Are The Automakers Future Proof?

Fuel prices are rising, CO2 emission norms are getting ever stricter, congestion is increasing, taxes are going up, and young people are fast losing interest in cars. Suffice to say, it’s a tough time to be an automaker!

But it’s interesting to see how different carmakers are addressing these issues. Perhaps in the past, companies would have taken a cue from their favourite flightless birds and just dug their heads in the sand with the hope that ‘this too shall pass.’ But it seems as though automakers have grown wiser after experiencing one tumultuous crisis after the other. They now realize that they have to chart a proactive course through the haze of uncertainty in order to simply emerge on the other side.

But that requires a lot of planning, and, dare I say it, hedging your bets. It’s no longer as simple as letting your existing model run a seven-year course while you calmly figure out how to make it bigger, faster, and just that little bit sleeker. The need of the hour is quite the opposite – you now have to make your new model lighter and more efficient, but still safer and more comfortable. All of which is considerably harder to achieve of course, while at the same time devising the right electrification strategy – which you can only hope will work – in addition to setting up car-sharing programs, developing autonomous driving machines, and generally solving the world’s energy needs all at the same time.

In all seriousness though, the good thing is that automakers are not shying away from the changing mobility landscape. Scary as it must be, most of them are attempting to face it head-on – and that’s a courageous move. They have future mobility teams and vehicle intelligence engineers who work together with app developers and smart phone designers to try and figure out what the mobility landscape will look like years from now, while also attempting to create vehicles that are a reflection of the current generation. All the while they also have to cater to today’s transportation needs by giving the internal combustion engine, which has served us so well for so long, a new lease of life by making it more finely engineered than the Hubble Telescope.

Each manufacturer, or automotive group, has studied, debated, researched, forecasted and placed their bets – but each has a different approach to the same problem. So, who will come up trumps?

Well, unless someone can also invent a working DeLorean time machine while they’re at it, it looks like we’ll just have to wait and see…