Bodies, cybercars and the mundane incorporation of automated mobilities

Abstract

Cars are technologies that re-shape corporeal existence, material environments and social temporalities in diverse and complex ways, with impacts on all people, spaces and times, not only those that are explicitly ‘automobilized’. This article aims to interrogate claims that the new technologies of mobile data processing, information transmission and wireless communication that have been brought into the ‘banal’ performance of car driving are affecting not only the driving experience but the entire body-person. The first part reviews recent phenomenological approaches to the embodied car driver–road assemblage, including claims that kinaesthetics and haptics are significantly transforming ‘movement-space’. The second part presents a content analysis of US corporate advertising, car industry websites, sales brochures and media reports on new technologies to consider whether and how reconfigurations of mundane mobility systems might be impinging upon the performances, practices and materialities of the human and the car, in particular the habituation of the luxury car driver to new technologies. In contrast, participant observation in the Philadelphia International Auto Show (5–13 February 2005) and analysis of local advertising markets suggests that changes in the embodied experience of driving have been minimal. The third part draws on internal industry reports and publications by road safety and oversight agencies in the USA (with some attention to Europe) to show that the most significant changes are actually taking place in less visible software-driven systems, automated communication, surveillance and ‘intelligent transport systems’, which are transforming the quotidian infrastructures and ‘infostructures’ of cars, streets, highways and cities in ways that are more mundane yet more far-reaching than the individualistic and personalized rhetoric of commodity marketing would suggest.

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