Who’s behind the wheel? Visioning the future users and urban contexts of connected and autonomous vehicle technologies

Wigley, Edward and Rose, Gillian (2020). Who’s behind the wheel? Visioning the future users and urban contexts of connected and autonomous vehicle technologies. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 102(2) pp. 155–171.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2020.1747943

Abstract

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are promised by their developers to transform mobilities, making travel accessible to all – including those unable to drive due to age, affordability or disability – and thereby widen the distribution of what Urry calls ‘network capital’. This paper interrogates promotional visualizations about CAVs as they imagine future automated mobilities and the scaling up of the technologies from small trials to mass roll-out. It analyses a wide range of images from a CAV trial in a UK city and demonstrates that these images reinforce rather than disrupt traditional gendered associations of automobility. This study further develops this work and notes other ways in which visualizations of CAV-enabled network mobility reiterate existing network capital inequalities. It also pays careful attention to the background urban environment in which CAVS are pictured. The paper argues that an absence of people and place specificity enable CAV technologies to be imagined as being used in other locations and contexts. Hence the visualizations of CAV that picture only specific forms corporeal mobility also work to envision the mobility of entrepreneurial capital, as the software and hardware behind the driverless vehicle is shown as transferable to, and profitable in, different contexts and situations.

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