It is often claimed that autonomous driving will be realized in the future; some even claim it has already been realized. My study investigates autonomous driving’s effects on the present. It is about the meanings and struggles of those involved in working with self-driving car assemblages at a German university. At present, there is no empirically grounded investigation which simultaneously investigates autonomous driving in its promissory and material dimensions. My study takes autonomous driving as an instance where two male-dominated cultures intersect: German car culture and German computing culture. I am interested in the ways in which the relation between men, masculinity and technology, is used, negotiated and reproduced within an emerging culture of autonomous driving. My analysis is grounded in empirical material generated by original ethnographic research. Between June 2012 and November 2015 I conducted fieldwork among a collective of roboticists and their computational enhanced cars in Germany. My research is mainly situated within conversations on robotics and artificial intelligence in (feminist) science and technology studies (e.g. Collins 1995; Suchman 2008).
