In January and February 2007, the European Union found itself at the heart of a battle between two of its commissioners; Stavros Dimas who is responsible for environmental issues and Günter Verheugen who is responsible for industrial affaires. Dimas was pushing for a decision that would oblige automobile manufacturers to meet the proposed strict emission reduction targets for their overall annual sales while Verheugen argued for targets per automobile and proposed that the norms should be differentiated by category of vehicles. For obvious reasons, Fiat, PSA and Renault supported the first position while the German automobile manufactuers supported the second.

Such a debate illustrates the difficulties faced when the generally-accepted principles of sustainable development need to be transformed into concrete practices by firms and public policy makers, with all the associated issues of arbitrage in which technical questions are hiding very political ones. Despite appearances, the broad ethical and ecological issues it raises do not permit the objectives of sustainable development to transcend the conflicts of interests that persist between different industrial actors, different regions of the world and different stages in the production process.

In this context, as a social science research community specialised in the automobile sector, we are obliged to consider how the different actors in the industry (manufacturers, equipment suppliers, distributors, repair specialists, public policy makers) react to the challenges posed by sustainable development. This does not mean, of course, that we are obliged to dilute the critical dimension of our approach in light of what appears to be a dominant consensus for measures favoring sustainable development. On the contrary, a phenomenon benefiting from such an overwhelming positive rhetoric can surely benefit from a more critically analytical approach. What is clear is that, beyond the rhetoric, we are witnessing a new manner of questioning the role of the automobile in our economies and our societies.

The social actors involved in promoting this debate on the automobile and sustainable development see this as an opportunity to ask new questions and to have industrial actors reply to a broader range of constituencies, thus introducing more ‘democracy’ into the life of the industry. As researchers in social science, our primary interest is to enhance understanding of such social, political and economic issues and the growing importance of sustainable development is thus fertile ground from which to generate a challenging new set of research questions in the automobile industry.