Systemic Innovation

7Technological Change and Environmental Transition: Lessons from the Case of the Automobile

7.1. Introduction

The current technological system faces a major limit: its production of pollution and damage has become completely destructive of the environment. The encounter with this limit is the product of the nature of the technologies implemented: they are greedy for natural resources, produce pollution (in particular greenhouse gases), and are very disruptive if not destructive of ecosystems. The major technological change that is beginning to take place is the replacement of traditional technologies with technologies that are called “sustainable”, i.e. compatible with the preservation of the environment. But this intrinsic nature of environmental damage by the technologies implemented in the contemporary technological system is today made critical by the scale of human activity and will undoubtedly lead to a limit of these activities and a diversification of technological solutions for the same activity.

The field of road transport, which can be assimilated to the automobile since it is entirely operated by motor vehicles (light vehicles, heavy goods vehicles and buses), which we will call the automotive system, will be used as an illustration of technological change under environmental constraints. The central component of this automotive system is its almost exclusively thermal motor component: conventional internal combustion engines or diesel engines. The automotive system ...