THE AUTOMOBILE ROAD TO TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE Diffusion of the Automobile as a Process of Technological Substitution

Advancement of the motor vehicle and its production methods is analyzed as a process of technological change. In a broader context, motor vehicles evolved as an integral component of road transportation through a series of interlaced substitutions of old by new technologies. Building on a large number of studies that described technological substitution processes, first it is shown how new energy forms replaced their predecessors and how the old marine-transport technologies were substituted by new ones. These examples constitute some of the oldest, empirically documented technological changes and show that many events in the d;•namics of energy substitution and marine transport are related to technological changes in road transportation . It is shown that these substitution processes can be described by simple rules and that the replacement of old by new technologies in the energy and transport systems lasted about 80 years . The technological changes within road transportation, however, were more rapid. Replacement of horses by automobiles and older by newer generations of motor vehicles and production methods lasted only a few decades in the United States. Thus , technological substitutions within the road-transportation system were considerably shorter than the expansion of railroads , surfaced roads, all road vehicles together, and the more recent expansion of air transportation . Introduction Analysis of the historical replacement of old by new technologies has shown that most of these processes can be described by simple rules that are captured in the logisticsubstitution model [ 13 , 14, 15, 16]. The evolution of motor vehicles during the last 100 years can also be seen as a series of interlaced technological changes of production methods and vehicles. It will be shown that these changes can be captured by logisticsubstitution analysis and that they have occurred with a high degree of regularity. We will distinguish the substitution processes in terms of annual production of motor vehicles from equivalent processes at the level of the whole fleet. Nebojsa Nakicenovic is a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria . His research interests include the long-term patterns of technological change and, in particular, the evolution of energy, automotive, and aerospace technologies. Address reprint requests to Dr. Nebojsa Nakicenovic , IIASA , Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg , Austria. © 1986 by Elsevier Science Publishing Co. , Inc. 0040-1625/86/$03 . 50