emerging.
This research is currently carried out on the basis of own resources.
Talks given
Stegmaier, P. (2023). Doing electric automobility as an Element of Mundane Energy Transition. Towards a joint STS-governance perspective. Session ‘The role of new and emerging technologies in the energy transition: Part 3’ 4S Conference Honolulu, 8 November 2023.
Stegmaier, P. (2017). Emerging cultures of electric vehicle use. Towards a governance perspective STePS Research Days, Enschede, 13 June 2017.
