The extent to which the transition from internal combustion engine cars to electric cars represents an important contribution to sustainable mobility is the central question addressed by a new book edited by CTS colleagues Graham Parkhurst and Billy Clayton . Given the socioeconomic importance of the car, and its impacts on the environment, ‘Electrifying Mobility: Realising a Sustainable Future for the Car’ takes a multidisciplinary approach, with its authors and perspectives drawn from sociology, social and environmental psychology, business studies, political studies, sociotechnical transition studies and environmental science, as well as transport planning and geography.
Across twelve chapters organised in four parts, the narrative considers how ‘electrification’ alters the inter-relationships between society, the economy and the built environment that have coevolved over the last century, including the practices of organisation and production of the automotive industry itself. Examination of the extent to which electric cars could offer a sufficiently environmentally benign ‘technical fix’ to avoid the need for behaviour change is balanced by exploration of the extent to which the electric car is changing both government policies and citizens’ attitudes, behaviours, and traveller ‘experiences’. Major technical and delivery challenges are acknowledged, notably that battery technology is improving, but remains constrained and expensive, and the need to plan and fund the delivery of a publicly-available charging network as a critical ‘dependency’ for mass uptake. However, technological opportunities are also noted, through integration with trends for higher automation and digital connectivity of vehicles, and the shared mobility that those changes may encourage.
In the final chapter, Parkhurst and Clayton conclude that the once tentative and contested transition to electric cars as now being unstoppable, but with the interrelated factors of vehicle range and total cost of ownership remaining as key moderators of its speed and nature.
Electrification is also seen as being far from the harmonious and smooth representations of its public image; instead recreating long-standing local conflicts over road space for moving and parked vehicles and new forms of global contest for access to material resources.
Also acknowledged is the long timeline of transition, and the problem presented by an established global fleet of some billion internal combustion engine vehicles. Potential enhancements to the environmental sustainability of the transition are mooted, such as a greater role for retrofit battery-electric conversions and new ways of paying for the full costs of road use, but in the final analysis, the answer to the fundamental question must lie in the wider context of mobility practices and policies, in other words, a sustainable future for the car implies not just a new way of powering it, but a different role for the car in both the economy and society.
This blog post was written by Graham Parkhurst who is Professor of Sustainable Mobility and directs the research centre
Electrifying Mobility: Realising a Sustainable Future for the Car was published in hardback and electronically by Emerald in October 2022.