ScienceTuesday: Technology on the horizon. What is driving the dream of autonomous driving?

ScienceTuesday: Technology on the horizon. What is driving the dream of autonomous driving?

📅 Tuesday, 26 May 2026
🕑 1.30 pm to 2.15 pm
🧑‍🎓 Speaker: Prof. Dr Sebastian Pranz
📍 Canteen/hybrid (see link below)

The history of autonomous driving has, to this day, been characterised by a peculiar sense of imminent expectation. The era in which fallible human drivers would be replaced by infallible technology already seemed within reach back in the 1960s, when Continental unveiled a remote-controlled ‘ghost car’ for tyre testing. Even latest technologies such as Tesla’s so-called ‘Full Self-Driving’ promise an autonomous transport revolution in the near future: if humans disappear from behind the wheel, so the narrative goes, vehicles will become safer, more comfortable and more efficient. This project examines the imaginaries of autonomous driving on the basis of three empirical case studies from the fields of private transport and public transport. On the one hand, the aim is to identify the socio-technical conceptions that have driven technological development, both in the past and today. On the other hand, the aim is to examine the specific temporality of the narrative: how is the temporal framework of a narrative about the future structured? Which temporalities conflict with one another, and which prevail? How are the past, present and future punctuated? etc. The thesis is that, in the still-unfinished technology of autonomous driving, the present and the future intersect, so that the car becomes a ‘space of experience’ (Koselleck, 1995) for the transport of tomorrow.