The Automotive Industry in an Era of Eco-Austerity. Creating an Industry as if the Planet Mattered, by Peter E. Wells, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham (2010). x + 202 pp. £59.95 (hbk). ISBN: 1 84844 967 4.

摘要

Like many social science researchers, Peter Wells has a marked love-hate relationship with the automobile. So much becomes manifest in the first part of this interesting book on the scope for a 'greener' automotive industry. Ambivalences abound. The automobile is the most wanted durable consumer good of our time, for both practical and symbolic reasons. Yet this 'freedom' comes at the price of an epidemic amount of road deaths and serious injuries. Its use, moreover, is increasingly self-defeating: not only do cars stand in their own way, provoking congestion on a massive scale, but also they are limiting other modes of mobility, such as of buses and bicycles. In terms of human activities, it is by far the single largest contributor to carbon dioxide (CO_2) emissions, but the industry is also moving at the forefront of green technology. The industry is often portrayed as a major source of innovation and new production and marketing concepts, yet, taking a broader perspective, it appears stubbornly resistant to fundamental change. Where many other industries deliver their value in fundamentally different ways, the automobile remains stuck in a rather simple value transaction: from suppliers to assemblers to final products to be sold in one go. Finally, the industry presents one of the pillars of our economy and one of the key sources of employment. At the same time, the industry depends heavily on state subsidies and major rescue packages, as became acutely manifest during the recent years of economic downturn.