Conclusion: the Second Automobile Revolution — Promises and Uncertainties

Abstract

The first automobile revolution was characterised by the adoption of a global standard — the internal combustion engine, sustained by a liquid fossil fuel (oil) and by the diffusion of automobiles, mainly throughout the industrialised world. After a brief era of confrontation between different energy producers, the tandem ‘internal combustion engine/petrol’ became the global standard and still dominates today (Bardoux et al., 1982). Aside from a dramatic shift in production volumes between the first and the second half of the twentieth century — as in Figure 23.1 — the latter half of the century fulfilled the earlier promise of what can be called the automobilisation of industrialised societies. Achieving this promise was predicated on two political choices: the creation of an adapted and dense road network within a framework determined by state authorities; and the post-Second World War implementation in most industrialised nations of a ‘coordinated and moderately hierarchised’ mode of national income distribution. This mode triggered a self-sustaining process until 1974, one that ‘school of regulation’ economists have called Fordism, in homage to Antonio Gramsci, who was the first to use this term to refer to the variant of capitalism in which increases in real wages are viewed as a precondition for mass consumption and industrial development.¹ The new forms of work organisation and their extension to ever more activities, along with the general development of social protection, education and public services, expanded the middle classes and more broadly the population of individuals who could afford to acquire a new vehicle.