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The beginning of the 21st century has seen important shifts in
mobility cultures around the world, as the West's media-driven car
culture has contrasted with existing local mobilities, from
rickshaws in India and minibuses in Africa to cycling in China. In
this expansive volume, historian Gijs Mom explores how contemporary
mobility has been impacted by social, political, and economic
forces on a global scale, as in light of local mobility cultures,
the car as an 'adventure machine' seems to lose cultural influence
in favor of the car's status character.
Why has "car society" proven so durable, even in the face of
mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to
his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global
spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why
adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so
difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging
forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the
exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive
culture.
Our continued use of the combustion engine car in the 21st century,
despite many rational arguments against it, makes it more and more
difficult to imagine that transport has a sustainable future.
Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains
the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the
motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our
knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a
broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs
to unearth the desires that shaped our present "car society."
Combining social, psychological, and structural explanations, the
author concludes that the ability of cars to convey transcendental
experience, especially for men, explains our attachment to the
vehicle.
This book covers one and a quarter century of the automobile,
conceived as a cultural history of its technology, aimed at
engineering students and all those who wish to have a concise
introduction into the basics of automotive technology and its
long-term development. Its approach is systemic and includes the
behaviour of drivers, producers, nonusers, victims, and other
""stakeholders"" as well as the discourse around mobility.
Nowadays, students of innovation prefer the term co-evolution,
emphasizing the parallel and mutually dependent development of
technology and society. This acknowledges the importance of
contingency and of the impact of the past upon the present, the
very reason why The Evolution of Automotive Technology: A Handbook
looks at car technology from a long-term perspective. Often we will
conclude that the innovation was in the (re)arrangement of existing
technologies. Since its beginnings, car manufacturers have brought
a total of 1 billion automobiles to the market. We are currently
witnessing an explosion toward the second billion. Looking back, we
can see this history evolve through five distinctive phases:
Emergence (1880-1917) Persistence (1917-1940) Exuberance
(1945-1973) Doom (1973-2000) Confusion (2001-present) The Evolution
of Automotive Technology: A Handbook helps us understand how these
phases impacted society and, in turn, shows us how car technology
was influenced by car users themselves.
The idea of "understanding the present through its history" is
based on two insights. First, it helps to know where a technology
comes from: what were its predecessors, how did they evolve as a
result of the continuous efforts to solve theoretical and practical
problems, who were crucial in their emergence, and which cultural
differences made them develop into divergent families of artifacts?
Second, and closely related to the first insight, how does a
certain technology or system fit into its societal context, its
culture of mobility, its engineering culture, its culture of car
driving, its alternatives, its opponents? Only thus, by studying
its prehistory and its socio-cultural context, can we acquire a
true 'grasp' of a technology.The Evolution of Automotive
Technology: A Handbook, Second Edition covers one and a quarter
century of the automobile, conceived as a cultural history of its
technology, aimed at engineering students and all those who wish to
have a concise introduction into the basics of automotive
technology and its long-term development.
Do you enjoy listening to music while driving? Do you find radio
traffic information indispensable? Do you appreciate the moments of
your drive in which you can listen to or sing along with whatever
you like? This book shows how we created auditory privacy in cars,
making them feel sound and safe, even though automobiles were
highly noisy things at the beginning of the twentieth century. It
explains how engineers in the automotive industry found pride in
making car engines quieter once they realized that noise stood for
inefficiency. It follows them as they struggle against sounds
audible within the car after the automobile had become a closed
vehicle. It tells how noise-induced fatigue became an issue once
the car became a mass means for touring across the country. It
unravels the initial societal concerns about the dangers of car
radio and what it did to drivers' attention span. It explores how
car drivers listened to their cars' engines to diagnose car
problems, and appreciated radio traffic information for avoiding
traffic jams. And it suggests that their disdain for the
ever-expanding number of roadside noise barriers made them long for
new forms of in-car audio entertainment. This book also allows you
to peep behind the scenes of international standardization
committees and automotive test benches. What did and does the
automotive industry to secure the sounds characteristic for their
makes? Drawing on archives, interviews, beautiful automotive ads,
and literature from the fields of cultural history, science and
technology studies, sound and sensory studies, this book unveils
the history of an everyday phenomenon. It is about the sounds of
car engines, tires, wipers, blinkers, warning signals, in-car audio
systems and, ultimately, about how we became used to listen while
driving.
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