The problem with Pod Man

Abstract

Pod Man is the rational, individual and hyper-masculine transport consumer entrenched in industry narratives focused on automated vehicle technologies and infrastructures. This article interrogates how these narratives are constituted, the futures they imagine, predict and promote, and how people and households are presented within these futures. The discussions in this article are based on a content analysis of sixty industry reports. While there is an emerging body of research engaging with the gendered and racialised dimensions of future automated mobilities, previous studies have for the most part focused on conceptual and promotional visualisations of automated vehicles. Building on this existing work, I argue that equal attention needs to be paid to the ideologies and agendas embedded in industry reports. Taken together, the visual representations and industry reports contribute to large scale anticipatory narratives about possible futures. To better understand and critique the values and logics of these narratives, I discuss how the Pod Man persona underlies visions of automated vehicles and its potential consequences for shaping potential future trajectories.

Keywords:

• Mobility futures
• gender
• autonomous vehicles
• Pod Man
• creative methods

Welcome to the future of transport, as seen through the eyes of Pod Man, an ideal model for travel in the year 2030. Pod Man values efficiency, productivity, and personalisation. He expects any service he uses to be as tailored to his desires as his suits are to his body. His time is precious and his needs are paramount. Pod Man steps out of his inner city condo and slides into a waiting luxury self-driving pod. Facial recognition technology confirms Pod Man’s identity. Since the pod is linked directly to his calendar and has a complete history of his travel, there is no need to manually enter a destination. The pod predicts where he needs to go and when he needs to be there. Flipping open his laptop, he checks emails while joining a video call. His digital voice assistant announces: “Your normal commute will be delayed by 15 minutes due to traffic”.¹

Introduction

Self-driving cars (also referred to as autonomous vehicles and driverless cars) have become emblematic of the future of mobility. In 2007, John Urry predicted that ‘new players will emerge in the transportation construction market, such as electronics software companies as they integrate their products into hybridised personal vehicles’ (Urry 2007, 346). His prediction has come to pass, with many software companies such as Waymo (subsidiary of Alphabet Inc), and automotive companies like Tesla and Volvo racing to develop the first commercially viable self-driving car. Industry and policy visions of automated vehicles (AVs) regularly produce and circulate visions of safer, more productive, convenient and personalised transport future. These visions are a strategic means to an end, intended to stimulate government investment, create business opportunities and partnerships as well as maintaining public interest.

These visions are often communicated through advertising campaigns and simulated concept cars that portray the idealised future of self-driving cars. A growing body of research confirms that, embedded within these media ecologies, self-driving cars advance a specific classed, gendered and racialised vision for the idealised transport consumer (Balkmar and Mellström 2018; Hildebrand and Sheller 2018; Wigley and Rose 2020). Primarily pursued from the perspective of visual cultures and media studies, this work has not engaged in a systematic way with the role documents such as reports play in bringing visions of automated mobility to life. While the media-based representations are critical for rendering such visions as intuitively recognizable, the industry reports play an integral role in making these visions intelligible from a policy and governance perspective.

This article focuses on the role industry reports play in creating both excitement and a sense of inevitability around automated mobility futures. The anticipatory language used in the industry reports strongly suggests that people’s lives will be both transformed and improved in equal measure by the introduction of these emerging technologies. This language foreshadows a desirable future whilst simultaneously hinting at an idealised consumer of these emerging technologies. As visions and applications of automation in transport become increasingly common we need to critically question the implications of these future technologies. Specifically, where and how are people represented in these narratives? And how might these technologies reproduce or generate inequalities in the future?

The central argument of this paper is that embedded within visions of automated mobility is a technology-driven, hyper-mobile, and hyper-masculine transport consumer. I call this idealised transport consumer ‘Pod Man’. This article builds on existing research on the gendered and racialised visions of AVs in the US and UK (Balkmar and Mellström 2018; Hildebrand and Sheller 2018; Wigley & Rose 2020), through an analysis that draws on an Australian corpus of reports and uses visualisation as a method for troubling the dominant narratives mobilised in these reports.

The remainder of this article unfolds in four sections. In the following section, I outline the analytic and conceptual framework, anchored by mobility justice (Sheller 2018), critical mobilities work on gender (Uteng, Christensen, and Levin 2020) and race (Clarsen 2017; Taylor 2012), and the role of idealised subjects in sociotechnical futures (Strengers 2013, Dahlgren et al 2021). In the next section, I discuss the research design used for interrogating industry imaginaries, and the method used for creating the critical Pod Man persona. The main body of the paper critically foregrounds the five key promises embedded in sociotechnical narratives about automated mobility futures. In the paper’s last section, I define the Pod Man persona and problematize his role in shaping automated mobility futures. In the conclusion, I focus on how Pod Man can be used by mobilities scholars to unpack and challenge prevailing industry discourses, ultimately advocating for more inclusive and equitable automated mobility futures.

The gendered and racial underpinnings of automated mobilities

There is a well-established body of literature informed by the mobilities turn (Sheller 2018) that examines the social dimensions of automated mobility (Stilgoe 2021; Bissell et al 2020; Lindgren et al 2020; Pink et al 2020; Uteng, Christensen, and Levin 2020). This literature emphasises the anticipatory nature of these technologies, urging us to be critical of the politics embedded in public visions of future mobility. In this article, I draw on mobilities scholar Mimi Sheller’s (2018) work on mobility justice to interrogate the politics embedded in visions of future mobility. Mobility justice is a useful concept for ‘thinking about how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, shaping the patterns of unequal mobility and immobility in the circulation of people, resources, and information’ (Sheller 2018, 81). In this article, I ask questions about power and technology specifically, how might the unevenness of automated mobility shape future uneven subjects of mobility?

To answer this question, this article draws on Sheller’s (2018) model of mobility justice to understand how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, how uneven subjects of mobility are created, and how to imagine a just mobile future. Sheller’s (2018, 256) mobility justice framework provides a model for critically thinking about ‘the ongoing colonisation of everyday life by information technologies’:

Automation, machine learning, algorithmic control, and artificial intelligence are all interconnected developments that may be highly socially disruptive, but their direction depends on how they are enacted, regulated, and made real. Their outcomes are not inevitable. (Sheller, 2018)

Sheller calls for us to pay close attention to the ideologies and agendas underlying these anticipatory narratives about future technologies. In the sections below, I unpack the gendered and racialized underpinnings of mobilities in Australia and demonstrate how these existing ideologies and values shape the visions and technological possibilities of automated mobility.

Mobility scholars such as Georgine Clarsen (2017) and Andrew Taylor (2012) have detailed specific regional histories of the racial politics of automobility in Australia, highlighting the experience of Indigenous Australians. The field of transportation equity also covers the inequitable race and class distribution of transport access, creating what Tim Cresswell calls the ‘mobility poor’, who in Australia are predominantly Indigenous or racialized immigrant populations. Clarsen (2017, 522) has analysed the deep link between narratives about using automobiles centering white settlers as the ‘conquerors of the harsh and empty wastes’ of the outback, arguing that these ‘stories worked produce a sharp divide between settler modernity and Indigenous primitivism’. Understanding existing racial formations in Australia is central to understanding transitions to automated mobility and the underlying racial politics that reproduce mobility injustice.

On the subject of gender, mobilities scholar Uteng, Christensen, and Levin (2020, 6), writes that imaginaries of smart mobility are led by technology companies and manufacturers who promote a utopian vision of a society in which technological advances will deliver a mobility system that everyone can access, whilst at the same time promoting an image of the future that ‘relegates women, children, and the elderly to the figurative passenger seat of this future’. If women, children and the elderly are relegated to the passenger seat of these sociotechnical futures, who is in the driver’s seat? Who are the idealised subjects of these possible futures?

Previous research on sociotechnical futures (Strengers 2013, Dahlgren et al 2021) focuses on a selection of idealised subjects as a way of drawing attention to the pervasive and unified visions embedded in technological narratives about the future. For example, Resource Man, the idealised energy consumer was created by digital sociologist Yolande Strengers (2013, 35) from an analysis of ‘over fifty publicly available international smart metering and grid consumer reports’. Closely related to Resource Man is the techno-hedonist persona (Dahlgren et al 2021) who was created using a similar approach, focusing on visions of smart homes in industry and consultancy reports. Later in the article I detail how I created Pod Man by following the same method, drawing on reports from the transport industry to draw critical attention to the pervasive idealised subject embedded in narratives about the future.

Resource Man’s spouse – the Smart Wife – is emblematic of the gendered assumptions embedded in policy discourse about energy and smart home futures. Strengers and Kennedy (2020) created the concept of the Smart Wife who ‘encompass(es) smart technology intended to carry out domestic labours traditionally associated with the wife’s role and any smart technology that is treated as a smart wife by those who interact with her’. By reinforcing traditional gender and family roles these personas evoke anticipatory feelings of safety and trust by providing the ‘comforting assurance that while technology advances, domestic ideals will remain the same’ (Phan 2019 citing Spigel 2005). Similarly, in industry visions of the smart home, the techno-hedonist persona is imagined at the head of his heterosexual nuclear family (Dahlgren et al 2021).

The personas featured in these visions are crucial to their success in directing, enacting and regulating future mobility technologies. Söderström et al. (2014, 309) argue that anticipatory visions serve as ‘ideological construct focus(ed) on the storytelling activity…as a means of securing and strengthening market dominance’. While these personas are critical to the success of these anticipatory visions, they are not necessarily salient in the narratives when it comes to the industry reports. Therefore, this article builds previously used approaches to identifying and critiquing these personas in industry reports (Strengers 2013; Strengers and Kennedy 2020; Dahlgren et al 2021) and adds an additional layer to the methodology in the form of visualisation.

Research design

The research findings discussed in this article were based on a scoping study of automation in transport and mobility in Australia. This involved analysing industry reports to identify the latent values guiding visions and narratives about the future. The scoping study followed the same research design process developed by Strengers (2013) and Dahlgren et al (2021). The findings presented in this article are based on a content analysis of sixty reports (see Supplemental Appendix B) focused on anticipated technologies predicted to change the Australian transport market and mobility landscape. The reports were published between 2015 and 2021 with the majority of reports published in 2018 (15) and 2020 (18). The reports were imported into NVivo analysis software and coded using qualitative content analysis (Schreier 2012) to identify the emerging trends, predictions, visions, and possible scenarios for transport futures. The reports were categorised as being produced by consultants, government departments, advocacy groups, university researchers and transport peak bodies.

While this article draws on the whole sample, the focus is primarily placed on the reports published by consulting agencies and government bodies for their direct relevance to predictions about the future of transport. The rationale for focusing on the literature produced by private consulting agencies like McKinsey, Deloitte and PWC is twofold. First, due to their role operating as forms of ‘proxy sovereignty, dispersing and mobilising governance whilst simultaneously normalising a particular way of being in the world’ (White 2016, 577). Second, the vast majority of their contracts are with the Australian government. These two categories of reports explore the potential future markets for transport related technologies, and anticipates the future benefits these technologies can bring to the broader Australian transport system.

Coding the reports was an iterative process informed by, (i) the explicit future speculations contained in the reports and (ii) the implicit future trends identified in the reports. These speculations were categorised into five key promises about the future of transport and everyday life – safety, productivity, accessibility, sustainability and personalisation (Quilty et al 2022). To establish a baseline of industry-based sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) and visions for future mobilities in relation to everyday life, the key findings of the content analysis were synthesised into three speculative narratives. Figure 1 shows one of these three speculative vignettes, titled Pod Man. This article focuses on this particular speculative narrative because it most directly relates to imaginations around future mobilities in relation to everyday life and it encompasses all five of the promises about the future.

Figure 1. Pod Man.

A white man in a suit on his laptop inside a self-driving car.

The three vignettes (see Supplemental Appendix A) were shared with a visual artist – Mirranda Burton – and through an iterative process the three graphics (see Figures 1 and 2) were created. The process of creating the graphics began with an initial outline of the everyday scene which she sent through for feedback, after making two rounds of adjustments she created the final images depicting each of the personas in everyday situations:

Figure 2. Left: ‘Family Man’. Right: ‘the Student’.

Image of Family Man shows four people in a self-driving car. Image of the Student shows a busy street with a young man’s face reflected in his phone.

There is a growing field of arts-based research in the social sciences (Holm, Sahlström & Zilliacus 2018), from graphic novels depicting climate and capitalist futures (Schuster 2023), to drawings that capture the visual impact of coronavirus on airports (Booker 2021). Barry et al. (2023, 352) call for creative mobilities research to be centred in critical mobilities research, not simply as a way of communicating research findings, but as a productive way ‘thinking unconventionally about the possibilities of cultivating a more just and equitable future’. This article takes up this call for more creative mobilities research by contributing research that visualises the politics and values embedded in industry narratives about automated mobilities.

Visualisation has the potential to bring together multiple aspects of a problem into a single powerful image that brings dominant imaginaries to life. To achieve this visualisation and its intended effect, I collaborated with illustrator Mirranda Burton to capture the power dynamics of anticipating automated mobilities. The inclusion of the laptop and coffee maker, Pod Man’s facial expression, the absence of the steering wheel, and the enclosed ‘cocoon’ like design of the vehicle, invite the viewer into the fantasy of the self-driving car, revealing the hyper-mobile subject – Pod Man – at the heart of these fantasies.

Anticipating the future: sociotechnical imaginaries

There is an established body of scholarship devoted to the study of large-scale technological visions and the social identities and forms they prioritise. The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) from Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been widely used to critically examine the social values and ordering entrenched in anticipatory technological narratives. From visions of smart cities (Sadowski 2020a) to self-driving utopias (Norton), the process of creating and reifying sociotechnical imaginaries occurs through anticipatory narratives that are mobilised through a variety of modalities. In this article, I build upon previous research that has focused on the media ecologies surrounding self-driving cars (Hildebrand and Sheller 2018; Wigley and Rose 2020) by focusing on the key promises about the future that are embedded in industry reports. The following sections draw on the qualitative analysis of the reports to critically foreground the five key promises embedded in industry narratives about automated mobility futures – safety, productivity, accessibility, sustainability and personalisation.

Safer futures

One of the central promises made in the reports is that automated mobilities will be safer than ‘traditional’ vehicles controlled by people, with crashes and mortality significantly reduced if not eradicated altogether. The reports relied on a narrow definition of what constitutes ‘safety’, often obfuscating the complexity of this anticipatory concept. Consider the anticipatory use of safety in a report published by Infrastructure Australia (2018) who stated that ‘vehicle automation could [emphasis added] reduce road crashes by up to 94%’. This type of claim was commonly cited in the reports as one of the primary reasons that automation should be integrated into the transport and mobility systems in Australia. While this promise was central to this broader narrative about automation and transport, as Norton and others have argued, this promise is as old as the automobile itself.

The analysis of the industry reports and its claims about increased safety resonates with Jack Stilgoe (2021) who argues that ‘foremost among the justifications offered for self-driving cars is that they will offer dramatic improvements in road safety’. Take for example a report published by Deloitte Access Economics (2018) that makes the case of AVs by citing research from the US Department of Transport which ‘estimates that 94% of accidents are due to human error, which could in turn be eliminated by the introduction of AVs’. One of the key challenges facing AV engineers and manufacturers is winning the public’s trust when it comes to self-driving cars (Deloitte Access Economics 2018). This is why circulating and reiterating the narrative that AVs are safer than traditional vehicles is necessary work that requires a lot of figurative heavy lifting beyond media campaigns.

Productive futures

Industry reports present increased productivity as one of the ultimate goals of AVs, promising to free people from the time they currently waste by driving. Consultancy KPMG (2021) predicts that ‘autonomous vehicles will be ubiquitous – transforming the travel experience so that journeys are far more productive’ promising that ‘it will be straightforward to work on the commute’. However, there is existing research that tells us people already work on their commutes, taking work calls while waiting in traffic or answering emails on the train (Aldred 2013). I suggest that based on the claims made in the industry reports that were analysed, visions of AVs are nudging towards a future of hyperproductivity (Thomas 2014). Analysing the reports through the lens of hyperproductivity, we can see how AVs are being framed as a way for employees to further collapse the boundaries between their home and work.

In this imagined future, self-driving cars will become cocoons of technology, enveloping passengers on the inside with email, social media and advertisements, whilst being cushioned on the outside by IoT (Internet of Things) technology like smart roads, vehicle-to-vehicle communication and smart traffic management systems. Media and journalism scholar Mark Andrejevic (2020, 29) expands on the idea of the connected and automated car (CAV), arguing that ‘the creation and deployment of autonomous vehicles will transform cars into fully mediated devices, packed with sensors that collect and process a growing range of information’. While the data being collected about passengers on the surface is (allegedly) aimed at providing a personalised service for Pod Man, beneath the surface may be lurking a more insidious agenda. Transforming mobility with IoT technology may provide a more personalised and convenient service (for some consumers) but it requires enormous amounts of data to be collected, manufactured and shared. It is crucial to address these issues at a policy and governance level before these technologies become ubiquitous.

Accessible futures

The reports also frame accessibility as one of the key benefits that will emerge from automating Australia’s transport system. For example, a report published by Infrastructure Australia (2018) claims that ‘‘automated vehicles could increase accessibility…and could lead to significant benefits by reducing the risk of social exclusion’. This claim assumes that automation will improve the lives of people living with disabilities. However, as critical disability scholars Gerard Goggin and Karen Soldatić (2022, 385) argue, within ‘the dominant social imaginary of disability and technology remains the potent conception that technology will be a great benefit for people with disabilities’. In some ways disability is used to provide the social licence for introducing new technologies like AVs. The problem with this promise, according to sociologist Ingunn Moser (2006), is that while technologies have the potential to improve the lives of disabled people, they are equally capable of ‘reproduc[ing] the conditions for the making of difference and disability in the first instance’. It is imperative to recognise and plan for the intersectional nature of disability since, as Goggin and Soldatić (2022) warn, it is likely to be compounded by emergent technologies such as AI and automation.

Sustainable futures

Sustainability is another one of the key promises that will be made possible through the integration and adoption of automated vehicles. Australian consultancy Deloitte Access Economics (2018) predicts that ‘the widespread adoption of zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) and autonomous vehicles (AVs) are likely to be among the most significant technological changes in the upcoming decades’. As Urry (2007) and others have previously argued, cars are powerful machines and traditionally this sense of power has stemmed from the internal-combustion of fossil fuels. ZEVs such as hybrid or electric vehicles do not rely on this traditional fuel source and whilst the reports suggest that the widespread adoption of ZEVs is on the horizon what is largely absent is considerations for the socio-political antecedents necessary for this transition to occur. For example, Australia has a distinct ‘car culture’ (Miller 2001) that produces and is produced by its own forms of hegemonic (Wajcman 1991) or petro-masculinity (Dagget 2018). The future imaginary for AVs assumes that the mobility consumer of the future will choose not only the autonomous but electric and therefore ecomodern option for travel.

Personalised futures

The final promise identified in the reports centres around the idea of removing the burden of driving by eliminating the active labour associated with driving (steering, navigating, accelerating and braking). In these visions of the future, transport is transformed from a form of labour into a service. This follows a broader trend of the X-as-a-service business model (Sadowski 2020b), notably by platform titans Uber and Airbnb. The transport reports invite the reader to imagine if this model were applied to the entire transport ecosystem. Take for example the following excerpt published in a piece by consultancy Deloitte (2021):

What is slicker than the latest smartphone? It is a creation still taking shape today. You will find it on the road, not in your hand. From the outside, it looks like a car. On the inside, it looks like a living room, or a bedroom, or an office. The next big thing is the ‘smartphone on wheels’: an autonomous vehicle (AV) that is anything a passenger wants it to be.

Embedded within this future imaginary are surveillance technologies and logics that will supposedly unlock the hitherto unforeseen levels of personalisation. For instance, a report published by the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (2019) promotes the connected vehicle scenario where ‘transport data can be collected through mobile apps that also provide commuters with real-time service updates’. In this vision of the future the way AVs become ‘smartphones on wheels’ is through the extraction, accumulation and circulation of consumers data.

Defining and problematising Pod Man

Pod Man is the technology-driven, hyper-mobile and hyper-masculine transport consumer found at the centre of sociotechnical imaginaries of automated mobilities. He represents the ideal mobility subject who is both invisible and powerful, shaping visions of the future of mobility. In this section of the article, I analyse the Pod Man persona through a mobility justice lens, drawing on Sheller’s (2018) assertion that ‘historically, mobility, gender, and race intersect in unequal relations of power that make mobility into a racializing, gendering, and (dis)abling process’. It is important to note that while I describe the key racial, gendered and classed characteristics of Pod Man separately, these aspects are not distinct from one another. Indeed it is their entangled nature that buttresses the creation of uneven mobility subjects. Pod Man is both a provocation and an entry point for thinking about how emerging technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, are shaping unequal relations of power in visions of mobility futures.

As a white settler colonial society, Australia has deeply rooted racial formations and relations entrenched in existing mobility infrastructures. Just as the first automobile associations and manufacturers mobilised the anticipatory geography of settler formations, current policy discourses carry the transport industry’s collective desires, fantasies, assumptions, hopes and ideologies. One of the core assumptions is that the adoption of self-driving cars will begin at the top of the technology adopter hierarchy, before flowing down to the rest of society. However, taking a trickle down approach might very well undermine the very socio-economic benefits that consultancies and policymakers claim will flow from automated mobilities, because the immediate beneficiaries are the very mobility elites who already benefit from superior services.

Take for example Deloitte Access Economics’s (2018) definition of the top adopter category – Innovators – as ‘individuals possessing high levels of education and income ($156,000AUD or more)’. In Australia this category of adopters often takes the form middle-aged, highly educated and wealthy white men (Broadbent, Metternicht, and Drozdzewski 2019). This is why I decided to portray Pod Man as white (see Figure 1), in order to unsettle and make visible the racial formations entrenched in the reports. Unlike advertisements where designers and carmakers can substitute various faces and races into their visualisations, the reports rely on racial proxies (primarily, education level and income) to communicate the preferred ethnicity of the ideal mobility consumer (Phan and Wark 2021). If future transport policies and decisions avoid critically engaging with these deeply embedded biases, structural patterns of exclusion will continue to determine the ways through which Australians will gain access to and experience transport in the future.

Visions that exclude people of colour from the future of automated transport also exclude women. As previous studies have highlighted, in media representations and speculative visualisations of AVs ‘the female body is mostly absent or visually delegated to the passenger seat’ (Hildebrand and Sheller 2018, 75). The feminine instead transformed, subsumed into the car itself. Existing research on emerging technologies has concentrated on feminine labour in the context of smart homes (Spigel 2005; Strengers and Kennedy 2020), however little attention has been paid to how self-driving cars are reinforcing hegemonic masculine ideals. For instance, consider this statement by the CEO of one of the largest AI companies in the world who predicts ‘cars of the future will drive autonomously, act as both an intelligent assistant and loyal companion, and be self-learning’ (Global Times 2021). The self-driving cars of the future are anticipated to perform a secretarial role to Pod Man by always preempting his needs. Harvey Specter has Donna, Pod Man has his car.

Despite optimistic claims that technological advances will deliver a personalised on-demand mobility system for everyone, there is emerging evidence that emerging technologies have a high risk of reproducing classed forms of privilege (Sparrow and Howard 2020). A key component of the self-driving car fantasy is being able to separate oneself from others. For example, in a report published by an Australian transport peak body, the authors speculate about a self-driving future titled ‘Private Drive’, where consumers can ‘hitch a ride with other passengers’ or ‘pay more to travel solo in a luxury [emphasis added] vehicle’ (Infrastructure Victoria 2018). This is why I deliberately use the singular Pod Man rather than Pod Men to signify his desire to travel alone in his ‘personal security pod’ (Peter Wells and Xenias 2015, 107), hermetically sealed off (Jensen 2019) from the rest of society. In this way, the fantasy of the self-driving car embodies atomism (Heywood 2011) which ignores the possibility and potentiality of the commons, of collectivity, of community.

In many ways those who occupy these spaces are vilified and framed in a negative sense. For example, work by Greg Marston et al. (2019) on the stigmatisation of welfare recipients in Australia – more commonly referred to as job seekers or pejoratively as dole bludgers – reveals that unemployed individuals are not necessarily immobile or immoral; rather, they often face structural barriers such as affordable housing. While class is often avoided in public debate in Australia, Steven Threadgold and Jessica (2022) argue that figures such as the ‘hipster’ or the ‘dole-bludger’ become proxies for discussions about class. These social categories are not expected to be amongst the first to adopt AVs. Those predicted to first enjoy the fruits of AVs belong to the ‘Innovators’ category. Often referred to as the white-collar workers or professionals (Wright and Forsyth 2021), the ‘Innovators’ represent the elite managerial class. Pod Man represents the desire for this class to be separated and in a sense protected from the immorality and messiness of the unprivileged or non-elite through the fantasy of a protective individual cocoon.

Conclusion

Self-driving cars are no longer restricted to the imagination, with vehicles moving beyond testing environments to public roads. As these cars veer into everyday life it is important to consider the implications of these technologies. How might these technologies reproduce or generate new inequalities in the future? Where and how are people represented in these narratives? There is an emerging body of research that demonstrates how self-driving cars advance a specific classed, gendered and racialized vision for the idealised transport consumer (Balkmar and Mellström 2018; Hildebrand and Sheller 2018; Wigley and Rose 2020). While these studies have focused on the emergence of this vision from media ecologies such as advertisements, building upon this trajectory of research, this article has examined the idealised transport consumer entrenched in industry reports.

By focusing on the socio-technical narratives circulated through industry reports, this article offers an analysis of these imaginaries and the dominant claims they make about the future. This analysis reveals that industry imaginations of automated transport in the future, especially those focused on AVs, operate within a vision of a technology-driven, hyper-mobile and hyper-masculine transport consumer, which I refer to as Pod Man. As I have outlined, this figure emerges through five interrelated promises mobilised through the reports: safety, productivity, accessibility, sustainability and personalisation. These promises were identified through a scoping study that aimed to identify and understand the role of automation in the future of transport and mobility in Australia (Quilty and Pink 2023; Quilty et al 2022), which sits within the Future Automated Mobilites project. The Pod Man persona was identified and developed during the analysis of the reports and written up as part of a series of persona vignettes (see Supplemental Appendix A) alongside the images (see Figure 2) created in collaboration with artist Mirranda Burton.

This article represents the conceptual development and extension of the Pod Man persona as a critical concept for mobility scholars to challenge the values underlying anticipated technologies such as AVs. Through the visualisation of Pod Man (see Figure 1), this article has contributed a creative and arts-based method for critiquing dominant narratives. It is imperative that mobility scholars pay close attention to the interests, imperatives and ideologies entrenched in these technologies, especially with the rise of self-driving cars being introduced into both legislation and public roads. To this end, in this article I present Pod Man as both a provocation and an entry point for thinking about how emerging technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, are shaping unequal relations of power in visions of mobility futures.

Acknowledgments

I would like to first thank Mirranda Burton for her contribution in visualising Pod Man. The conceptualisation of Pod Man is my own, however I would like to acknowledge that the research that informs this article is based on a Scoping Study led by Sarah Pink, to inform the work of the Transport and Mobilities Focus Area of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. I also thank Jeni Lee, Thao Phan and Jathan Sadowski for their contributions.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision-Making and Society [Project Number CE200100005] in partnership with Monash University.

Notes

1 This is a condensed version of the original vignette written for Pod Man. This shortened version was created specifically for this article. For the full version of the vignette see Supplemental Appendix A.