Driving an old car: an alternative technical utopia?

This article looks at the reception of one of today’s hottest technical utopias: the electrification and digitization of individual mobility - and, more specifically, the automobile. Its spread has already begun, and is now a political priority. The electric and connected car thus concentrates beliefs in a technical solution to all the environmental ills and urban problems generated by the automobile. By focusing on the existence of automobile mobilities that radically diverge from this dominant technicist utopia - namely, the regular use of cars over 20 years old - this article aims to show that the utopia of the electric and connected car meets with opposition directly generated by the feelings of dispossession it generates, and that on closer inspection, it is indeed technical counter-utopias that are lodged in these mobilities thought of and expressed as alternative, subversive or even contestatory.