  Mobility is valued greatly in the highly industrialized societies. The need
for radical change in propulsion technologies is obvious to all actors,
irrespective of whether they originate from industry, politics or the general
public. This paper analyses the tension between innovation pressure and pull of
convention in the automobile industries. This tension is currently giving rise
to a situation of stalemate in relation to alternative propulsion and fuel
technologies. We map the situation by means of a taxonomy of current and future
incremental and radical innovations. Based on in-depth field observation of
engineering and manufacturing in Germany, we present an innovation landscape in
the form of a two-dimensional matrix composed of propulsion innovations and
fuel innovations. We use mathematical models of hyperselection to develop a
rationale for escape strategies from the current lock-in into conventional
combustion-engine technology. Based on the heuristic guidance of these models,
we discuss several empirical cases in which buses act as pioneers in markets
for alternative propulsion vehicles. Neither the model nor the basic empirical
material used in this paper are new. Instead, we show that using mathematical
models as a kind of substratum on which empirical observations and theoretical
arguments can be ordered leads to new and partly unexpected insights into the
nature of socioeconomic innovations. We apply this approach to the case of new
driving technologies and argue that there is a 'third epistemic function' of
models in the continuum between data driven, exactly validated models at the
one extreme and a metaphoric use of models in thought experiments at the other.
This is what we call a holistic description.
