Federal regulatory management of the automobile in the United States, 1966-1988

Throughout the 20th century, the automobile became the great American machine, a technological object that became inseparable from every level of American life and culture from the cycles of the national economy to the passions of teen dating, from the travails of labor struggles to the travels of "soccer moms." Yet, the automobile brought with it multiple dimensions of risk: crashes mangled bodies, tailpipes spewed toxic exhausts, and engines "guzzled" increasingly limited fuel resources. During the 1960s and 1970s, the United States Federal government created institutions---primarily the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration within the Department of Transportation and the Office of Mobile Source Pollution Control in the Environmental Protection Agency---to regulate the automobile industry around three concerns, namely crash safety, fuel efficiency, and control of emissions. This dissertation examines the growth of state institutions to regulate these three concerns during the 1960s and 1970s through the 1980s when the state came under fire from new political forces and governmental bureaucracies experienced large cutbacks in budgets and staff.;While most previous studies of regulation have focused either on biographies of regulatory visionaries (a.k.a. policy entrepreneurs) or on legislative histories, this dissertation examines how the federal government built bureaucratic organizations and administrative capacity to regulate and force change in the automobile through performance standards. Employees of these agencies helped shape automobile design by creating routine regulatory procedures that intervened in the longstanding traditions of automobile design. Only by examining these micro-practices of governmental power, I argue, can we understand how regulatory regimes have truly influenced their intended objects. My dissertation examines how these institutions developed, learned, and evolved, with an eye to how these transformations shaped technological change in the automobile industry. By examining the mundane world of federal test procedures, scientific studies, agency meetings, and administrative hearings, I will show how low-level bureaucrats formed new networks between government and industry, established the state of the art in automobile technology, and forced innovation in automobile design.