Summary

See also Academic literature for a review of journals.

    1. Gender
    2. Subcultures
    3. Representation of cars and consumers in advertising
    4. Uses that people make of cars
    5. Histories of the car industry -- obviously, all the above often include historical contextualization and detail but histories of industrial relations and economics seem to take up a separate category.

Although much of the work is quite cogently argued, methodologies tend to be a little fuzzy. In particular, we often seen individual cases rather than statistically rigorous sampling strategies--one might even accuse some of these works of being anecdotal. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but one does wonder what conclusions we can really draw from many of the pieces. Further, as one reviewer suggests, the current nature of much academic publishing (collections of individual papers, loosely bound together by a theme rather than more rigidly organized books) does not always guarantee consistent quality.

Here's Daniel Miller's intro to the book, which provides a nice overview of recent work (as well as summarizing his volume's contents):

Document Iconmiller_driven_societies.pdf

There is some extremely interesting work directly relevant to our project. In particular, I wish to highlight that of Michael Bull on personal Soundscapes as managed through both the personal stereo and the car.

So far, I think that the concluding remarks of this review from the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies are fairly accurate:

In conclusion, what are we to make of these three books on "car cultures"? While reams of drivel have to date been generated, on and off Madison Avenue, regarding America's putative "love affair" with the automobile, very little of critical substance has been produced analyzing the car as a vehicle (pun intended) of cultural formation and transformation. James J. Flink's The Automobile Age—a revision of his 1975 volume The Car Culture—is the only book I know of that addresses the topic with any depth or rigor. This work is still in print and well worth seeking out; a single-author historical survey, it has obvious advantages, in terms of focus and comprehensiveness, over the volumes under review here. Still, all three books I have discussed contain their shares of valuable and insightful material and can be recommended to readers, both scholarly and popular, interested in studies of this ubiquitous, complex, and vexing machine.

I'll be "borrowing" more of the review later in this page (and I discuss Flink's Automobile Age, here).

See Summaries.

Contents
    1. Car Cultures -- contents; summary; review
    2. The car and British Society -- contents
    3. The Motor Car and Popular Culture in the 20th Century -- contents
    4. The Car and the City -- contents
    5. Drive On! A Social History of the Motor Car -- summary; rough guide to contents
    6. Autopia: Cars and Culture -- summary; review
    7. Car Crash Culture -- review
    8. The Automobile Age -- summary
    1. Driving Lessons: Exploring Systems That Make Traffic Safer -- contents
    2. Fatal Exit: The Automotive Black Box Debate -- contents; summary
    3. Traffic Psychology Today -- contents; summary
    1. Sounding Out the City -- discussed in Soundscapes
    2. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman -- summary; discussed in Soundscapes
    3. The Auditory Culture Reader -- discussed in Soundscapes
    4. The Cybercities Reader -- summary/ overview; breakdown of sections; summary of 2 articles
    5. Technospaces: Inside the New Media -- summary; review
    6. Telecommunications and the City -- summary; highlights; overview of chapter breakdown
    1. The Car and Its Future -- summary; contents; preface
    2. The Car of the Future in Western Europe -- quoted outline fro intro; v. brief summary
    3. The Car of the Future: New Technology and its Impact on the World Motor Industry -- very brief summary; intro quotation


Gender



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Subcultures




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Histories of the Car Industry



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Examples of Academic Books on Car Culture

Hopefully, providing breakdowns of the contents of several academic books on car culture will communicate something of the flavour of scholarship.

Car Cultures


Miller, Daniel (ed.) (2001) Car Cultures. Berg: Oxford and New York.

  1. Driven Societies, Daniel Miller -- download Document Iconmiller_driven_societies.pdf
  2. The Life and Death of Cars: Private Vehicles on the Pitjanjatjara Lands, South Australia, Diana Young
  3. The Invisible Car: The Cultural Purification of Road Rage, Mike Michael
  4. Driving While Black, Paul Gilroy
  5. Raggare and the Panic of Mobility: Modernity and Hybridity in Sweden, Tom O'Dell
  6. Driving, Drinking and Daring in Norway, Pauline Garvey
  7. Kwaku's Car: The Struggles and Stories of a Ghanian ong-Distance Taxi-Driver, Jojada Verrips and Birgit Meyer
  8. Soundscapes of the Car: A Critical Ethnography of Automobile Habitation, Michael Bull
  9. The Colonizing Vehicle, Gertrude Stotz

Articles/ papers tends towards an anecdotal (case-by-case assessment) analysis; making linkages and connections that one intuitively feels to be correct but which are not supported by statistical data.

Here's the cover for Miller's book. Note that it uses a car that seems quintessentially "American."

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Here's a review from the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies--it refers to another book, Autopia which is discussed later in this page:

While Autopia is basically a coffee-table tome, geared for a popular audience and thus filled with brief and largely undemanding material, Daniel Miller's anthology Car Cultures is precisely the opposite: academic in tone and orientation, it offers ten substantial scholarly essays examining the sociological and anthropological aspects of the automobile. Unlike Autopia, its illustrations are sparse, though it does contain something of a "photo essay": Jojada Verrips and Birgit Meyer's "Kwaku's Car," which chronicles the piecemeal restoration of a Ghanian taxi-driver's jalopy. Another key difference between the volumes is Car Cultures' welcome provision of a synoptic editorial introduction: Miller's "Driven Societies," which, in its review of methodological debates and issues in the field, is so meaty that it constitutes a freestanding essay in its own right. According to Miller, the main "problem for the study of car cultures, as of culture more generally, is to retain the link between the micro-history and ethnography of experience and an appreciation of the way these are shot through with the effects and constraints of acts of commerce and the state" (17). In other words, the critic must strike a balance between an alertness to the overarching power relations inscribed in the automobile and an assessment of the diverse local uses to which this commodity may be put by differently situated communities. While individual chapters tend to come down on one side or another of this systemic divide between capital and consumers, the book as a whole achieves an admirably dialectical perspective.

For Miller, such a perspective must acknowledge, above all, the "evident humanity of the car," considered not only as "a vehicle for class oppression, racism and violence" but also as a mechanism for "objectifying personal and social systems of value" (2). His title, "car cultures," thus refers to these large-scale entailments of norms and practices emanating from the motorcar as a complex and mutable material object. Such a viewpoint differs radically from both capitalist histories of the automobile industry and vulgar-marxist critiques of the same since, according to Miller, these approaches share a reductionist functionalism that privileges the immanent values of commodity production and exchange over and against the more "intimate relationship between cars and people" (16). What the essays in his book strive for, then, is a perspective that "relate(s) the car to its wider context in political economy . . . but in such a manner that this sheds light upon, rather than being opposed to, the more personal and involved relationship between values of particular groups of drivers or passengers and their cars" (17). If at times the result threatens to tip over into uncritically descriptive celebrations of consumer "resistance" to commodified power, this is a risk worth taking in order to combat the draconian pessimism of most critical evaluations of the culture of automobility.

I must admit, however, that the chapters I found most congenial were those whose tone was colored by this prevailing negativity. Paul Gilroy's "Driving While Black," for example, strives to connect "the uniquely intense association of cars and freedom in black culture" (82) with African-Americans' "distinctive history of propertylessness and material deprivation" (84). While the consumption of luxury cars might seem to confer social status on an otherwise economically disenfranchised minority, this communal self-assertion must be understood in the larger context of "the tacit enforcement of segregated space that is a growing feature of metropolitan life" (85)—a spatial apartheid defined, in no small part, by the forces of suburban privatization enabled by widespread car ownership and use. At the same time, Gilroy reminds us that, while the car tends to endorse "radically individualistic solutions" to entrenched social problems (86), it has also featured prominently in the articulation of black communal aspirations, especially as expressed through popular music, from soul through R&B to rap. Yet a critical appreciation for these positive valences must ultimately be "secondary to our grasp of the destructive and corrosive consequences of automotivity and motorization" for minority communities (87). This essay—the best in the book, in my view—establishes an ethical-political benchmark against which the more positive readings of "car culture" must be judged.

Generally speaking, these affirmative treatments manage to escape some of the more stinging strictures of Gilroy's analysis by focusing on car cultures outside the United States, where the hegemonic character of American-style automobility is tempered by local forms of appropriation. Two essays focus on Scandinavia—Tom O'Dell on "Modernity and Hybridity in Sweden" and Pauline Garvey on "Driving, Drinking and Daring in Norway"—while others focus on non-Western cultures: Ghana, in the aforementioned piece by Verrips and Meyer, and two Australian aboriginal groups, in essays by Diana Young and Gertrude Stotz. Ruptures as well as continuities with U.S. models of car maintenance and utilization are consistently stressed, generating a nuanced sense of the global diversity of the automotive ethos. Garvey, for example, analyzes the James-Deanesque "exercises in transgressive daring" (136) that have come to inform Norwegian youth-cultural driving practices, but she also argues for "the socially embedded nature of drunkenness" (137), which makes for nationally specific inflections of speed racing and joyriding. Similarly, Stotz shows how the Nguru Abos of Northern Australia tend, like many Americans, to see the car as metaphorically male, but this perception is rooted in the "Warlpiri exchange system . . . based on a gendered relationship of rights and obligations" (223), not in a Western model of patriarchal technocracy. Perhaps the most fascinating discussion of ethnic adaptation is Young's treatment of the lifecycle of the car among the Anangu of Southern Australia, where she argues convincingly that motor vehicles reinforce, through their incorporation into religious gatherings and magical practices, a "spiritual connection with the land" (52)—which is a far cry from the West's longstanding (and much lamented) technological alienation.

The remaining essays focus on particular topics—Mike Michael on road rage, Michael Bull on the car as a mobile audio system, and Simon Maxwell on the ethics of automobile ownership—that facilitate pointed comments on the interplay of domination and resistance in "car culture." Michael's discussion, while acknowledging the institutionalized violence cross-culturally immanent in driving, also shows how feelings of anger and frustration are channeled into ethnically unique forms of expression in different European countries. Bull's essay, which analyzes how drivers construct individualized musical "soundscapes," concedes that these "aural privatized experiences" are implicated in the "industrialized soundworld" of the culture industries (188), yet he rejects Adorno's "totalitarian" construction of this relationship (191) in favor of a "more dialectical process in which drivers actively construct their experience(s)" (200). I find the latent utopianism of Bull's argument unconvincing, but he deserves credit for shedding light on an undeniably popular function of the car—as a mobile concert venue—that has received scant attention in the critical literature. Perhaps the most fully dialectical treatment in this group of essays is Maxwell's, which analyzes how consumers "reduce anxiety and guilt" (206) regarding "the social and environmental consequences of increasing levels of collective car ownership and use" (220) through a negotiated ethics that stresses individual thrift and altruistic concern for others. Maxwell's model accommodates both the negative dimensions of car culture—its misuse of natural resources and privatizing deformations of social space—alongside its more affirmative possibilities: the "positive social frames of meaning of car use associated with care and love for immediate others, as well as care for others within wider social networks" (217-218). Unfortunately, his method seems to me unsound—a psychoanalytically-inspired ethnography that expatiates rather too ambitiously from a limited sample of banal observations.

What Car Cultures shares with Autopia, above all, is a concern to balance the utopian and dystopian trajectories immanent in the ongoing globalization of automobility. Given that driving provides one of the most intimate and intense technological experiences available in everyday life, it is not surprising that attitudes towards the car—both scholarly and popular—should have come to reflect our general ambivalence about the powerful machines that define and structure our world.

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The car and British Society


O'Connell, Sean (1998) The car and British Society: Class, gender and motoring, 1896-1939. Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York.

  1. 'By their cars ye shall know them': class, status and the spread of car ownership
  2. 'A myth that is not allowed to die': gender and the car
  3. 'The right crowd and no crowding': leisure and the car
  4. 'These things will right themselves': road safety and the car
  5. Dealing with a contradiction: the car in the countryside
  6. Representations of the car


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The Motor Car and Popular Culture in the 20th Century


Thoms, David, Len Holden and Tim Claydon (eds.) (1998) The Motor Car and Popular Culture in the 20th Century. Ashgate: Aldershot and Brookfield, USA.



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The Car and the City

Wachs, Martin and Margaret Crawford (eds.) (1992) The Car and the City: The Automobile, he Built Environment, and Daily Urban Life. University of Michigan: Ann Arbor.

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Drive On! A Social History of the Motor Car


Setright, L.J.K. (2002/ 2003) Drive On! A Social History of the Motor Car. Granta: London.

David Platt writes: I won't go into too much deail about this book. Setright's a motor industry journalist (I'm aware of his work from a very good pop/ coffee-table book of 40 years of the Mini). He breaks his history of the car into five main sections:
  1. An Historical Review
  2. The Yoke and the Spur
  3. The Face of the Earth
  4. The Turn of the Wheel: Revolutions in Technology
  5. Personal Effects

More explicitly:

  1. A chronological history of the car (divided into 10-year periods)
  2. Social forces in the car's development and adoption
  3. Effects on environment (on the city and the countryside)
  4. New technologies (types of tires/ tyres, computer systems, air conditioning etc.)
  5. Fashion, accoutrements, and iconography

There's also a rather interesting timeline, of which there is a PDF on the History of Automotive Technology Timeline page. It includes major world events in politics and economics, life and art, as well as developments in automobile technology and the industry.

On balance, the book's tone is popularizing. However, it also is definitely not a "coffee-table book".



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Autopia


Wollen, Peter and Joe Kerr (eds.) (2002) Autopia: Cars and Culture. Reaktion: London.

Very glossy collection of articles with lots of big pictures.

Divided into :

I was more than a little surprised to see Barthes's article on the "New" Citroen (or DS9) included. Anyway, here's a review from the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies:

In his editor's introduction to Autopia, a collection of essays on the cultural history of the automobile, Peter Wollen echoes British author J. G. Ballard in posing a critical choice between "Autopia," an enthusiastic embrace of the freedom and autonomy allegedly conferred by car ownership, and "Autogeddon," an anxious acknowledgement of "the automobile's dark side—car crashes, road rage, congestion, environmental damage, oil slicks, urban sprawl, car bombs and many other scourges" (10). To this list of scattered complaints he might well have added the following, more systemic indictments: the unchecked growth of powerful industries (big oil, big steel) at the expense of public transportation, the ongoing atrophy of communal space, and the increasing privatization of social experience—trends initially centered in the West but now global in their scope and implications. If not the essential cause of these massive changes, the automobile was most certainly their key agent, thus suggesting that a study of the motorcar might provide a

unique platform from which to assess an entire century of cultural transformation.

While the goal of Autopia is indeed, as Wollen asserts, "to understand the complex ways in which the car has transformed our everyday life and the environment in which we operate," an analysis that also involves "assessing the pros and cons of the automobile as a social and cultural force" (11), the book's composite structure—an anthology of 36 new and reprinted pieces, some full-fledged essays, some excerpted fragments—undermines this impulse to comprehension. A wide-ranging mosaic of perspectives, the book suffers from the typical shortcomings of any such assemblage: lack of integration, unevenness of coverage, and questionable apportionment of space (flaws also evinced by the other two volumes under review here). Autopia is further hobbled by its specific format: designed as a coffee-table compendium, with glossy pages and an impressive array of illustrations, it clearly assumes a popular audience whose level of education and attention span mitigate against specialized vocabularies and lengthy analyses. The need to appeal to such a readership likely also explains the book's title, which plumps for the sunnier side of Ballard's dichotomy, though there are enough dire portents of imminent Autogeddon in its pages to satisfy the gloomiest of cultural pessimists. What is missing is a methodical examination of how the phenomenon of automobility has restructured social relationships; instead, readers must be satisfied with arresting and colorful snapshots that capture the forces of change at particular moments and in specific contexts.

These snapshots are sorted into four broad categories: "Cars in Culture," seven chapters covering automobiles in art, literature, film, and popular music; "Cars and Capital," eleven chapters studying automobiles in different national cultures; "Motor Spaces," twelve chapters canvassing public sites and private spaces defined or engendered by the presence of cars; and "Myths and Motors," six chapters treating the automobile's iconic and ideological aspects. The rationale for this general structure is sketchy, and the editors make no attempt to explain it. The section on "Cars and Capital," for example, does not focus on the political economy of the automobile, though the range of global coverage suggests a general contrast between capitalist and socialist economies, while the section on "Motor Spaces" provides a hodgepodge of materials on topics ranging from the geopolitics of expressway design to the pleasures of long-distance driving to the frustrations and mystifications of traffic. At times, an item grouped into one category seems more appropriate to another: Michael Bracewell's essay "Fade to Grey: Motorways and Monotony," a penetrating discussion of the techno band Kraftwerk, is included in the "Motor Spaces" section presumably because it references the German autobahn system, when it would probably have fit better into the section on "Cars in Culture." Some items struggle to fulfill the expectations of their categorical assignments: Patrick Keiller's "Sexual Ambiguity and Automotive Engineering," included in the "Myths and Motors" section, makes a few vague stabs at an analysis of the gender ideology of car design, when what it really offers is a detailed production history of various European makes and models. Considering the fact that two-thirds of the volume's contents are newly commissioned pieces, one would have liked to know the basic vision of the project communicated to the contributors by the editors; absent a sense of these overarching assumptions, the chapters come to seem even more diffuse and impressionistic than they probably are. Despite these organizational problems, however, the materials the book assembles are in the main valuable and interesting, and the text itself is certainly attractively packaged.

The chapters in the "Cars and Culture" section include both broad surveys—e.g., co-editor Wollen's essay on "Automobiles and Art," which canvasses avant-garde appropriations of car iconography from Futurism to Pop—as well as more focused pieces, the strongest of which is A. L. Rees's "Moving Spaces," which provocatively analyzes how automotive travel, as represented in film, functions as a topographic allegory of narrative movement. Unfortunately, some of these chapters display the sort of vague, breezy generalizations one might expect from a coffee-table tome: for example, E. L. Widmer's "Crossroads: The Automobile, Rock and Roll and Democracy," which treats popular music's response to the motorcar, offers a superficial tour rather than an in-depth investigation. And the pictorial orientation of the volume also likely explains why literature receives such short shrift in favor of film and visual art; only a single, short chapter, Allen Samuels's "Accidents: The Car and Literature," covers the topic, and it is rather too eccentric and elitist—Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby providing more of a touchstone than Stephen King's Christine—to supply a reliable guide. But there is an upside to the picture-book format: in addition to the abundant illustrations gracing the individual chapters, each section includes what might be called a "visual essay" consisting of several pages of strikingly vibrant images; in the "Cars and Culture" section, this consists of eleven reproductions of car-inspired paintings and art installations by Francis Picabia, Diego Riviera, Robert Longo, Edward Kienholz, and others.

Sections two and three focus on "car culture" not as imaginative expression but as lived experience. While obscurely conceived, the "Cars and Capital" section contains some compelling material, such as co-editor Joe Kerr's concise history of automobile production in Detroit, which highlights links between economic conditions and city geography, and the excerpt from Dirk Leach's philosophical memoir of his stint as a laborer on the Mercedes-Benz assembly line, Technik. Yet while these pieces might lead one to assume that capital-labor relations are indeed a focus of this section, thus justifying its general title, the rest of the chapters are given over to treatments of national car cultures—Japan, the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Romania, India, and South Africa—without any special emphasis on political-economic concerns. (Indeed, Kerr's and Leach's contributions may be seen as conforming with this geographical focus in their coverage of the American and German car industries.) Happily, several of these essays are quite strong—especially Ziauddin Sardar's "The Ambassador from India," which defends the eponymous vehicle as an emblem of Indian modernity, and Viviana Narotzky's "Our Cars in Havana," which ponders the pervasive presence of "vintage" U.S. vehicles in post-revolutionary Cuba. The latter chapter, along with those on the U.S.S.R., China, and Romania (by Michael R. Leaman, Geremie R. Barmé, and Adrian Otoiu, respectively), suggests that the automobile, a quintessential icon of Western capitalism, bears with it certain social and spatial relations—most centrally, a tendency towards privatization that expresses itself in the growth of suburban enclaves—that prove intractable

even when imported into socialist terrain. But this judgment must be gleaned from insights scattered throughout the essays; there is no sustained attention to such systemic, structural questions, despite the section's putative topic.

The "Motor Spaces" section is, as noted above, even more chaotically arranged, though it too contains its share of small gems. These include excerpts from such classic works of cultural criticism as Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity dealing with the impact of the automobile on the urban environment. This section, in fact, features the highest proportion of reprinted pieces—seven out of the twelve chapters—which perhaps explains its more rambling feel, though a counterpoint between utopian and dystopian perspectives provides something of an integrating link. On the positive side, Andrew Cross limns the "indelible romantic tone" of the long-distance road trip (250), while Sandy McCreery counter-intuitively argues that traffic congestion "can be a beautiful thing" (311); more downbeat pieces are Ian Parker's meditation on the fears and loathings of London gridlock and the excerpt from Jay Holtz Kay's Asphalt Nation, which chronicles the geographical and aesthetic "maiming of America" accomplished by the interstate highway system (273). But these tepid effusions and morose ruminations seem shallow beside the more balanced assessments, such as Jacobs's analysis of how the habits of pedestrians in cities have adapted to accommodate the flow of cars or the aforementioned, brilliant essay by Michael Bracewell, which—like its inspiration, Kraftwerk—celebrates the paradoxical "transaction . . . between irony and nostalgia" (291) that affords pleasure even in the robotic repetitions of driving. For all its scattershot quality, this section offers an engagingly diverse collection of views.

Not so the final section. While it is ostensibly a more cohesive unit, focusing on the symbolic meanings of the automobile, "Myths and Motors" offers a series of curiously uninspired chapters. Exceptions to this stricture are Roland Barthes's scintillant memo on the Citroën, culled from his 1957 classic Mythologies, and a brief excerpt from Ilya Ehrenberg's neglected 1929 masterpiece The Life of the Automobile; but these two pieces make up only five of the section's forty-plus pages. By contrast, Keiller's essay, mentioned above, is a dull overview of European engineering techniques spiced up with occasional pseudo-Freudian asides; Grace Lees-Maffei's "Men, Motors, Markets and Women" is a fairly standard comm-studies analysis of automobile advertisements geared for female consumers; and Karal Ann Marling's "America's Love Affair with the Automobile in the Television Age" is as vacuous as its title implies (e.g., "after the privations of the Great Depression, after the hardships and shortages of the war, victorious Americans deserved nothing but the best" [354], etcetera ad nauseam). The treatment of gender ideology in these three chapters never rises above the platitudinous—though Lees-Maffei has the excuse that her analysis is actually centered on cultural stereotypes. The concluding essay by Martin Pawley, a study of the Dymaxion car designed by Buckminster Fuller, is more substantive but seems out of place, not offering much in the way of an iconological appraisal.



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Car Crash Cultures



Brottman, Mikita (ed.) (2002) Car Crash Culture. Palgrave: New York.

More from Rob Latham's review (this means that I've rather egregiously copied the whole review into this page, but as it's a private wiki ...):

The third book under review here, Mikita Brottman's anthology Car Crash Culture, pushes this ambivalence to the very limit: like J. G. Ballard's notorious 1973 novel Crash which has so clearly inspired it, the book tackles the theme of automotive accidents in a manner that is at once cautionary and celebratory. From Kenneth Anger's "Kar Krash Karma," the gleefully trashy exposé on celebrity deaths that opens the book, to Gregory L. Ulmer's "Traffic of the Spheres," the playfully postmodern proposal for a public "MEmorial" to car-crash victims that closes it, the volume manages to sustain a paradoxical attitude towards its central subject, critically arraigning the inherent hazards of automobility while at the same time reveling in the breathtaking power—even the quasi-sexual ecstasy—of the crash. As a result, it is an altogether more shocking—and entertaining—book than either Autopia or Car Cultures could hope to be.

It is also more imaginatively organized, with 28 chapters of new and reprinted material divided into five broad sections: "Car Crash Contemplations," six meditations inspired by specific wrecks, both famous and obscure; "Car Crash Crimes," six pieces canvassing the gruesome forensics of accident injuries; "Car Crash Conspiracies," four essays spinning elaborate intrigues out of literal or figurative automotive deaths; "Car Crash Cinema," five studies of narrative and documentary films dealing with collisions; and "The Death Drive," seven probings of the public culture—the mythic and political aspects—of the crash. The book opens with Brottman's long and fascinating introduction, which begins with an anecdote relating her own car accident, when she was a graduate student vacationing in Cyprus, and exfoliates into a searching examination of the psychosocial desires and repressions—hedged around with or shading into "rumors, gossip, voyeuristic fantasies, private nightmares, conspiracy theories, and allegations of cryptic skullduggery" (xxiii)—informing the phenomenon of the crash in Western culture. This autobiographical framing of the issue gives the volume a personal charge lacking in the other two books; while it does at times gesture towards a scholarly purpose, including footnotes and other displays of erudition, Car Crash Culture is, like Autopia, clearly designed as a popular work—though with its sometimes uncouth tone and its provision of gross-out imagery (squeamish readers be warned), it is essentially the campy Gen-X cousin of Wollen and Kerr's more soberly yuppified tome.

In her editorial conception of the car crash, Brottman casts a wide net, engaging not only literal automotive accidents but all manner of vehicular deaths, from John F. Kennedy's assassination (covered in Pamela McElwain-Brown's "SS-100-X," a study of the Presidential limousine), to a suicide who leapt from the Empire State Building and landed atop a shiny sedan (topic of A. Loudermilk's "Clutching Pearls: Speculations on a Twentieth-Century Suicide"), to the frequent use of a "death car" by serial killers to kidnap and transport their victims (treated in Michael Newton's "Highway to Hell: The Story of California's Freeway Killer"). A central thread in the book's coverage—taking a page, once again, from Ballard's Crash—follows our culture's peculiar obsession with collisions involving celebrities, stunning events that loom as "instant constellation(s) of tragedy, sacrifice, mass fantasy, and monumental comeuppance" (xv), according to Brottman. Aside from Anger's leering overview of the subject, individual chapters consider the deaths of Albert Camus (Derek Parker Royal's "Rebel with a Cause"), Jackson Pollock (Steven Jay Schneider's "Death as Art/The Car Crash as Statement"), and Princess Diana (Philip L. Simpson's "Car Crash Cover-ups"), as well as the near-death of Pope John Paul II (David Kerekes's "Papal Conveyance") and the imaginary death of Paul McCartney (Jerry Golver's "Why Don't We Make Believe It Happened in the Road?"). Royal's and Schneider's essays are particularly valuable in that they speculate convincingly on how the public reputations of Camus and Pollock were transformed by their violent demises. References to James Dean and Jayne Mansfield are, predictably, pervasive; Howard Lake, for example, offers a potent meditation on these (and other) celebrity crash deaths in his "Jump on In, You're in Safe Hands: Flash-Frames from the Automobile Cargo Bay Experience," which adopts the point-of-view of the passenger in order to meditate on issues of social agency.

Some of the best—and, alas, worst—essays in the book attempt, as does Lake, to extrapolate the crash into wide-ranging theoretical or cultural allegories. On the positive side, Eric Laurier, explicitly deploying Walter Benjamin's work on allegory, envisions accident sites as technocultural "ruins" in his essay "This Wreckless Landscape," while Ulmer's "Traffic of the Spheres" conscripts Georges Bataille to evoke the crash as a "sacrifice" that exceeds "the conventional capitalist understanding of profit, productivity, expansion, accumulation" (330). Less compelling are Julian Darius's half-baked reading of the crash as a Christian allegory in "Car Crash Crucifixion Culture" and Christopher Sharrett's hysterical polemic on the latent violence of the capitalist system, "Crash Culture and American Blood Ritual." In contrast to these large-scale allegorical arguments, which use the car crash to

generate abstract models, other essays deal with the brute facticity of specific wrecks, in registers that vary from the painfully commemorative (e.g., William Luhr's "Stranger in the Night: A Memory") to the calmly dissective (e.g., the autopsy reports included in the "Car Crash Crimes" section). Indeed, Brottman should be commended for how effectively she constructs a consistent counterpoint between sweeping position statements and narrowly particular case studies.

That said, it must also be acknowledged that Car Crash Cultures, like Autopia, is something of a scattershot inquiry into its subject. Four of the book's five sections, while imaginatively conceived, lack cohesion—the exception being "Car Crash Cinema," which focuses on a specific medium and a shared set of canonical texts, especially David Cronenberg's 1996 film of Ballard's novel Crash. A pair of essays address this movie, and while Harvey Roy Greenberg's "Machine Dreams" and Brottman and Sharrett's "The End of the Road" differ in their judgments—the former seeing the film as an affirmative working-through of pathological desires, the latter as a dire prediction of social apocalypse—both are animated by the homophobic assumption that anal sex, metaphorized as rear-end collision, is a sign of cultural decadence and death. A pair of pedestrian (no pun intended) essays—by Tony Williams and David Sterritt, respectively—examine the accidents that feature at the cores of Jonathan Kaplan's Heart Like a Wheeland Jean-Luc Goddard's Contempt, while Brottman concludes the section with an energetic deconstruction of the morbid excesses of highway safety films of the 1950s and `60s, in particular the gory classic Signal 30. (These kitschy horrorshows seem to be enjoying something of a renaissance these days, as witnesses Bret Wood's recent documentary, Hell's Highways: The True Story of Highway Safety Films.) Alas, this collection of essays on film, the most integrally organized part of the book, is also, I feel, its weakest; in fact, the more jumbled and wandering sections provide greater readerly pleasures, perhaps because disorientation and chaos are major aspects of the car crash experience itself.




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The Automobile Age


Flink, James J. (1988) The Automobile Age. MIT: Cambridge, MA and London.

Thorough traditional history of the automobile industry with a strong focus on the USA (not surprisingly).


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Examples of Academic Books on Car Technologies

Driving Lessons: Exploring Systems That Make Traffic Safer

Rothe, Peter J. (ed.) (2002) Driving Lessons: Exploring Systems That Make Traffic Safer. University of Alberta Press: Edmonton, Alberta.




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Fatal Exit: The Automotive Black Box Debate

Kowalick, Thomas M. (2005) Fatal Exit: The Automotive Black Box Debate. IEEE Press: Piscataway, NJ.


The book is a manifesto for inclusion of Black Box recorders in private car. Some of Kowalick's concluding points:

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Traffic Psychology Today


Barjonet, Pierre-Emmanuel (ed.) (2001) Traffic Psychology Today. Kluwer: Boston, Dordrecht, and London.

Key themes and interests:

Not much material that's obviously directly relevant to our study -- perhaps the Chprt 14 on ITS ("Intelligent Transport Systems" or road transport telematics) and the ways that they might benefit driving. From p. 267:

Chapter 14 also:

But nowhere in the book do researchers discuss "entertainment."

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Related Academic Works

To the casual reader/ viewer many of these books might not appear to be important. Yet, they do belong to disciplines and areas that have direct relevance to thinking through the experience of driving: geographies and sound.


The Cybercities Reader



Graham, Stephen (ed.) (2004) The Cybercities Reader. Routledge: London and New York.

Themes of the book picked up from the Introduction and contents listing:

PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CYBERCITIES PART 2 CYBERCITY DIMENSIONS PART 3 SHAPING CYBERCITIES?

Two particularly interesting articles for us:

Plaut, Prina Ohana "Do Telecommunications Make Transportation Obsolete?" (p. 162-166)



Sheller, Mimi and John Urry "The City and the Cybercar" (p. 167-172)

David Platt writes: I foresee some objections to Sheller and Urry's rather utopianist outcome ...



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Sounding Out the City



Bull, Michael (2000) Sounding Out the City. Berg: Oxford and New York.

See Soundscapes.

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Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman

du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus (1997) Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Open University Press: Milton Keynes.

Academic book intended to go with one of the OU's adult education courses. Well-written without much resort to the excesses of academic language.

Argues that one can only fully understand artefacts by understanding their location within five interonnected cultural realms: production, consumption, identity, representation, and regulation. Convincing (and one of my main models for understanding artefacts, should anyone be interested), but at times does descend into the anecdotal (for which, Michael Bull has criticized the book).

Emphasizes the way in which the Walkman was shaped by consmers as Sony closely monitored consumer response. The Walkman lost the twin headphone jacks as people seemed to view their stereo as "private" (p.59), and the "hotline" button that allowed one to lower the volume easily to someone speaking (p.59).

Also has some references to work on Soundscapes.

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The Auditory Culture Reader

Bull, Michael and Les Back (eds.) (2003) The Auditory Culture Reader. Berg: Oxford and New York.

I discuss this book in Soundscapes. Among the reprinted articles, we see a return appearance of Bull's article on "Soundscapes of the Car".

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Technospaces

Munt, Sally R. (ed.) (2001) Technospaces: Inside the New Media. Continuum: London.



From Graeme Harper's (University of Wales, Bangor, Wales) review in International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3, 357-376 (2002):

The difference between Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age and Sally Munt’s Technospaces: Inside the New Media becomes at once plain. Munt’s book, part of the Critical Research in Material Culture series, for which Munt is the series editor, is a collection of essays by a variety of contribu-tors who are, by and large, theoreticians. Thus Technospaces: Inside the New Media engenders a different kind of readerly engagement from Le Grice’s book. Yet there are some important similarities between the two volumes.

Plainly enough, the contributors to Munt’s book explore themes connected with space – one axis of Le Grice’s investigative equation. Yet Munt’s organization of the book, and her own critical engagement with such theoretical voices as those of Henri Bergson and Michel Foucault, also allows the other axis, that of time, to be heralded. Munt opens with her ‘Series Foreword’, quoting historian E.P. Thompson to support the import-ance of examining ‘real, material human lives’ (2001: xi). Chapters follow-ing are as wide ranging as Per Persson’s ‘Cinema and Computers: Spatial Practices within Emergent Visual Technologies’, Radhika Gajjala’s ‘Studying Feminist E-Spaces: Introducing Transnational/Post-Colonial Concerns’ and Michael Bull’s ‘Personal Stereos and the Aural Reconfigura-tion of Representational Space’.

This, from David Sanford Horner’s ‘Cyborgs and Cyberspace: Personal Identity and Moral Agency’, is indicative of the kind of analytical statement you will find in Munt’s book: ‘The creation of new technologies of the virtual holds out the promise of deliverance from the limitations of existence in physical space. The ontology of this virtual space is an ontology without bodies’ (2001: 71).

As the book’s aim is to ‘explore the implications and contingencies’ raised by technologically induced new spatial practices, it naturally travels some intellectual distance. French Marxist Henri Lefebvre is, however, of some ‘navigational’ importance, his work on space appearing notably in Munt’s introductory chapter ‘Technospaces: Inside the New Media’ and in others such as Peter Dallow’s ‘The Space of Information: Digital Media as a Simu-lation of the Analogical Mind’, a chapter in which Lefebvre’s comment that each phase of history is ‘marked by a particular logic of visualization’ is highlighted. Yet the book does not begin and end at referencing Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991).


Judith Roof’s chapter, ‘Depth Technologies’, looks at the idea of ‘depth’, at the effect of new technologies on the nature of our response to it. Rose Ainley’s ‘Keeping an Eye on Them: Control and the Visual’ takes a close look at CCTV. Paula E. Geyh considers postmodern landscape, real and fictional, in ‘The Fortress and the Polis: From the Postmodern City to Cyberspace and Back’. And Matthew Hills gives well-argued close attention to the ‘virtual fan community’ in ‘Virtually Out There: Strategies, Tactics and Affective Spaces in On-line Fandom’.

Other chapters include Aylish Woods on ‘information technologies’ and the video feature Fresh Kill (1994), Kathleen LeBesco on the resignification of fat in cyberspace, Duncan Sanderson and Andrée Fortin on geographi-cal communities and their interaction with that ‘cyberspace’, the Sussex Technology Group on mobile phones, and Kate O’Riordan on computer games and that ‘virtual’ tomb raider, Lara Croft.

If Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age and Technospaces: Inside the New Media share one final similarity, alongside their ‘personal’ and

‘communal’ interest in the effect of digital technology on our ideas of space and time, it is their enthusiasm for the cultural relevance of these very effects.



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Telecommunications and the City



Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin (1996) Telecommunications and the City: Electronic spaces, urban places. Routledge: London and New York.

Attempts to "stimulate more sophisticated debate and research on city-telecomminications relations" (p. xiii). Weighty volume (over 430 pages of dense text).



Chapters cover:

Only specific reference to "cars" in index, points to pp. 301-302 and a discussion of the "intelligent city" and traffic control systems, although there is more discussion of "transportation" and "traffic" (but not much more). Much of the chapter on urban infrastructure and transportation (p. 278-310) actually focuses on utilities, telecommunications, etc.

Fig. 7.4 The scope of road transport informatics technology (p. 298)

Demand management

Motorist communication and information Improved traffic control Automatic vehicle control Automated toll collection


A couple of casual references to cars, such as in the conclusion which points out that people start cellphone conersations when stuck in traffic jams (p. 380).

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Other Books



The following are not academic, but do approach the future of automotive transport.

The Car and Its Future



Exum, Kaitlen Jay and Lynn M. Messina (eds.) (2004) The Car and Its Future. The Reference Shelf, 76.5. HW Wilson: New York and Dublin.

Collected articles from various US newspapers. Of more immediate use to us than some of the books above, simply because it focuses on identifying and predicting trends. However, not one of the articles go details VEC/ mobile media -- the technology concerns appear to be all about safety ...

Preface

 

One out of every two Americans owns a car. For the approximately 1.8 million households in the United States, there are 1.9 million automobiles; a mere 8 percent of households do not own cars. The United States is the largest market of automobile consumers in the world. It is safe to say that Americans love their cars. They like what they have now, they’re excited about upcoming models, and they wait breathlessly for the cars of the future, hoping that they will get incredible mileage, produce no emissions, and, ultimately, fly like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

 

To a certain extent, Americans’ infatuation with cars makes sense. In a country as large as the United States, cars are often a veritable necessity. Many people, provided they do not live in one of the few American cities with extensive public transportation, need cars for their daily commutes and their vacations. Cars allow people to travel from the suburbs to the city and back again, to navigate the ever spreading urban sprawl. However, there is more to this love affair with cars than simple practicality. Cars are the stuff of fantasy; for proof, look at the litany of films and music that reference, even idealize vehicles. Disney’s Herbie, the Love Bug starred a Volkswagen Beetle with personality. Michael J. Fox relied on a DeLorean, complete with gull wings and mythical flux capacitor, to take him Back to the Future. And such films as Grease and American Graffiti sparked a resurgence in interest in 1950s car culture and the phenomenon of cruising. Such songs as the Beach Boys’ "Little Deuce Coupe" and Prince’s "Little Red Corvette" only furthered the obsession.

 

Without a doubt, the United States is a car culture, and Americans want it all: safety, glamour, mileage, and that elusive "coolness factor." Today’s autos can accelerate to illegal speeds, and suburbanites who use their vehicles only for errands own sport utility vehicles (SUVs) with off-road capabilities. Admittedly, sometimes a driver’s wants are frivolous, but not always. There is an increasingly persuasive drive toward eco-conscious vehicles that run on alternative fuels like hydrogen fuel cells, diesel, and electricity. Hybrids, or cars with both gasoline engines and electric motors, are the new big thing; whether or not they have staying power remains to be seen. Also popular are tiny autos like the Smart Car and the BMW Mini Cooper, both of which tend to be inexpensive and get good mileage.

 

Another trend is toward light trucks and SUVs. The Hummer, popularized by actor-turned–California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is the paragon of the bigger-is-better trend. While such vehicles get notoriously poor mileage per gallon, many drivers feel safer wrapped in tons of steel and reassured by four-wheel drive.

 

So, which vehicle will win the war, the massive SUV or the minuscule car? Maybe neither, since there has been an upsurge in the popularity of sports cars, too. Since the global market for cars continues to grow (especially gaining speed in China), perhaps there is room for all these cars. If vehicles are engaged in a large-scale popularity contest, then Generation Y may very well have the power to decide the winner. Carmakers and insurance companies are actively gearing their products to Generation Y, a force approximately 63 million strong, even though many of them cannot even drive yet. Known for not wanting to feel as if they are being marketed to, members of Generation Y present an elusive market to be cracked. Automakers and insurers are targeting them through teen-oriented print ads, television commercials, and Web sites; whether such tactics work will be seen only after Generation Y comes into its own buying power.

When we consider car production rather than purchasing power, in some respects Europe and the United States have become passé. Asia is taking over the market, not only with plants in such countries as Japan and Korea but with Asian-owned factories in North America. Honda and Toyota are two companies at the forefront of hybrid production; they are responsible for the Civic and Insight and the Prius, respectively.

 

The Car and Its Future considers automobiles and automotive technologies from a variety of angles. The book’s first chapter examines how people feel about and use their cars, including how they drive, methods of car shopping, and purchasing habits. The next chapter looks at the psychology of vehicle design, the effects of manufacturing techniques on quality, and the high technology that goes into our cars. The following chapter considers safety issues, including accident rates, driving techniques that compromise the safety of all drivers, the issue of child safety, and the psychology of driving. The auto insurance industry is the topic of the next chapter, which looks at the best way to obtain reasonably priced insurance as well as at the relationships between insurers and repair shops. Another chapter covers the automotive industry from a global perspective, including foreign car manufacturing in the United States, the effects of America’s foreign policy on gas prices and the auto industry, and the state of car manufacturing in Europe and Asia. The final chapter considers vehicles that use alternative fuels, including hybrid cars and those that run on hydrogen, electricity, and diesel, exploring how environmentally friendly they are and how soon they can be successfully mass-marketed.

We would like to thank the many periodical publishers who have so generously granted permission to reprint their articles in these pages. We also must express our gratitude to those at the H. W. Wilson Company who helped to produce and research this book, especially Sandra Watson and Jennifer Peloso, as well as Michael A. Messina, who graciously donated his photographs. Thanks also to Gray Young, Rich Stein, Norris Smith, and Clifford Thompson.

 

Kaitlen Jay Exum

Lynn M. Messina

October 2004
 

 

Contents


Preface ix

I. Life Behind the Wheel 1
Editors’ Introduction 3
1) Going Through the Emotions. Jim Mueller. Chicago Tribune 5
2) Lease/Buy? Auto Deals Not So Easy. Julie Blacklidge. Fort Worth Business Press 9
3) Online Car Sales Gaining Speed After Slow Start. Bob Keefe. Palm Beach Post (Florida) 13
4) Go for a Sedan for Teen’s First Car, Experts Say. Amanda Rogers. Fort Worth Star-Telegram 17
5) Just Taking a Spin. Jaquetta White. The Times-Picayune (New Orleans) 19
6) R.I.P. SUVs? Peter Roff and Jillian Jonas. United Press International 22
7) Drivers Stick with Light Trucks Despite Heavy Fuel Prices. Gregory Cancelada. St. Louis-Post Dispatch 25

II. Marketing and Design 29
Editors’ Introduction 31
1) Car-nal Knowledge. Vicki Haddock. San Francisco Chronicle 33
2) Survival Demands Automakers Race to Bring New Models to Market Faster. Bill Vlasic. The Detroit News 38
3) Global Mood Affects Vehicle Design. William Diem. Detroit Free Press 43
4) Smart Lesson in Quality. Anthony Lewis. Automotive Industries 45
5) Car Makers Zooming in on Youth. Matt Nauman. San Jose Mercury News 49
6) Lost? Let the Car Be Your Guide. T. Edward Phillips. The New York Sun 52

III. Traffic and Safety 55
Editors’ Introduction 57 1) Safety First. Daniel A. Thomas. Planning 59
2) As Technology Advances, So Do Privacy Concerns. Diane Katz. The Detroit News 65
3) States Cracking Down on Driving and Phoning. Diane Cadrain. HR Magazine 70
4) In-Car Electronics Can Distract, Imperil. Jeff Bennett. Detroit Free Press 72
5) Blind Spots, Backover Dangers Gain Attention. Ann Job. MSN Autos 74
6) A Parent’s Lapse Can Be Fatal in the

Summer Heat. Jeanne Wright. Los Angeles Times 78
7) SUV Capable, But What About Driver? Richard Rubin. Charlotte Observer (North Carolina) 81
8) National Survey of Drinking and Driving Attitudes and Behaviors, 2001. U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Traffic Tech 83
9) The Zen Commuter. Jessie Milligan. Fort Worth Star-Telegram 87

IV. Insurance and Auto Repair 91
Editors’ Introduction 93

1) Consumer Guide: Auto Insurance. Jocelyn Parker. Detroit Free Press 95
2) Gearing Up. Lynna Goch. Best’s Review 99

3) DRPs: Deciding What’s Legal, What’s Not. Tina Grady. Automotive Body Repair News 105
4) Crooks Like Saturn SL; Asian Cars Closing In. John Porretto. Newsday 113 5) Brake Applied to Recall Cover. Carolyn Aldred. Business Insurance 115

V. The Auto Industry: A Global Perspective 121
Editors’ Introduction 123
1) Foreign Cars Aren’t Quite So Foreign These Days. Jim Fuquay. Akron Beacon Journal 125
2) Smug No More. Jerry Flint. Forbes 128
3) Japan’s Design Practices Get Credit for Its Reliable Cars. Charles J. Murray. Electronic Engineering Times 130
4) China Goes Car Crazy. Clay Chandler. Fortune 133
5) Oil Erupts as Issue in Presidential Campaign. Robert Collier. San Francisco Chronicle 135

VI. Alternative Fuels 141
Editors’ Introduction 143
1) The Lowdown on Hybrids. Eric Minton. GEICO Direct 145
2) Waving Yellow Flag on "Green" Hybrid Vehicles. John O’Dell. Los Angeles Times 150
3) The Hydrogen Highway: Hype or a Happening? Larry E. Hall. MSN Autos 154
4) The Electric-Car Slide. Greg Schneider. The Washington Post 159
5) The Diesel. Dennis Simanaitis. Road & Track 164

Bibliography 171
Books 173

Web Sites 175
Additional Periodical Articles with Abstracts 177



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The Car of the Future in Western Europe


Whitbread, Colin (1983) The Car of the Future in Western Europe: The Application of High Technology in the Cars of Tomorrow. Economist Intelligence Unit, Special Report 155. EIU Limited: London.

Not really an academic book or report (although I found it in an academic library). From the author's introduction:

The report is divided into eight chapters. The first two examine the broad principles of car design in Europe (Chapter 1) and body shapes (Chapter 2). The next four are concerned with the development of electronics in cars. Chapter 3 provides teh background, and is followd by a more detailed analysis of the position with regard to drivetrain control systems (Chapter 4), driver information systems (Chapter 5) and braking and suspension equipment (Chapter 6). Chapter 7 provides an account of trends in the use of materials, covering such aspects as recent developments, current usage, factors affecting future usage, and the impact of change on material suppliers. Finally, Chapter 8 contains a brief look at the likely cars of the 1990s.


Not much in the way of VEC, here. The chapters on electronics are concerned with control and driver information systems (gauges, speedometers, etc.). At the time that this was written, electronics were becoming an increasingly important part of car architecture and design. Lots of tables showing facts and figures (e.g. trends in percentage of materials used).
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The Car of the Future: New Technology and its Impact on the World Motor Industry



Daniels, J. (1989) The Car of the Future: New Technology and its Impact on the World Motor Industry. Economist Intelligence Unit, Special Report 2017. EIU Limited: London.

Seems more thorough than the 1983 report discussed above.

It is generally accepted that the world's motor industry is currently undergoing major chanegs resulting from the adoption of high technology. The aim of this report is to survey all the main areas of high technology with a view to assessing which technical developments have had, and are likely to have, the greatest impact on the motor industry and its products, and in what way.

The scope of this report is limited to that part of the industry whic produces passenger cars and light commercial vehicles. The products of the heavier commercial sector are subject to different constraints, demands and legal requirements -- for example, the very much greater use of diesel, and the imposition of widely differing weight limits in different markets -- which lead to a fundamentally different analysis.

Interesting points:

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Posted at Jul 12/2005 07:31AM:
chris witmore: Wow! You've done an amazing job here David.