CHAIRPERSON
Dr Lin Weiqiang, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
Since more than a century the electric car has been pushed to the fore as the ideal car of tomorrow.
So, why would its implementation succeed now? Or wouldn’t it?
In this presentation, Dr Gijs Mom (Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands), engineer and historian of technology, will look back on the so-called failure to introduce the electric car in the past. We are now on the brink of the fifth generation, and we might wonder whether its breakthrough is imminent, or whether we face the fifth ‘failure’. In the presentation, technical and socio-cultural arguments, previous and current, will be weighed. It will be argued that so far the electric car was very successful, even if it was never introduced.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Gijs Mom gradutated as a literary historian and an automotive engineer. Since 1999, he teaches at Eindhoven University of Technbology, the Netherlands. He wrote a doctoral dissertation on the history of the electric vehicle (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), and recently published a monograph on the deeper motives of automotive mobility: Atlantic Automobilism; Emergence and persistence of the car, 1895 – 1940 (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015). He is currently finishing a second monograph, tentatively titled World Mobility History (1945 – 2010).
REGISTRATION
Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you click on the “Register” button above to RSVP.
