Integrating Domestic Car Maintenance into the Automotive Transition: An Ethnographic Study of “DIY” Motorist Households

Résumé:

Purpose

The call for papers highlights the centrality of the circular economy in ensuring an environmentally sustainable automotive transition. Beyond reducing the material intensity of vehicle production, extending the lifespan of electric vehicles and their components constitutes a key lever for environmental sustainability. This perspective raises two interrelated questions that a qualitative sociological approach is particularly well suited to address. First, what are the implications, for working-class households, of losing the ability to extend the lifespan of their own combustion engine vehicles—objects they own and over which they retain partial maintenance and repair autonomy? The transition to electric vehicles is likely to disconnect some of these households from a set of social, material, and symbolic resources that currently enable low-cost mobility. Second, through what processes might these households be led to transform their technical skills and socially acquired knowledge in order to engage with the maintenance of electric vehicles, which they are expected to retain over relatively long periods? Underlying these questions is a broader issue central to the automotive transition: the technical, symbolic, and political appropriation of electric vehicles by households historically attached to combustion engine vehicles technologies.

Research Design

This paper draws on a two-year ethnographic study conducted in a rural town of approximately 3,000 inhabitants, selected for its economic, spatial, and geographical characteristics. The research was carried out within the framework of the ANR MOTEURS project. The empirical material consists of 46 qualitative interviews, complemented by systematic observations of both public and private spaces (parking areas, streets, gardens, and private as well as professional garages). The analysis focuses on the non-monetary resources (material, residential, social, cognitive, and professional) that enable certain households to use highly depreciated vehicles, often exceeding 250,000 kilometers.

Results and Findings

The first set of findings shows that some working-class households are able to mitigate the uncertainty and risk of breakdown associated with aging vehicles by mobilizing resources that lie largely outside the formal automotive sector. These resources can be analytically grouped into three categories. Material resources include access to housing configurations—such as detached houses with garages, workshops, or gardens—that enable vehicle maintenance, as well as the storage of tools, spare parts, and even “donor” vehicles. Temporal and cognitive resources refer to forms of time organization structured around manual activities (home repair, object fabrication and maintenance), which combine the management of everyday constraints with leisure practices, thereby sustaining the accumulation of technical competencies. Finally, social resources encompass networks of friends or relatives engaged in similar practices, facilitating the circulation of technical knowledge, in addition to digital resources accessed online.
The second set of findings highlights that the self-taught competencies mobilized by these households are neither fixed nor confined to older combustion engine vehicles. The increasing availability of affordable USB and Bluetooth OBD devices has contributed to the diffusion of practices ranging from the interpretation of diagnostic data (e.g., particulate filter indicators) to the clearing of fault codes, and, in more advanced cases, to the customization of vehicle features or the reprogramming of electronic control units. This vernacular appropriation of onboard electronics calls into question the conventional boundary between “accessible” and “overly technical” vehicles, and suggests the possibility of a similar process of appropriation with regard to the technical architecture of electric vehicles.

Practical and Theoretical Implications

These findings indicate that the transition to electric vehicles entails, for a segment of “DIY” households, a destabilization of previously available material, social, and cognitive resources. The shift to electric mobility, particularly through leasing arrangements, introduces new monetary constraints embedded in financing schemes, whereas these households have thus far relied on practices that remain largely invisible to, and unaccounted for in, conventional economic models. For stakeholders involved in the automotive sector and in the governance of the transition, this situation entails a dual risk: the economic precarization of these households and their potential resistance to adopting electric vehicles and/or leasing schemes.
From this perspective, the analysis points to the need to conceptualize the automotive transition as the coexistence of two complementary dynamics: on the one hand, the diffusion of affordable electric vehicles; on the other, the continued use and maintenance of older vehicles by households whose mobility practices involve relatively low annual mileage and, consequently, limited environmental impact. Such coexistence appears crucial both for the budgetary sustainability of these households and for the political acceptability of electric mobility.
In the longer term, the findings also underscore a largely overlooked dimension of transition models: the progressive aging of the electric vehicle fleet. Anticipating this dynamic requires integrating, at the design stage, the possibility of safe and accessible forms of lay intervention. The political acceptability of electric vehicles – particularly among the populations considered here – will depend on their capacity for technical and symbolic appropriation. In this respect, self-taught forms of expertise should be regarded not as residual, but as a resource to be mobilized in sustaining the durability of an electrified vehicle fleet. More broadly, “DIY” households must be fully integrated into the conceptualization and implementation of a circular economy in the automotive sector, as their inclusion constitutes a key condition for the social and political viability of the transition.