A brief history of automotive domination
The combination of chronic underfunding, capitalist planning, and political bias toward the automobile has sabotaged transit at almost every step.
It was the shot heard round the world—for transit experts, at least. “I think public transport is painful. It sucks,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk opined at a 2017 convention. “Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time. It’s a pain in the ass. That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”1
Criticism of Musk’s comments was swift and damning. Transit planner Jarrett Walker tweeted that the billionaire’s “hatred of sharing space with strangers is a luxury (or pathology) that only the rich can afford,” while Rich Sampson of the Community Transportation Association of America quipped: “When you’re white, wealthy & emotionally estranged, you view everyone else as an inconvenience at best and a threat at worst.”2 In response, Musk tweeted at Walker: “You’re an idiot,” clarifying a few hours later that he “meant to say ‘sanctimonious idiot.’”3
The online fireworks weren’t only entertaining—but also instructive in how automobile dominance is justified and defended by its proponents. Musk’s anti-transit comments contained an age-old myth of a “love affair with the automobile” that has been weaponized for a century.
There is nothing inevitable about widespread automobility. Contrary to elite opinions, the daily deluge of car commercials, and the implications of every related political announcement—to fund a new road, expand a highway, or offer electric vehicle subsidies—there is no such thing as an inherent “love affair with the automobile” that needs to continue. What we think of as car culture, and increasingly as truck and SUV culture, is the product of a century-long onslaught of corporate lobbying, propaganda, and mythmaking, along with massive state subsidies that produced the infrastructure required for suburbanization and automobile dominance. It has largely worked. By and large, transit systems in North America are underused, dilapidated, and overpriced.
Some urbanist explanations of this ideological coup revolve around the alleged conspiracy of National City Lines between 1938 and 1950, in which General Motors, Firestone Tires, Standard Oil of California, and other companies that were invested in automotive dominance bought up and destroyed complex networks of electric streetcars in cities across the U.S. and Canada. There is some truth to the story, which found a popular retelling in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In 1949, participating companies were convicted for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act via National City Lines’ monopoly over diesel bus sales and products, which further entrenched automobiles as the basic form of transportation. Functional streetcar systems were replaced by buses, which eventually lost out to cars. But while the so-called GM streetcar conspiracy is a particularly memorable example of how automotive and oil interests collaborate to pursue profit, the story of how car dominance came to be is considerably longer and more complex. As argued by Australian writer Jeff Sparrow about the so-called conspiracy: “In many ways that missed the bigger point: simply, streetcars, trains and other transport systems required state support to be viable, and that support increasingly went to automobiles.”4 Let’s review some of that history’s highlights (and lowlights).
The first Model T was sold in 1908, and the first U.S. federal road program was inaugurated in 1916.5 Peter Norton, author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, told me that by the 1920s cars were viewed by much of the public as extremely dangerous, understood as forcing pedestrians off streets, crowding curbs, delaying streetcars, taking up excess space by sitting idle, and failing to serve a large portion of the people in a dense city. Judges, juries, and newspaper editorial pages blamed the car every time one killed a pedestrian on the street.
Dan Albert, author of Are We There Yet?: The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless, observed: “The upper classes used automotive violence to drive the working classes and urban poor from the streets—relatively wide open spaces in dense urban neighborhoods. Vigilantes responded with attacks on the millionaire motorists who raced through working class neighborhoods.”6
The automobile was seen as a clear threat to the peace and safety of urban residents. As a result, municipal engineers took a series of steps to limit private car use. Those included banning curb parking, designing intersections and signal timing in a way that deliberately delayed traffic, and encouraging pedestrians to cross the street anywhere they liked. In their early era, North American cities were explicitly designed for the pedestrian and the streetcar.
“That status quo just terrified people who wanted to sell cars,” Norton says. “People were actually not buying very many cars in cities.” The automotive industry then realized that “the obvious solution lies only in a radical redefinition of our conception of what a city street is for.”
A concerted propaganda campaign by the automotive industry ensued. When a pedestrian was killed, the industry worked to ensure the victim was subject to public blame. Norton says that huge efforts were poured into a “campaign of organized ridicule against people who walk in streets,” including collaborating with local police departments to physically pick up jaywalkers and carry them to the curb in order to embarrass them into never repeating the “crime.” When cars collided, auto interests called for wider roads to improve safety rather than slowing down traffic.
In 1932, the National Highway Users Conference was officially inaugurated by General Motors, the American Automobile Association, and other interests.7 Every safety issue that arose was solved in a way that didn’t slow or restrict cars.
“It was a really substantially successful effort to create a car-dependent city,” Norton says. “And the car-dependent city became self-perpetuating: to survive in the car-dependent city, you have to get a car. And once you have a car, now your interests do align to some degree with the proponents of the car-dependent city because they’re the people who say, ‘If you’re stuck in traffic, we’ll get you another lane.’”
Private companies that were contracted by cities to provide streetcar service, sometimes along with electricity and road paving, began to fail en masse.8 Throughout the twentieth century, many major transit systems were taken over by municipalities. The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 divided the previously close relationship between the transit industry and electric utilities, and the rise of suburbs, highways, and automobile dominance further undermined the financial viability of private transit operators. Yet even after being taken over, many transit systems were losing out to automobility in state support.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of 1933, premised on mass consumption of cheap energy, played a major part in this process. Matthew Huber, author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, told me that prior to World War II, American workers didn’t have high enough wages or the public infrastructure to consume in a way that created sufficient demand for capitalism to expand. The Wagner Act of 1935 dramatically altered those conditions by guaranteeing the rights of labourers to organize into unions and collectively bargain without fear of being fired. Higher wages for white workers combined with a massive mobilization of public resources to create the capacity for widespread private car ownership and highly segregated single-family suburban living. The GI Bill of 1944 further entrenched this trajectory by offering very low- interest mortgages for new suburban homes to returning white soldiers while systematically denying them to Black soldiers through bureaucratic restrictions, violent intimidation, and redlining; a huge majority of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans dispersed over the following decades were for suburban homes.9
The automotive industry tirelessly advocated for grade- separated, divided, controlled-access highways through cities. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 was largely financed by a gas tax. This process satisfied industry, as it understood that highways would be able to expand much faster via a gas tax than toll roads.10 The $128.9 billion interstate highway system, covering 90 percent of highway costs, was planned out by the auto industry and highway engineers—not urban planners or local communities.11 These freeways were antithetical to bus service, which relied on frequent opportunities to stop.12
The mass buildout decimated communities of colour, destroying local neighbourhood economies, displacing residents, cutting off access to other parts of the city, and compounding racist oppression that had been institutionalized by redlining and blockbusting.13 Violence and intimidation was also used by white residents, especially against Black families. As historians Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese wrote about the development of the suburbs:
African American, Asian American, and Latino families battled for access to the suburbs, challenging not only the presumed whiteness of suburbia but the ideology of white supremacy implicit in postwar suburban ideol ogy. In response, white suburbanites in concert with other crucial players—including government—created a web of discrimination that secured links between race, social advantage, and metropol itan space.14
This racist and ecologically devastating process became self-reinforcing. Transit usage dropped drastically after the war, leading to more cuts.15 White suburbanites became convinced of their inherent right to drive gas guzzlers to and from their homes in increasingly sprawled cities, while simultaneously opposing higher taxes. This culminated in the rise of so-called taxpayer revolts like California’s 1978 Proposition 13, which stunted the ability of municipalities to gather property taxes and has been described as “the antitax measure that ignited the Reagan Revolution and the conservative era.”16 Huge public resources had been used to produce geographies of privatism; such a revolt was an almost inevitable endpoint. As Huber explains: “Privatized geographies lead to privatized forms of politics, which are not good.”
Throughout this time, automobile companies lied and evaded regulations. Famous examples include the following:
Car companies have gamed fuel economy standards for years, with a 42 percent gap between test and actual performance.18 American automobile manufacturers spent almost $50 million in 2017 lobbying the federal government to lower fuel economy standards.19 “At each step of this industry’s evolution, they have lied and they have lied in a way specifically that causes harm to human beings,” Matthew Lewis, a climate and energy policy consultant in Berkeley, told me.
University of Iowa law professor Gregory Shill has made the case that the U.S. is “car-dependent by law” at every level of government: “traffic laws, land use, criminal law, torts, insurance, environmental, vehicle safety regulations, and even tax law provide incentives to cooperate with the dominant transport mode and punishment for those who defect.”20 These structures, Shill argued, not only displace costs onto non- drivers but institutionalize a “state of dependency and inequality.”
A similar argument by Brown University anthropologist Catherine Lutz identified five “automobility-induced pathways to inequality,” concluding:
With the aid of unremitting state support over the course of a century, car and oil corporations emerged at the center of a regime of accumulation that directs massive amounts of daily spending by all car owners and users, directly and via the tax system, to a small number of people and groups at the very top of the U.S. economic system.21
Public transit was a victim of this legal and ideological coup. The only transit services that were able to retain ridership through the upheaval were the grade-separated rail lines in large cities like New York and Chicago. “Only when transit didn’t need to share the road with the car, and frequent service continued, was it able to survive,” Jonathan English wrote.22
The massive Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 committed $375 million over three years of federal capital aid for transit, mostly rapid transit systems.23 But the new rail systems failed to coordinate service with buses, leading to low ridership in many places. The same error was echoed in the commuter rail and light rail eras of the 1980s onwards.24
Starting in the late 1970s, neoliberalism ushered in a new phase of privatization, gutting of spending on public services, and fragmentation of transit service. Under U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher, buses were deregulated and privatized in 1985, along with a series of state-owned enterprises related to rail infrastructure. Between 1995 and 2013, bus fares outside London shot up by 35 percent above inflation, while many routes were cut.25
Most transit services in North America have remained relatively public in terms of ownership and operation. But that’s changing fast—particularly through the public-private partnership (P3) model of development. There are many different kinds of P3s, ranging from basic service and management contracts, to design-build arrangements (in which the private companies construct the asset), to design-build-finance- operate-maintain, to build-own-operate (in which the private sector maintains ownership on behalf of a government without full privatization).
The appeal of P3s for neoliberal governments is that short-term risks and costs can be transferred to the private sector, keeping debt off the books despite the likelihood of costing more in the long run. Toby Sanger, executive director of Canadians for Tax Fairness, explains: “This really hides the cost. There’s no actual accounting rules for the public sector that specify how you need to report P3s. Those future costs are largely kept off the books. It’s impossible to find out what these are unless governments open their books or the auditor general looks at them.”
In Toronto, all of Metrolinx’s proposed light rail transit (LRT) lines are being constructed with P3 arrangements. In 2015, a consortium of private partners under the name of Crosslinx Transit Solutions agreed to design, build, finance, and maintain the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line. In July 2018, Crosslinx Transit Solutions filed a notice of motion alleging that the provincially appointed Metrolinx and the Ontario Infrastructure and Lands Corporation had delayed their work, requesting more time and compensation to finish the project. The two sides eventually reached a settlement, but Metrolinx wouldn’t disclose how much more money it was giving the consortium in order to meet the deadline.26
Shelagh Pizey-Allen of TTCriders told the Globe and Mail: “It sort of shatters that rhetoric around P3s keeping cost down and downloading the cost onto the private sector.”27 A December 2018 report by the Ontario auditor general revealed the payout was $237 million, euphemistically criticizing the alternative financing and procurement (AFP) process: “In an AFP project, a private-sector consortium is paid a premium to bear the risks of project delays and cost overruns. However, under the Eglinton Crosstown LRT AFP contract, the responsibility for these risks was not fully transferred to the AFP consortium.”28
Meanwhile, Ottawa’s Confederation Line—a 7.7-mile light rail line that uses a P3 deal—has faced constant delays, criticisms of lack of transparency, and concerns about operations in winter.29 Since opening in September 2019, the transit line has been plagued with operational issues, requiring a fleet of twenty replacement buses to remain on standby in case of delays and breakdowns.30 Few media reports have bothered to note that a private consortium designed, built, and maintains the line.
The DC Circulator—a downtown bus service in Washington, DC—is operated by RATP Group, Paris’s publicly owned transit operator, in partnership with Washington’s transit agency.31 Detroit’s infamous streetcar line was known as the M-1, until the founder of mortgage lending company Quicken Loans bought the naming rights for five million dollars and changed the name to the QLine. The 3.3-mile QLine, described by CityLab as “hardly mass transit” and “a boon for local developers” due to its lack of coordination with the rest of the city’s transit system, was funded by a gaggle of local capitalists in partnership with the state and federal governments.32
Stephanie Farmer, a sociology professor at Roosevelt University, told me that the city put together the Chicago Infrastructure Trust to explicitly work on P3 projects, streamlining private finance into public works projects. Hence Elon Musk’s absurd proposed Hyperloop project to the airport that would fire autonomous sixteen-person pods through dedicated tunnels, though Chicago already has a dedicated rapid transit service to the airport called the Blue Line.33 (The Chicago Hyperloop was effectively killed off with the election of new mayor Lori Lightfoot in May 2019—but a similar project remains on the table for Cleveland.34)
Due to the expected rate of return for private investors, P3 projects tend to cost more than if they were publicly built.35 Privatization has also been criticized for its negative impacts on system coordination and the city’s ability to build up its own capacity for future infrastructure projects. The “value for money” found via P3s is often found through undermined labour practices that threaten workers’ well-being.36
The construction of Montreal’s Réseau express métropolitain (REM), owned by pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), has been criticized for its potential to pull riders from existing public transit systems and undermine the potential for coordination with or expansion of other systems. It also lacks financial transparency—particularly around fares.37
In many instances, such as the London Underground refurbishment in the early 2000s, private partners in P3s have walked away and shut down their project subsidiary with bankruptcy if escalating costs threaten its profitability, which in turn leaves the public forced to cover costs.
Transit riders and the general public can also be deprived of opportunities to give input, because of the quasi-private nature of many P3 arrangements. Representatives of Toronto’s TTCriders said that the governance structure of Metrolinx—an unelected board appointed by the province with decisions made behind closed doors—exhibits characteristics of “creeping privatization” despite technically being a public body.
Privatization can also manifest at much smaller levels, such as Calgary’s failed contracting out of the design for an electronic fare payment system. It was eventually cancelled and a lawsuit was filed over the project in 2015; the city still doesn’t have an electronic fare payment system.38
This ever-increasing commodification and fragmentation has bred considerable distrust of transit agencies, which, in turn, undermines their ability to secure new funding through tax referendums. That matters a great deal, as considerable transit funding has been downloaded onto states, provinces, and municipalities, requiring highly visible and often regressive methods including sales taxes and property taxes.39
Marta Viciedo, of Miami’s Urban Impact Lab, told me that a half-penny sales tax was passed in 2002 specifically for public transportation. It was intended to double rail service on Miami’s Metrorail, but only three miles of the proposed twenty miles was ever built, while bus routes were cut.
Viciedo says that there’s a bitter fight underway in South Dade because part of county leadership wants a modernized bus rapid transit (BRT) line, while residents emphatically desire the Metrorail extension that they’ve paid the half-penny tax for, for sixteen years—a situation that became increasingly hostile in 2018.40 “A lot of that money has been misspent,” she told me. “It is unlikely that a referendum for additional dollars will pass, simply because of the broken promises and the immense lack of trust that we have right now.” Construction on the BRT corridor is expected to start in mid-2020; the county transportation board voted against light rail in 2018 but pledged to covert it into light rail if the BRT met certain ridership requirements.41 In response to that proposal, Miami-Dade County Commissioner Dennis Moss said: “We always find a reason why we can’t do something.”
Other cities have simply voted down proposals at the outset. In 2015, 62 percent of Metro Vancouver residents voted against a 0.5 percent sales tax to fund plans for public transit expansion.42 The question of increased transit funding should never have gone to referendum, David Moscrop, a political theorist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa, told me. The decision represented a “very cynical abuse of participatory democracy” by then-premier Christy Clark. Moscrop says there were plenty of other issues at play in the TransLink referendum. The “yes” side was uncoordinated and poorly framed, relying on billionaire Jim Pattison to be its spokesperson instead of someone like a single parent who depends on public transit. Meanwhile, the opposing side—led by the right-wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation—successfully made the vote about TransLink’s alleged inefficiency and bloatedness.
In Nashville, the Koch brothers financed the astroturf group Americans for Prosperity, which helped defeat a $5.4 billion transit referendum in 2018.43 Americans for Prosperity had been involved in anti-transit campaigns across the country since 2015, including in Arkansas and Utah.
The combination of chronic underfunding, capitalist planning, and political bias toward the automobile has sabotaged transit at almost every step. Budget constraints restrict a transit agency’s coverage (how much of a city or region is adequately serviced), affordability (what fare hikes are required to make up for lack of public funding), and frequency (how often a bus or train arrives, and if they can be accessed at non-peak times).
Almost all transit agencies now suffer from serious unreliability. An assessment of 2018 bus data found that weekday on-time performance—defined as arriving at a bus stop between one minute early and four minutes late—ranged enormously between eighteen U.S. cities, from 44 percent in Baltimore to 75 percent in Portland.44 As described by New York’s TransitCenter, which compiled the numbers, “If these were grades in school, even the highest performing agency, [Portland’s] TriMet, only receives a ‘C.’” An analysis of forty bus routes servicing the Toronto suburb of Scarborough found a total of 11,000 delays of greater than ten minutes in 2018, averaging 15.25 minutes each.45
Because of austerity, transit services run buses or trains less often, making a late or missing bus even more calamitous for riders—especially for shift workers who ride transit outside of peak hours. Inadequate budgets also force arbitrary decisions about whether to prioritize increasing ridership—which usually means building new routes for the rich—or attempting to improve service for poor and low-density areas.
In many cities, the only public transit modes and routes that receive sustained investment are rail lines built to primarily serve affluent commuters, including to airports and stadiums. These projects receive popular support from chambers of commerce and the business press, linking transit to global competitiveness. Meanwhile, investments in buses often languish, leaving low-income residents without a dependable means of getting around. That’s particularly the case for uncoordinated bus and rail services operated by separate agencies without single-fare models. In Toronto, for example, this means that while riders of the TTC can transfer between subways, streetcars, and buses, they have to pay a considerable premium to take Metrolinx’s commuter trains.46
University of Pennsylvania sociology professor Daniel Aldana Cohen emphasizes that the bus is the service that most poor people ride, and that the new urbanist “smart growth” agenda often ignores its critical role. “People just kind of hate buses. And the public sector hasn’t done much to make buses more comfortable at all. There’s nobody defending buses, on the one hand, and on the other hand bus routes are probably under the most sustained and direct attack from the coming collective private rideshare.”
Atlanta is a prime example of this deeply racist funding approach, which has been described as “highways for the largely white suburbs and a chronically underfunded public transit system for people of color and low-income people.”47 In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. said about Atlanta: “The system has virtually no consideration for connecting the poor people with their jobs. There is only one possible explanation for this situation, and that is the racist blindness of city planners.”48
The same dynamic has played out in Chicago. Professor Farmer told me that transit investments have consistently been made to benefit wealthy neighbourhoods and sectors including tech and finance, while depriving low-income communities in South Chicago of funds for improved rail service. “What you see amongst the 1 percent and wealthy in Chicago is that they’re mobilizing the city’s resources to build transit projects that benefit them,” she says.
The introduction of new rail or bus rapid transit infrastructure in a community can trigger rapid gentrification and displacement of low-income residents from the area. Transit-oriented development—planning for density and walkability around transit—is often initiated by governments in the interest of attracting real estate development. “Upzoning,” or changing zoning for increased density and mixed uses, also creates its own consequences if it is not done in a way that protects low-income residents.49
The very language of “densification” can be code for privatized real estate development that results in pushing low-wage jobs and residences to the outer suburbs. This creates an ironic inversion: the people who most need affordable transit are displaced in the process of its construction.50
Harsha Walia, an organizer with No One Is Illegal and author of Undoing Border Imperialism, told me that the argument of densification has been powerfully weaponized in Burnaby, a community to the east of Vancouver with a high percentage of Chinese, South Asian, and Filipino residents. Walia says that transit routes and SkyTrain routes in particular have had displacing effects, with higher-end condos pushing out existing residents. With gentrification comes increased policing, which leads to harassment and incarceration of Black and Indigenous people—especially those who are unhoused, criminalized for using substances or selling sex work, or living with untreated mental health issues.51
It’s a similar situation in Pittsburgh. “Our city is being gentrified and a lot of people are being displaced,” Crystal Jennings, housing and transit co-ordinator for Pittsburghers for Public Transit, told me. “It’s hard to try to find housing near a good transit stop or service. A lot of people are getting pushed out to the suburbs.”
P.E. Moskowitz, author of How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality and the Fight for the Neighborhood, explained to me that public transit is now almost exclusively built as an income generator and tool of gentrification that in turn displaces the very people who rely on it the most. In fact, it’s partly because of unequal and often segregating transit service that areas with quality transit gentrify and generate enormous profits. “With a more equitably distributed and more extensive public transit network, you would take the pressure off a lot of neighbourhoods that are currently experiencing gentrification,” Moskowitz says.
The construction of Toronto’s Eglinton Cross LRT has been lambasted by Black business owners in Little Jamaica for obstructing customer access and threatening property tax hikes that will likely displace their multi-decade presence for condos.52 Businesses complaining about construction, especially of transit projects, is a tale as old as time, but the racialized impacts of such processes shouldn’t be ignored.
“Like austerity anywhere else, the responsibility to finance cascades downward. It fell increasingly on cities, which means cities need robust tax bases. The way you create a robust tax base is you cluster people with high salaries in your city. And increasingly, the companies that pay the highest salaries are the gentrifying companies: your Amazons, your tech companies. The way you get the money to build the transit system you dream of is by inviting things that destabilize the rest of your social environment.”
—Alex Birnel, MOVE Texas
Rather than trying to fundamentally challenge these inequalities, many transit agencies and planners are forced to tinker around the edges while they try to maintain their existing funding by demonstrating ridership growth. Bus network redesigns, which have been described as the “hottest trend in transit,” can illustrate the pitfalls of obsessing over ridership growth over other metrics.53 Maryland’s Republican governor cancelled a proposed light rail line in Baltimore after election in 2015, but agreed to fund a bus system redesign as what was described as a “consolation prize.”54 Costing $135 million, the overhaul included a “high-frequency grid, dedicated bus lanes, and transit signal priority corridors that would dramatically improve service.” These were all critical steps to improving transit service, but the process hasn’t resulted in a major uptick in ridership.
Some may argue that it’s not necessarily supposed to; rather, the redesign was to clear out inefficiencies and make sure transit vehicles are running on the most sensible routes, allowing for easy integration of more routes in the future. Yet there are still plenty of no-show buses and lack of frequent service. The one thing reported as the most lacking component of the Baltimore revamp? Money. As explained by CityLab:
Underfunding is a problem for transit agencies around the country, but it especially stings for Baltimore—a city where 30 percent of the population doesn’t have access to a car, affordable housing tends to be far from job centers, and where public schools rely on the [Maryland Transit Administration] to transport 27,000 students to school every day.55
That isn’t to suggest that improvements like bus network designs are inherently harmful: some can be done with great consideration and consultation.56 But they can often be used to make it seem like transit can be improved without challenging the crisis of funding cuts and neoliberal car-centric planning. The same goes for solutions like dedicated bus lanes and all-door boarding: excellent in theory, but easily undermined by lack of money. Such policy tensions are a microcosm of the crisis facing transit. This financial situation has led many people to ignore or be complicit in oppressive systems, and it has widened the door to allow venture-capital-backed capitalists to poach transit ridership. Issues of gentrification, air pollution, rising fares, policing, and neglect of many riders—including seniors, people with disabilities, and women, trans, and gender non-conforming people—are not inherent to public transit. They are the result of transit operating within a specific political context, the dominant objective of which is the restoration and maintenance of ruling-class power—with severely racist and classist repercussions.
These material conditions can change. But they are the ones that we face at this present moment, and that advocates of the “three revolutions” are successfully appealing to with their next-generation automotive technologies.