IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023 - 22

Book Review
Book Review
Age of Auto Electric: Environment,
Energy, and the Quest for the
Sustainable Car-Matthew N. Eisler
(Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2022,
365 pp.)
Reviewed by David N. Lucsko
Auburn University
Auburn, AL 36849 USA
 When it comes to new technologies, I have
never really been an " early adopter. " " Reluctant latecomer "
would be closer to the mark, for my mantra
has always been that " if it isn't broken, don't fix
it. " I still prefer LPs to MP3s, DVDs to streaming, and
paper copies of journals, books, and magazines to
their online equivalents. I have never tweeted, never
used Facebook, and only recently (and with grave
misgivings) acquired a smartphone. More to the
point, my cars have manual keys, manual transmissions,
and manual GPS (i.e., road atlases). Several
decades into the digital age, I remain a comfortably
analog person.
So, when an early-adopter buddy of mine stopped
by recently in his brand-new electric Ford Mustang
Mach-E GT, I was stunned at how impressed I was.
For one thing, unlike other electric vehicles (EVs) I
have seen up close (mostly Teslas), this one looked
and felt like a real car: it had a real dashboard with
real switches and knobs, a real brake pedal, and an
overall design that did not look like something an
eight-year-old doodled after seeing Blade Runner
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2023.3299317
Date of current version: 21 September 2023.
22
0278-0097/23©2023 IEEE
2049. More importantly, it was by far the fastest vehicle
I have ever driven, so much so that by the end of
a quick spin I had an idiotic grin on my face I could
not quite shake. It was, as Matthew Eisler reports in
Age of Auto Electric, the " EV smile. "
Like my friend's Ford, Eisler's new book is a tour
de force. Its 14 chapters lay out an engaging and
nuanced account of the recent history of EVs, focusing
on the second and third eras of EV research and
development (the 1990s and the current period that
began in the late-2000s, respectively; the first was
back in the early 20th century when the automobile
itself was still new). Eisler proceeds from a couple
of deceptively simple questions: How and why, after
80-plus years of internal combustion engine (ICE)
dominance, did EVs once again seem viable in the
1990s, only to quickly fade once more into obscurity?
And why did they reemerge a decade later in
a more commercially sustainable way? Better batteries
played a role-nickel metal hydrides in the
1990s and lithium ions more recently-but Eisler's
basic premise is that " better batteries " is a myth.
Battery technology has improved, that is, but that is
not why electrics reemerged. Instead, Eisler credits
" the interplay between changing enviro-technical
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
http://orcid.org/0009-0002-7452-8994
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023
