On Electric Cars and Ecomodernist Silence

Un nen mira dins el capot d’un cotxe. Amsterdam, 1961 | Jack de Nijs, Fotocollectie Anefo, Nationaal Archief | Domini públic

Entends ce bruit fin qui est continu, et qui est le silence.
Écoute ce que l’on entend lorsque rien ne se fait entendre.
(Hear this fine noise which is continuous, and which is silence.
Listen to what you hear when nothing is being heard.)

Paul Valéry

The conquest of silence on wheels

As Karin Bijsterveld, Eefje Cleophas, Stefan Krebs and Gijs Mom document in their book “Sound and Safe: A History of Listening Behind the Wheel,” the automobile industry set out early on to conquer silence. While the sound of the combustion engine has historically functioned as the acoustic symbol of certain brands and as proof of their power, from the technical perspective of efficiency and mechanical reliability, the sound itself has always been undesirable. Although car manufacturers initially marketed their products as machines at the service of the intrepid spirit of the sporty, adventurous man, during the first half of the 20th century, cars began to be designed and marketed as a product targeted at the businessman who travelled for work and the middle-class family who travelled for pleasure. It was then that the essential qualities of the private car became its ease of use and interior comfort.

Coinciding with the increase in the number of vehicles manufactured and placed on the roads, the proliferation of roads and road infrastructures and the increase in traffic density, the car was to become a kind of motorised lounge in which the driver could relax during their journey, chat with the other occupants or listen to the radio. At that time, the industry had already begun progressively transforming the car cabin into a private space of acoustic encapsulation, improving noise insulation both from the outside and from the engine. Alongside this, a process began to simplify the driving experience and silence the mechanical transmission components, which historian Kurt Möser has called the “de-sportisation” of the automobile. In this way, and as an aesthetic counter-narrative, silence displaced engine noise as the main acoustic quality of the car, and many brands began to present it as proof of reliability, comfort and safety.

Thus, in a 1935 advertisement, Rolls Royce claimed that a Rolls was “as silent as its shadow,” while Peugeot compared the sound of its cars to that of “a swan swimming on a lake.” “Speed is the aristocracy of movement, but silence is the aristocracy of speed,” said Maurice Goudard, the Chairman of the French Society of Automotive Engineers, in 1935. During the second half of the twentieth century, silence and the harmonisation of sound between the various elements of the car continued to gain importance, and brands continued to take great care over the sound design of their cars, with marketing centred on the sensory experience they provided for the user. During the 1990s, manufacturers began to use TV commercials to highlight the silence and sound design of their vehicles. Based on the same type of marketing adopted decades earlier, many of these ads appealed to the sensory experience of driving, and even to its potential musicality. A paradigmatic example of this type of advertising is the spot launched by Honda in 2006, in which, after hearing the phrase “this is what a Honda feels like,” a choir sings the various sounds that the driver can hear at the wheel of a Civic.

Diagram made by Cara Daggett for the exhibition “Petro-masculinities,” organised by Bòlit Centre d’Art Contemporani in Girona in 2021

More recently, the appearance of electric vehicles and their mass marketing has added to this long chronology of the automotive industry’s conquest of silence and noise control. By reducing its noise emissions to near zero, the electric car has revived the manufacturers’ long-standing desire to extol and market the aristocratic-like silence that Rolls Royce, Peugeot and other brands presented over the last century as a unique symbol and quality of their vehicles. Silence, including that of the electric car, has become a coveted commodity of what Eva Illouz calls “emotional capitalism” and what Steven Miles has termed “the experience society.” However, it is precisely this global expansion of the electric car that shows how the historical process in which cars have been silenced and de-sportised has not been widely appreciated, nor does it meet with the approval of all drivers. This seems to be indicated, for example, by a recent study by the American Psychological Association entitled “Masculinity Contingency and Consumer Attitudes Toward Electric Vehicles.”

Based on the results of a survey, this study argues that the adherence of many men to traditional masculinity ideology is directly related to a low acceptance of electric vehicles. Using the concept of “masculinity contingency,” the study collected various preferences from respondents and analysed how these can be understood as a reflection of particular masculine identities. Without straying too far from the notion of habitus as proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, the “masculinity contingency” suggests that the feeling of masculinity is not an inherent trait of the individual, but depends largely on their ability to adhere to a set of social and cultural norms imposed, in this case, on cisgender men as a whole. Thus, the study revealed that, among the men surveyed, those who adhered most strongly to stereotypically masculine norms and codes were also the least interested in electric cars.

The marketing campaign rolled out by Ford for the launch of the electric version of its legendary Mustang is most illustrative in relation to the results of the American Psychological Association study. In addition to showing images of the car that display its sporty character and in which (strangely, as it is an electric car) there is abundant smoke, Ford decided to accompany the launch of the new Mustang with the release of a specific fragrance created for the occasion. After nearly 70% of respondents to a Ford survey said that when driving an electric car they would “miss the smell of gasoline,” Ford commissioned the creation of this fragrance with gasoline and rubber scents, adding “an ‘animal’ element to give a nod to the Mustang heritage” (sic). The name of this petro-perfume could not be more revealing: Mach-Eau. Sensory marketing was back, this time from Ford, to provide an olfactorily boost to the (for some, incomplete and diminished) experience of driving an electric car.

The bottle of the Mach-Eau fragrance, presented by Ford together with the electric version of its legendary Mustang.

Both the smell of gasoline and the sound of the combustion engine form part of a series of imaginaries and aesthetics associated with traditional cars and fossil fuels that fail to fit in with the new mobility paradigm supposedly represented by electric vehicles. This symbolic and psycho-affective substratum is precisely what Jaime Vindel calls fossil aesthetics and imaginaries. “Fossil aesthetics,” Vindel writes, “is the point at which raw experience of reality and the imaginary projections that associate industrial modernity with a certain discursive construction of energy converge.” For Vindel, the imaginary represents “that crossroads between aesthetics and ideology, between body and world image;” a “mental landscape that not only symbolises certain power relations (in this case, between man and nature) but also establishes them.” Vindel also refers to a third, broader concept that is directly related to the previous two – fossil culture. This could be defined as that “libidinal (infra)structure of social life” which allows and conditions both “the unfolding of a certain cultural institutionality” and the emergence of “imaginaries of wellbeing” strongly dependent on fossil fuels.

Ecomodernism, or the noise behind the silence

The fossil culture, aesthetics and imaginaries described by Vindel are closely related to that psycho-political dimension of petro-masculinity analysed by Cara Dagget and which, in our 2020 article, was related to the noise produced by the combustion engine and the exhaust pipe. However, as Ford’s marketing efforts show, these imaginaries persist in the age of the electric car. Another example of the persistence of this “petro-nostalgia” was the two launches of Tesla’s Cybertruck van, in 2019 and 2023 (the four years between the two were due to production problems). Presented amid smoke and Mad-Max-esque flares as “a better truck than a truck, and better sports car than a sports car,” the pick-up was subjected in front of an ecstatic audience to all sorts of durability tests, including sledgehammer blows, machine gun fire and a race against a Porsche 911. Jon Rogan even fired a titanium arrow at the pick-up to demonstrate the strength of its “exoskeleton made from a stainless-steel super alloy.” A real petromancer’s circus without a single drop of petrol.

As Cara Dagget writes in her article “Green-ing masculinity? Ecomodernism and electric trucks,” the Cybertruck seems to demonstrate that “a traditional version of American masculinity can be not only preserved, but even augmented by an electric battery.” Tesla’s website says the truck is “built for any planet” and shows photos of it towing a rocket reactor. Beyond the marketing, the imagery invoked by the Cybertruck has absolutely nothing to do with the problems of this planet, nor, of course, with a desire to help repair it. “In some cases,” said Musk, “you get a tad of a sundown of civilization vibe. We at Tesla have the highest quality technology for the apocalypse (…) Assuming at any point you contend with another vehicle [and drive a Cybertruck], you win,” he said. Not surprisingly, during the presentation, one member of the audience couldn’t resist the urge to greet Musk with a shout of “Terminator!”

Far from being a stale joke, Musk’s words and gestures are a symptom of the hegemony of a very specific way of understanding and tackling the serious eco-social crisis derived from global warming. Although what Daggett calls “eco-modern masculinity” (of which Musk would be the main exponent) would seem to be less dependent on fossil fuels, it is no less dependent on energy. After all, Daggett points out, so-called ecomodernism shares with petro-masculinity “the desire for endless, cheap energy, and the assumption that more energy is always a good thing.” A tweet by Musk, posted (and then deleted) on 25 July 2020, a few months after the coup in Bolivia that overthrew the government of Evo Morales, made his political positioning very clear. “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it,” Musk responded to a Twitter user who accused the US Government of being behind the military action to guarantee access to lithium, a mineral of which the Andean country has abundant reserves, and which is used to manufacture electric vehicle batteries. A few months ago, Musk also posted a tweet showing his support for Javier Milei shortly before the elections in Argentina, another country with large lithium reserves.

Tweet by Elon Musk posted and deleted on 24 July 2020.

However, it would be a mistake to think that the approaches and discourses of ecomodernism are always as outrageous and hyperbolic as the messages that Musk brandishes with the autocratic arrogance of what Dagget describes as “fossil fascism” and which now seems to be reformulating itself in an “eco” version. In its origins, ecomodernism was presented as a friendly, humanist movement that looked to the future with optimism and hope in the possibilities offered by technology. In a green-framed document adorned in plant motifs, the signatories of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, published in 2015, claim to be convinced that “knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene” (sic). The proposal of ecomodernism is to bring about a “radical and accelerated decoupling of humans and nature” based on and driven by “modern energy,” with nuclear energy being the best option among all those available. This accelerated technological progress, the signatories of the manifesto state bluntly, “will require the active, assertive, and aggressive participation of private sector entrepreneurs, markets, civil society, and the state.” Underneath these words, perhaps we can hear the fine, continuous silence of the Cybertruck?

Although the manifesto was written almost ten years ago, today, ecomodernism is still the trend that guides the global ecological transition at the political, institutional, industrial and corporate levels. Thus, the electric car continues to be presented as a clean alternative to the internal combustion vehicle, free of any sinful energy. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The transition to electric mobility involves a whole host of challenges and problems that require much more than the supposedly miraculous solutions of technology. As Robert N. Charette writes in the introduction to the study “The EV Transition Explained,” “Technological change is hard, social change even harder.” The profound transformation of work involved in the transition to electric mobility, the enormous challenges and material requirements involved in the design and manufacture of batteries, the large-scale creation of energy supply infrastructures, the invariable problem of the occupation of public space by automobiles, the setting of vehicle prices to make them affordable for broad sectors of society, and the direct relationship that exists between this new industry and economic nationalism are just some of the aspects analysed by Charette. Furthermore, he says, electric vehicles alone will not be sufficient to reduce carbon emissions, rather this will require “enormous lifestyle changes (…) people will need to drive and fly less, walk and bike more, and take public transportation.” The transition to electric mobility will be “much harder, much more costly and take much longer than its proponents believe.”

In addition to all this, as readily acknowledged by Musk and as analysed by the authors of the article “Electric Vehicle Paradise? Exploring the Value Chains of Green Extractivism,” the global deployment of electric vehicles is associated with a new form of green extractivism that “perpetuates an imperial mode of living, curtailing opportunities for more globally just futures.” Through the discursive construction and propagation of new “sociotechnical imaginaries,” the automobile industry and other interested actors seek to conceal the extractivist and colonial practices that result from an assertive and aggressive transition (as prescribed by the signatories of the ecomodernist manifesto) towards electromobility. Deployed according to the ecomodernist formula, this race towards the implementation of electric mobility would therefore resemble an eco-accelerationism or, to adapt the meaning of the term proposed by Paul Virilio, an eco-dromocratic revolution founded on capitalist logic and an unwavering mandate for speed and unlimited growth. From the procurement of the raw materials needed to manufacture its components to its marketing, the electric vehicle value chain ultimately involves a succession of material and symbolic violence very similar to that which Daggett describes in relation to petro-masculinity.

Of course, there is no glimpse of any of this in the brilliant sociotechnical imaginaries that manufacturers and other actors interested in the large-scale expansion of electromobility insistently try to push on society. To use another example of automobile marketing and once again highlight the symbolic value given to silence in the construction of these imaginaries, before we finish, it would be very apt to take a look at the advertisement that Volkswagen launched in 2015 to promote its electric models. The spot begins with the images and noise of traffic in a congested square in the centre of Hannover. We see how the neighbours close their windows and pedestrians look bothered by the din. Everything suddenly changes as the noisy vehicles gradually leave the square and are replaced by a fleet of cars of different models, all white. Silence fills the space as the cars begin to move in circles around the square. At this point, a smiling choir of children dressed in white emerges from under a large tree in the landscaped flower bed in the centre of the square and begin to sing an a cappella version of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.” Enraptured by this curious epiphany, passers-by smile as harmony reigns in the air and the cars continue to drive around the square.

It is ironic that, even though it aims for something completely different, the advert can be interpreted as an allegory of the true ecomodernist discourse. While its intention was to convey the idea that the electric car will bring peace and quiet to the streets, making life in the city more harmonious and pleasant, the sudden appearance of white cars and their stalking choreography as they circle around the square are rather sinister. Where are all these white cars coming from? Who is driving them? Where are they going? Why have they filled the square to the point of bringing the other traffic to a standstill? Why are they circling in what resembles a strange and disturbing ritual? Beyond the original intention, the images in the ad can be understood as representing the decoupling, as prescribed by ecomodernism, of human activity and a nature that exists on the margins of society. Moreover, there is nothing natural about the silent background over which the song is heard and, rather than an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity, it would seem to suggest an action of silencing and imposing a dogmatic and prefabricated discourse. This feeling is finally confirmed when, at the end of the commercial, a huge banner with the phrase “enjoy the silence” is unrolled commandingly from the top of a building. Thus, and bearing in mind the true intentions of ecomodernism, we might ask ourselves whether the most appropriate Depeche Mode song as a slogan and soundtrack for the campaign would, in fact, have been “Just Can’t Get Enough.”