publications in english

This book presents the most important milestones of the research on automated and autonomous driving in the United States, Japan and Europe throughout five decades (1950-2000). Drawing on sources from the automotive industry, electrical engineering, the robotics and AI-domain and military institutions, it retraces the transition from the guidance-cable approach to vehicle-based sensor and vision systems. Giving a detailed overview of the technical concepts, artefacts, research vehicles and robots, the book presents the transnational engineering efforts that started long before Silicon Valley entered the field. In addition, the book also uniquely details the role of the military in the domain of vehicle automation. This all ensures the book is of great interest to historians of technology, practitioners in engineering disciplines, scholars working in mobility studies, journalists, and political decision makers.

This special section on “Degendering the Driver” explores how gender intervenes in the potential shift from a driver-centered to a driverless car culture. It focuses on representations of imagined futures—prototypes, media images, and popular discourses of driverless cars. Following the tradition of feminist cultural studies of technoscience, we ask in our introduction how these new techno-imaginaries of autonomous driving are gendered and racialized. We aim to explore if the future user of an autonomous car is gendered or degendered in the current media discourse. The four articles explore what kinds of images are used, what promises are made, and how the discourse about autonomous driving is influenced by gendered norms. Some authors emphasize that self-driving vehicles could encourage pluralized forms of masculinity. Nonetheless, all authors conclude that driverless cars alone will not degender the driver but rather encourage a multiplication of gendered and racialized technologies of mobility.