Age of Auto Electric

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.Acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction 1
2 Reconsidering the Automobile 25
3 Defining Appropriate Technology 41
4 Forcing the Future 63
5 Hybrid Politics 77
6 Bounding Battery Risk 89
7 Fuel Cells, Hydrogen, and Environmental Politics 101
8 Kyoto Cars 111
9 Art of the Possible 123
10 Computers on Wheels 139
11 Motor City Twilight 161
12 Electric Cars and the Business of Public Policy 175
13 Silicon Valley Takes Charge 189
14 The Life Electric 201
Conclusion 219
Notes 231
Bibliography 297
Index 343"A thought-provoking and important work."
—C. J. Myers, formerly, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia“Age of Auto Electric lays bare the complex, sometimes infuriating modern history of electric vehicles. Far more than a history of battery development, it offers a roadside view of an energy transition-in-progress and the sociotechnical complexities involved in transforming entrenched infrastructures. Insightful and absorbing, Eisler’s book is essential reading.”
—Suzanne Moon, Associate Professor, University of Oklahoma

“Eisler regales with the fascinating and twisted history of why battery electric vehicles exist, and the technologists and regulators who co-created them, a tale that has nothing and everything to do with solving climate change.”
—Clark A. Miller, Director, Center for Energy and Society, Arizona State UniversityMatthew N. Eisler is Lecturer of History at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.