[Book review] From Automated to Autonomous Driving: A Transnational Research History on Pioneers, Artifacts and Technological Change (1950–2000) By Fabian Kröger. Cham: Springer, 2024. Pp. 307

To the casual observer, the self-driving car, exemplified by Tesla cars cruising on autopilot and robotaxi services like Baidu Apollo and Waymo, might appear to be a relatively recent phenomenon. As Fabian Krger, a historian of technology at the University of Paris 1 Panthon-Sorbonne, points out in his new book, however, the enabling technologies of self-driving cars have a longer history than you might expect. Engineers have been imagining and working on these systems since the 1930s, and their efforts, as compiled and described by Krger in painstaking detail, reveal much about the development of automobile technology over a century. The subtext of this meticulously researched book casts into relief an essential tension of automobility in its propensity to simultaneously empower and alienate the individual motorist. Traffic congestion and accidents, Krger observes, are typically cited as the problems for which the automated or self-driving car is framed as the solution.