“Premature Electrification”: Petro-masculine Panic in the EV Era

Masculinist Modernity

Among the varied significations circulating around the petroleum-powered car, the commodity has operated as a salient vehicle for expressions and tools of hetero-masculinity. “The whole notion of American society is […] indissolubly intertwined with a car-based masculinist modernity,” contends British sociologist John Urry.[1] American entitlement to cheap oil, combined with the autonomy granted by a car, encourages a certain kind of rugged masculinity: the road trip as mechanism of self-discovery via self-determination, nature backgrounded and passive; meanwhile, in the segmented sociality of urban sprawl, the car is readily legible as an accessory to male heterosexual desire, as well as the object of desire itself.[2] Lyrics across genres easily blur the distinction between the desire a man has for his female lover and the admiration they have for their car (often a key accessory for attracting lovers). Perhaps this confusion is not so unintentional, considering the ways oil becomes an object of desire: fossil fuels writ large drive a nation-state’s lifeforce, act as the lubrication that allows the project of United States statecraft to reproduce itself, domestically and abroad. By engineering oil scarcity, states and corporations collude to manufacture desire for oil, making it so oil consumption is required to achieve the American dream – a capitalist dream undergirded by heterosexual patriarchy.[3]

A revived genre of oil scarcity has been gaining traction in recent years: the advent of electric vehicles (EVs) as techno-optimist climate solution. US President Joe Biden and his administration has outlined a climate platform that relies heavily on ramped-up domestic production and widespread consumer adoption of EVs. To reach Biden’s goal of net zero emissions by 2050, half of new vehicles sold are to be “zero-emissions vehicles” by 2030.[4] Currently, less than one percent of US cars are electric.[5] To dramatically increase this share, Biden’s plan includes funding all aspects of the supply chain, from mining the lithium necessary for rechargeable batteries, researching and manufacturing batteries, building a nationwide system of charging stations, and offering consumer tax credits. Less oil scarcity than manufactured phase-out, the idea of progress itself appears forever tied to a futurity of the automobile and our relentlessly physical car-centric infrastructure: the linearity of a lone driver exercising autonomy along a paved road—this time in an EV—lends itself well to narratives of neoliberal progress. 

But while EVs may retain automobility, they stand to threaten the long-held love affair between oil and masculinity, cueing reactionary sentiments. Feminist scholars have written about masculinity as an identity perpetually in crisis, needing to constantly prove itself against a roster of perceived threats (and buying a muscle car is often one of the ways to assuage such threats). Energy systems, too, are repeatedly described as being in crisis, an instrumentally ambiguous positionality which can only be assuaged by seeking an equally vague goal of energy security.[6] Threatened masculinity can reclaim security by asserting dominance socially; a nation-state reclaims energy security—a destination whose criteria it itself defines—through political projects of imperialism and extraction. During the Trump administration, which ran on the slogan “drill, baby, drill,” energy humanities scholar Cara Daggett coined the term petro-masculinity to connect the historic and recently heightened reinforcements between climate denial, racism, and misogyny. The term describes a toxic, racialized masculinity that intensifies attachments to fossil fuels and the life they represent as the cultural zeitgeist scrutinizes carbon emissions. For the petro-masculine, the acceptance of climate change and attendant environmental regulations are threats akin to queerness and feminism, as they seek to wrest power from the oil-powered nation-state and traditional family values. To create the conditions for cheap energy driving the American dream, “extracting and burning fuel was a practice of white masculinity, and of American sovereignty, such that the explosive power of combustion could be crudely equated with virility.”[7] As Daggett has written elsewhere, energy is a “socio-material apparatus that flows through political and cultural life.”[8] The energy transition may shift fuel sources, but the fact of reactionary stances such as petro-masculinity keenly demonstrates that at stake in the structure of energy systems is always the structure of power. 

Given this entrenchment between petroleum and reactionary masculinity, this nascent transition to EVs poses both a threat and opportunity around which notions of energy security and petro-masculinity must reorient themselves. What happens to this oil-soaked masculinity as the car market attempts to transition to EVs? What are the ramifications of unsettling reactionary masculine anxieties in an uncertain time? This essay attempts to explore dimensions of these questions by analyzing several key examples of how elements of petro-masculinity persist in the EV market. Although petro-masculinity, as a reactionary stance, is not the only or even most dominant masculinity in this era of environmentalism, its outwardly aggressive traits threaten to give it an outsized influence on the entire EV market, with implications for the energy transition more broadly.

Tesla Repellent

While the Biden administration’s novel political and economic momentum has directed most auto companies to shift production to EVs, auto companies recognize widespread consumer adoption is not guaranteed—cueing the need for deliberate efforts towards manufacturing consent. Reading the writing on the wall, auto companies want to transition to EVs to stay in business, and appealing to petro-masculine anxieties is an important method of manufacturing consumer consent. Over the past few years, EVs have gained increasing public recognition by occupying public space on existing roads and in ideological space such as advertisements and market reporting. Despite the fact that environmental advocates have criticized Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act for substantially increasing fossil fuel production,[9] EVs have emerged as a flagship symbol of the energy transition, suggesting the phase-out of petroleum cars, and with it, the “vast networks of privilege […] sustained by fossil economies.”[10] Considering a few key examples, it is clear that petro-masculinity feels threatened and also confused by EVs, sparking reactions ranging from absurd to dangerous.

One illustrative expression of petro-masculinity is called “rollin’ coal,” referring to the practice of retro-fitting a diesel truck to allow the engine to flood with excess gas, creating plumes of black smoke. While coal is not actually burned, the smoke broadcasts pollution to symbolize industrial power. Appearing around 2014, conservative drivers used this to protest Environmental Protection Agency regulations and other forms of environmentalism, and later anti-Trump protestors. Daggett notes that rollin’ coal was especially used as “Prius repellent”—a term also printed on large stickers to adorn the bumper or cover the full back window of a large truck.[11] At least one Etsy account sells a sticker that says, “Tesla repellent,” shaped like an arrow to point towards the combustion driver’s fuel pipe.[12] By drawing attention to the “repelling” car’s fuel source, these stickers suggest that the cultural dimensions of automobility cannot be so simply divorced from fuel sources; in fact, automobility’s true potential seems largely defined by the specific cultural meanings imbued in fuel’s materiality. These stickers also imply a refusal to share the road—both the literal road and the road as symbol of progress—with non-petroleum; the two futurities are inherently incompatible, because the conservative impulse underneath petro-masculinity will always choose the opposite of what liberals do. As Daggett notes, fossil fuels have moved on from being real economic interests for most people, while becoming re-animated as symbols of conservatism.[13] Burning oil releases millions of years’ worth of compacted life; petro-masculinity threatens to hold back history with reckless nostalgia.

This impulse to inflate and exaggerate fuel consumption as an expression of recouping masculinity is evident in many examples of the emerging EV market, which has of course eclipsed Priuses and even Teslas. The lingering fumes of petro-masculinity’s imagination are evident in much of the EV market’s focus on large trucks. The EV market is trending towards larger vehicles, especially in the US. According to the International Energy Agency, small and medium models made up only 25% of 2023 EV sales in the US, compared to 40% in Europe and 50% in China.[14] In 2023, all three EV ads during the Super Bowl were for trucks.[15] Soon after signing his new climate bill in 2021, the vehicle Biden chose to test drive in a PR stunt was an electric Hummer in Detroit.[16] In expressing his support for union-made EVs, combined with the hyper-masculinity of militarism, the image event evokes a nostalgic industrial worker masculinity that fulfills a similar desire as rollin’ coal. An electric Hummer is fitting as material representation of Biden’s rhetoric, which is rife with militaristic language about “fighting climate change” and dominating global EV production. For the individual consumer, the electric Hummer assuages simultaneous fears of climate change’s dangers and electrified emasculation, promising a securitized hyper-autonomy in a chaotic world. (This electric Hummer moment harkens back to a study that found that after Americans were educated on climate change, they were more likely to purchase an SUV.)[17]

Like all EVs, electric trucks may reduce localized air pollution—but they find other ways to pollute and aggravate public space: as large vehicles, they continue to pose a public safety hazard; and they require large amounts of material, including bigger batteries, that spur mining booms domestically and abroad. A 2023 report from the climate policy thinktank Climate and Community Project, in analyzing different scenarios and factors of EV production, found that as vehicles increase in size, so does the battery, and how much lithium and mining is necessary.[18] Biden’s policies have already jumpstarted a lithium rush: the Western US alone is now pocked with more than a hundred stakes for lithium mines, a number that keeps growing.[19] Overdetermined by petro-masculine desire, the electric truck is barely legible as an environmental object, instead crowding public roads while also passively polluting via a supply chain of exploitation and extraction. 

Compensating for the EV’s perceived emasculation through size is one way to maintain the petro-masculine orientation; another is to be loud. Without combustion engines, EVs can be much quieter, losing the engine roar or unmuffled belch that can jostle an intersection and pollute noise as well as toxic fumes. To maintain this method of masculine presence, some auto companies are adding internal or external speakers to their EVs to simulate an engine noise. Electric muscle cars like the Mustang Mach-E and Dodge Hornet are adding fake sounds to sound like an engine; Dodge’s Daytona electric muscle car includes a fake exhaust sound at 126 decibels. Other companies are seizing on this new corner of the market and manufacturing aftermarket sound systems to add engine roar.[20] While it’s true that some of this fake noise is intended to address pedestrian safety concerns (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration implemented a new rule that EVs and hybrids are required to emit safety noises below a certain speed)[21] many of these engine noises clearly exceed this requirement to compensate for petro-masculine anxieties. From sound to size to visuals, this corner of the car market is determined to hang on to fossil fuels’ signifiers and even its sensory world. If the space occupied by cars—and that includes most space—can’t be imagined differently, futurity itself risks being choked in a smoggy haze of enclosed possibility.

Electricity’s Emasculations

Perhaps the most hyperbolic example of petro-masculine anxieties in the EV age is an ad for Dodge Ram’s electric truck, the 1500 REV, which debuted at the 2023 Super Bowl. Using the tropes of a medical prescription infomercial, as if for erectile dysfunction or premature ejaculation, the ad diagnoses the Bidenomic EV as “premature electrification.” A middle-aged man walking in a pastoral landscape addresses the camera, “Are you excited about driving an electric vehicle but worried it could leave you…unsatisfied? Then you could be one of many Americans concerned about premature electrification.” To provide examples of these “many Americans,” the ad presents several heterosexual couples who are stranded in various settings because of the limits of their EVs. Each woman addresses the camera to share her frustrations about the shortcomings of electrification, cloaked in double-entendre about bedroom vexations, while the male partner slumps in embarrassment: “There was plenty of charge before. Sometimes it goes away.” The spokesman explains the symptoms, including “fearing you might not be able to last as long as you’d like”; and “Lacking the confidence about getting and being able to keep a charge.” In one shot, a highway sign in the background has been flipped, so that the curved arrow points downward to resemble a flaccid phallus.[22]

The ad uses the heteronormative nuclear couple (implying the broader needs of domestic family structures, a bedrock of US capitalism) to make a statement about national and global energy systems, exemplifying insecure masculinity desperate for energy security. Driving a combustion-engine car, the ad makes clear, is a reproductive act: not only sexual—the car as extension of and site of heteromasculinity, where burning fuel becomes virility—but reproducing a certain way of life, in which burning (US-extracted) fuel demonstrates loyalty to patriotic notions of energy security. Driving a car is also a social act: the presumed privacy of a car cabin in fact functions as a shared, public experience, as well as a national concern, implicating public and private infrastructure (not to mention the global impact of carbon emissions). Similar to the ways rollin’ coal makes individual masculine insecurity everyone’s problem on the road, the ad suggests that fears of heteronormative impotence are a crisis warranting national concern. It doesn’t matter that the Ram 1500 REV resembles any other truck of formidable size. In Ram’s world, the sexual energy of petroleum, once taken for granted, is now under threat from electrification, impacting the lives of everyday Americans and their enjoyment on the road. Without mentioning petroleum or striving for any kind of environmental message, the ad instead uses the sexual gimmick to simultaneously boast and mourn what petroleum represents: a lifestyle of autonomy, limitlessness, a liquid flow, with a seamless mobility revolving around gas stations. 

To deflect this underlying panic that an EV leaves men emasculated, the ad humiliates the masculinity of the men driving these EVs, while ultimately aiming its barbed humor at larger infrastructure: Biden’s EV plan. There is some truth to the ad, in that charging EVs takes longer than filling up a gas tank, and the US just doesn’t have the extensive charging infrastructure necessary to meet the scale of widespread adoption Biden is envisioning. The “premature” is also a nod to the fact that this truck won’t be available until 2025, two years after the ad aired. But these logistical anxieties are proxy for the underlying panic about how EVs pose a threat to fossil fueled lifestyles – and the power structures therein. Any personal petro-masculine anxiety can be repurposed and redirected as fuel towards humiliating liberals and environmentalist values. 

The Ram 1500 REV ad is not just outwardly aggressive by being crude; its humor belies a deeper, malicious current. Petro-masculinity is not just about squeezing the last drops of petroleum to maximize carbon emissions, but about doubling down on regressive and authoritarian ideals. To fully explicate this dynamic, Daggett turns to psycho-affective dimensions: the petro-masculine subject engages in “damming up of the authoritarian body, and state, against desire is justified as necessary to guard its strength.” Gender-anxious and masculine-weakened, the petro-masculine seek to obey stronger authoritarian figures and preserve conservative masculine roles by turning to rigidity and self-discipline.[23] This “damming up” to acquiesce to leadership of an authoritarian figure is a fitting corollary to the contradictions of car culture: rather than offering freedom, automobility functions as a regime of control, sacrificing collective mobility (the future of our species) for an individualized fantasy of autonomy.[24] In other words, even the petro-masculine is limited by path dependence of what literary scholar Stephanie LeMenager calls petrotopia, the hegemonic system of highways, gas stations, and strip malls.[25] But, as Daggett explains, burning fossil fuels offers psychological release from this tension and withholding. Trump’s fossil authoritarianism “feels good because it bursts the constraints of liberal, Western hypocrisy.”[26] If a car is an accessory to, and object of, male heterosexual desire, Ram makes it clear its conservative consumer base is not “hard” for Biden and his EVs. If the ad could be summed up in an Etsy sticker, it would point to the crotch and say “EV repellent.” The ad appears to take an inherent risk in presenting a product as a failing phallus – but this impotence is weaponized, a virility withheld in order to hang on to the dangerous lifestyle that fossil fuels afford. Cloaked in conservative, crass humor, the ad is also a threat: authoritarian masculinity will refuse climate change, determined to reproduce conservative ideals and burn fossil fuels until the very last moment. 

As the public face of the US EV transition, Biden is an easy scapegoat for Trump supporters and other conservatives to unleash their fossil fury again. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 71% of Republicans would not consider buying an EV.[27] There are several ironies to this dynamic, however. The first newly developed lithium mine for EVs in the US – partially funded by General Motors – was in fact fast-tracked in the final days of Trump administration, who expanded the category of critical minerals.[28] While Biden’s funding of the proliferation of critical mineral mines can be greenwashed as a necessary sacrifice for the energy transition, the Trump administration recognized that critical minerals fit into a larger priority of industrial labor and extraction. The other irony is that, for the near future, charging these EVs likely means using electricity at least partially generated from fossil fuels: coal, natural gas, and nuclear account for more electricity generation than renewables combined.[29] These material facts contribute a nuance to the energy system’s partisan cultural meanings that petro-masculinity seems disinterested in taking advantage of. 

While large, loud electric trucks might placate some petro-masculine anxieties, there remains some frustration over what electricity can do for heteronormative virility. In the 1950s, bulbous front bumpers were added to cars to mimic breasts, as post-war sacrifice gave way to pleasure.[30] Half a century later, truck nutz—fake testicles hung on the back of one’s truck, often made with plastic, another petro-commodity—became a successful novelty item.[31] Electric trucks seem to spark some confusion—and creativity—over if this extension of the male cis-heterosexual body can still apply to the electric truck—simultaneously demonstrating the intimate imbrication between petroleum and sexuality. In one 2022 Reddit post, a user posts a photo of their large red electric Ford truck with two conventional lightbulbs hanging down as “truck nutz”, asking “did I do it right?”[32] A more recent post in a Reddit thread for electricians shows two electric wire connectors hanging from a vehicle, with the title “Truck Nuts”.[33] In yet another bizarre event in which a car draws attention to male genitalia, when the power went out in an Austin, Texas clinic in 2022, a urologist used his Rivian electric truck to perform a vasectomy.[34] The combination of the electrical grid failing, and an electric truck becoming responsible for (consensually) rendering a man sterile, could easily be instrumentalized for a fitting, if asinine, tirade on the emasculations of electricity. Yet it was also an EV that fulfilled a man’s wishes. These examples suggest the cultural meanings of EVs—and perhaps electricity more broadly—are still fluid, while fueling a charged cultural discourse.

While the material ramifications and cultural significations of our contemporary, liminal moment have yet to play out, this contemporary conflation of EVs with a threatened masculinity is not new. This is not the first time that the federal government or auto companies have pushed for widespread EV adoption: the history of the EV is itself quite reactionary, with significant jolts of funding seen in response to such political-ecological events as the 1970 oil embargo, and the post-An Inconvenient Truth era. At the turn of the century, it was not pre-determined that petroleum would become the de-facto fuel for the “novel horseless carriage”; EVs outsold petroleum cars in 1900.[35] For a variety of reasons, petroleum cars became corporatized by the 1920s, and with this turn, traditional gender roles were reasserted.[36] Perhaps one factor influencing fuel supremacy is that, as many historians of the early EV explain, these very early EVs appealed to women. Automobile writer Nick Georgano writes in The American Automobile: A Centenary, that women “appreciated its silence and ease of driving, and found hand-cranking undignified at best and often physically impossible.”[37] One Columbus Electric ad from 1913 emphasizes that for “The well-dressed woman who must go home from the theatre on the street cars […] the privacy of a […] car would mean more than you could ever guess.”[38] A 1910 ad for a Rauch & Lang electric car emphasizes, “any woman can run the car safely” because of simple controls.[39] Conversely, a car’s ability to showcase the muscle of its driver was exactly the reason some men preferred gasoline. Even without today’s acute awareness of the tremendous scale of petroleum’s horrors, early EVs apparently exuded cleanliness, a sort of proto-environmentalism that was already feminized. 

Vehicles for Change

Energy systems always encompass not only complex, far-reaching material infrastructure, but they also create and are created by the ideological infrastructure of cultural meanings—a dynamic that becomes especially apparent during this ongoing, emergent energy transition. No energy source is inherently more fair or free of violence than another—yet each fuel source and the supply chain around it carries its own unique potential for different distributions or expressions of power. Commodities are never just one thing, as cars encompass a plethora of signifiers: the automobility afforded by car-centrism has become a manufactured necessity of economic life, even a source of physical safety (at the other end of the spectrum from petro-masculinity, Subaru has become the de-facto lesbian car, after the company recognized this niche consumer base). Simply consuming energy is far from the only way to participate in energy systems; feelings of energy scarcity and uncertainty create the conditions for new, or intensified, volatile identities aiming to capture the meanings of commodities. As Daggett writes, another form of Anthropocentric masculinity is the ecomodern, which primarily understands climate change through the lens of science, and esteems technological solutions that are based on private and market-based economic structures. Tesla, invested in projecting an image of sleek techno-optimism, has been the posterchild of the ecomodern EV.

While the combination of pro-EV government funding and industry willingness is not new, this window of greater public awareness and organized urgency for climate solutions (including on the part of industry not wanting to miss a profit opportunity) may lead to a tipping point of EV dominance. Petro-masculinity, as a positionality of inflamed fear, is correctly assessing the possibility of undoing oil hegemony. But the EV market’s adaptability, as evidenced in this essay, maintains a tight grip on all the privileges that car-centrism can still afford. Removing oil from the equation far from guarantees that hetero-masculine, racist authoritarian ideologies—made possible in large part because of oil—will be gone with it. This first round of manufactured consent showed the market to be fickle: recent market reporting shows some auto companies have lost faith in the EV already, after only a few years of once again trying to interpellate consumers.[40] The industry’s outsized attempts at tailoring to petro-masculine anxieties might be off-putting to some customers, while still not enticing enough for the intended audience. Whether or not Biden’s EV futurity come to fruition on his timeline, it is clear that the stakes are high in this transitory window, and it is worth paying close attention to who participates in the power of energy systems, and how.

So far, it seems as though the EV market has been led by elements of both ecomodern and petro-masculine desires. The EV may be overdetermined by a stubborn insistence on relying on novel, individuating, consumerist technology to solve complex problems – a barbed package of toxic masculinity, threatening to close off other possibilities. Indeed, for some in the climate movement, this moment calls for solutions more layered than EVs, because a capitalist supply chain will only perpetuate extraction and exploitation and still leave us with the spatial violence of car-centrism. One solution is mobility oriented towards the collective and publicly owned utilities: expanded and affordable public transportation, more accessible urban planning, and reducing commutes wherever possible. Truly overcoming petro-masculinity means resisting authoritarianism in all its forms, and as this essay shows, energy and mobility are critical sites where that struggle must be fought. As the energy transition evolves, future research is needed to trace emergent meanings, identities, and cultures attached to not only EVs but also its associated infrastructure, from mining to batteries to charging stations, to electricity writ large. The EV is not just a car, but a vehicle of identity and power, enclosure and extraction. Any car with any fuel can kill a pedestrian; relying on car-centricism to solve climate change can kill imagination. Even without petroleum, EVs risk perpetuating the worst of car-centrism, exemplified in petro-masculinity. 

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[1] John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 117.

[2] Urry, Mobilities, 116.

[3] Cara Daggett, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2018, Vol. 47(1), 32.

[4] “Fact Sheet: President Biden Announces Steps to Drive American Leadership Forward on Clean Cars and Trucks,” White House Briefing Room, 5 Aug 2021.

[5] US Department of Energy, Alternative Fuels Data Center.

[6] Itay Fischhendler and Daniel Nathan, “In the Name of Energy Security: The Struggle Over the Exportation of Israeli Natural Gas,” Energy Policy 70 (2014), 153.

[7] Cara Daggett, “Petromasculinity,” 32.

[8] Cara Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics and the Politics of Work (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 3.

[9] “Biden’s Fossil Fuel Fail: How U.S. Oil & Gas Supply Rises under the Inflation Reduction Act,” Oil Change International, 20 Nov 2023.

[10] Daggett, “Petromasculinity,” 26.

[11] Daggett, “Petro-masculinity,” 40.

[12] “Tesla Repellant Vinyl Decal,” Etsy.com.

[13] Daggett, “Petro-masculinity,” 35.

[14] “Global EV Outlook: Trends in Electric Cars,” IEA.org.

[15] Kyla Mandel, “Where were all the car ads at this year’s Super Bowl?” Time Magazine, 14 Feb 2023.

[16] Michael Wayland, “Biden’s test drive of electric Hummer helped increase reservations,” CNBC, 23 Nov 2021.

[17] Susanne C. Moser, “More bad news: The risk of neglecting emotional responses to climate change information,” in Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, ed. Susanne C. Moser and Lisa Dilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 69.

[18] Thea Riofrancos, Alissa Kendall, Kristi K. Dayemo, Matthew Haugen, Kira McDonald, Batul Hassan, Margaret Slattery, and Xan Lillehei, “Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining,” Climate and Community Project, 2023.

[19] Patrick Donnelly, “Western U.S. Lithium,” Google Maps.

[20] Nathan Borley, “Fake engine noise coming to EVs,” Axios, 26 Apr 2024.

[21] “Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards; Minimum Sound Requirements for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles,” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 13 July 2022.

[22] Superbowl Commercials, “Super Bowl LVII (57) Commercial: Ram 1500 REV – Premature Electrification (2023),” YouTube, 15 Feb 2023.

[23] Daggett, “Petro-masculinity,” 38.

[24] Urry, Mobilities, 119.

[25] Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 74.

[26] Daggett, “Petro-masculinity,” 41.

[27] Megan Brenan, “Most Americans are not completely sold on electric vehicles,” Gallup, 12 April 2023.

[28] Sam Metz and Scott Sonner, “Mine OK’d in Trump’s last day may boost Biden energy plan,” AP News, 23 Jan 2021.

[29] “Electric power sector basics,” Environmental Protection Agency, updated 7 May 2024.

[30] LeMenager, Living Oil, 84.

[31] Nick Lamoureaux, “The bitter battle between two men who both say they invented truck nuts,” Vice, 20 July 2015.

[32] “My first truck/EV. Am I doing it right?” Reddit.

[33] “Truck Nuts,” Reddit.

[34] Bruce Y. Lee, “The first ever Rivian-powered vasectomy? Here’s the reaction,” Forbes, 10 Sept 2022.

[35] Tom Standage, “The lost history of the electric car,” The Guardian, 3 Aug 2021.

[36] Urry, Mobilities, 113.

[37] Nick Georgano, The American Automobile: A Centenary, 1893-1993 (New York: Smithmark, 1993).

[38] “Columbus Electric Buggy Company,” Electric Vehicles News.

[39] Matt Novak, “The first golden age of electric car advertising,” Pacific Standard, 14 June 2017.

[40] Nick Carey and Joseph White, “Industry pain abounds as electric car demands hits slowdown,” Reuters, 30 Jan 2024.

Cover Image: Designed by Amelia Diehl.
*Cover Image Description: An electric Hummer is superimposed onto a field of grass and flowers.

Edited by Natascha Otoya and Trang Dang; reviewed by Lívia Regina Batista-Pritchard.