The War on Vroom: The Politics of Electric Cars and Electronic Combustion

• In Event: Reimagining Virtue, Rights, and Masculinity in Environmental Political Theory

Abstract

The liberal environmental movement has embraced electric vehicles (EVs) as part of the transition from fossil fuel dependence; however, petromasculinity and patriarchal values also play an important role in the EV market. We draw from Daggett on petromasculinities, Baudrillard on hyperreality, and Malm on fossil fascism to build out a critique of ecomodernism and techno-fixes. To wit, we look at exhaust sound packages for EVs, which attempt to preserve a nostalgic masculine connection to a fossil fuel past by adding combustion engine noises to an electric car. Comments from Instagram posts reviewing the exhaust package from the Speciality Equipment Market Association show in 2023 are hostile to the new technology. Internal combustion vehicles serve as an identity marker in the US, and embracing these vehicles' power, pollution, and noise is part of a stance against environmentalism. From rolling coal to truck convoys, environmentalism appears as a threat to a future that is rooted in a fantastical past of American capitalist masculinity. The electric car, a product of hyperreal industrial capitalism and not a solution to the ecological crisis, has faced a backlash that highlights the growing necro-sexual and violent fascistic masculinities of US society. The reaction against EVs and their “inauthentic” sounds tell of the failures of green consumerism and liberal approaches to market-based environmentalism and highlights the gendered foundation of capitalist culture and the growing fascistic masculinity at the heart of American political identity. EV sound packages are an example of how the hyperreal has entered the culture wars of the American right. Since environmentalism and EVs are coded as queer or feminine by modern American conservatism, the attempts to maintain the nostalgic hyperreal are seen as smuggling queerness into the otherwise straight petromasculinity of car culture.

Author

• Emily Ray, Sonoma State University