Reconstituting Automobility: The Influence of Non-Commercial Carsharing on the Meanings of Automobility and the Car

Luca Nitschke

doi:10.3390/su12177062

Abstract

Automobility has long been understood as the normal and hegemonic way of moving and even without considering a global pandemic and the imperative of social distancing, disruptive change in everyday automobility seems far away. Based on 34 interviews with members of carsharing associations and private carsharing arrangements, this article argues that non-commercial carsharing, a self-organized form of carsharing, poses a twofold challenge to the hegemonic meanings of automobility on the level of everyday practice. First, the car’s role as status symbol is fading and overridden as an object of utility that is only used when absolutely necessary and mostly for leisure purposes. Second, the car is losing its position as the realization of individual freedom and the coercive aspects of the car and automobility become strongly present amongst non-commercial carsharers. Thereby, automobility emerges as an ambivalent issue and becomes perceived as means of liberation and means of domination simultaneously. By working with and against automobility’s hegemonic meanings on the level of everyday practice, non-commercial carsharing is changing the system of automobility from within and bears the potential for substantially altering the reproduction of the system of automobility.

Highlights

The System of Automobility and the Automobile SubjectTransport is one of the main contributors to the climate and ecological crisis and in most countries the only sector that isn’t contributing to reducing emissions [1,2,3]
The notion of status symbol of the car came up in many of the interviews, but mostly as general reference to the meaning of private car ownership for other people: “It is a luxury to have a car at the snip of your finger and for that you pay ” (Family Schuster, Königsbrunn)
Reproduction andgovernance of the automobile subject, these aspects provided the system of automobility with an immense stability over the last century [33,51,52,60]

Summary

Introduction

The System of Automobility and the Automobile SubjectTransport is one of the main contributors to the climate and ecological crisis and in most countries the only sector that isn’t contributing to reducing emissions [1,2,3]. Until before the global breakout of COVID-19, sharing mobilities experienced a technology-fueled revival as ‘Mobility-as-a-service’ [21,22,23] In this development, hitchhiking becomes on-demand ridesharing (Uber, Lyft, etc.) and a huge variety of vehicle-sharing (carsharing, bikesharing, e-scootersharing, etc.) emerge from their roots in the environmental (carsharing) and anarchist (bikesharing) movement [24,25]. I define non-commercial carsharing as the shared purchase, ownership and/or usage of a car within an institutionalized process of a defined, local group. This can be privately between friends, neighbors and/or the extended family or formally organized through a non-profit organization. This article investigates how non-commercial carsharing, a self-organized non-profit form of carsharing, influences the meanings embedded in the ‘system of automobility’ [30] regarding the car and (auto)mobility

Methods

Results

Conclusion