ABSTRACT
When we visit an ‘autosalon’ or ‘motor show’, we are invited to enter the future of transport: progress envisioned in terms of technology and technological advance. In their celebration of technology as key to a better future, autosalons are the utopian self-images of our technological culture. In such prophesying about the future, the belief in technology seems endless. Indeed the continuing stream of new automobiles and features presented at autosalons gives technological progress a sort of inevitability. The leading idea is that whatever the transport problem, technology can fix it. Autosalons capitalize on a pervasive ideology in our culture, one called by the historian Howard Segal ‘technological utopianism’. 1 Technological advance is seen, by definition, as something positive and desirable. It is based on faith in technology not merely as tools and machines, but also as the means of achieving a ‘perfect’ society in the near future.
