What Will The Motoring World Will Be Like In Five Years?
- •
- 63 reads
- •
- 271 views
- •
- 19 min read
The motoring world in such a state of turbulence today that predicting what it will be like in five years’ time seems only slightly easier than imagining the situation in fifty. Confusion in the industry and the outside world, in the UK and beyond, not to mention slowly but constantly changing customer tastes and requirements, combine to make the crystal ball particularly cloudy.
Still, there’s nothing like a good challenge, so on that optimistic note let’s make a few guesses about how things will be in 2022. Some of them may turn out to be nonsense, but we’re confident that many will prove to be true.
The tax situation
A new system of Vehicle Excise Duty taxation, the first for many years, will come into force on 1 April 2017 and, as we’ll see, is likely to have wide-ranging effects, since it places less emphasis on CO2 emissions. Unless it proves to be a complete disaster (which in political terms it probably won’t as it will bring extra money into the Treasury) it will almost certainly still be in place in 2022.
Benefit In Kind taxation for company cars is already known up until the end of the 2019-2020 financial year. The annual changes will no doubt continue along similar lines after that, with higher charges for cars emitting relatively small amounts of CO2 and the maximum 37% rate being applied from progressively lower CO2 bands (currently 190g/km for petrol cars but only 165g/km in 2019).
Trouble for hybrids
Hybrid cars, along with those running on bioethanol or LPG, currently have a considerable Vehicle Excise Duty advantage, but from April this will be reduced to just £10 per year. It’s quite probable that UK sales will therefore be very high for the rest of March but fall sharply immediately afterwards.
There was a recent precedent for this in the Netherlands. Sales of plug-in hybrids soared in late 2015, just before the end of a tax incentive for those cars, then fell dramatically in 2016.
The lesson to be learned is that, however much people like the idea of economical cars with low CO2 emissions, the amount of tax they have to pay on them still has a major effect on their popularity. This is very unlikely to change in the next five years.
Better "green" figures
There is still enormous pressure on manufacturers to improve fuel economy and lower CO2 emissions. The UK tax revision won’t change that, as cars are built to be sold in many countries where CO2 is still an important factor.
Petrol and diesel engines are still improving, at least according to official test results, but they can’t do so for ever. There must be a finite number of ways to reduce fuel usage, and many of them (improved control of fuelling, low rolling-resistance tyres, start/stop, battery regeneration and so on) are already common. The practical limit for CO2 emissions of conventional cars was estimated a few years ago at 80g/km, which seems reasonable.
Demands for better figures are not going to stop, so within the next five years there will certainly be new developments in the fields of all-electric, hybrid and hydrogen fuel cell technology, and more cars of these types will become available. How quickly they are taken up depends largely, as previously mentioned, on tax incentives.
The rise of hydrogen
Hydrogen fuel cell cars, which create electricity on-board and use it to power motors, have enormous advantages. Since the only thing they emit is water, they are considered to be extremely clean, as long as you don’t investigate how the hydrogen was made too closely. They are also as quiet and as cheap to tax as battery-powered cars and they have a much better range.
Their disadvantages are that they are very expensive and in most countries there isn’t a nationwide refuelling infrastructure. Fixing the second problem – by installing more pumps – may help solve the first. If the hydrogen is easily available, more people will buy the cars, and unit costs will fall.
They will still be rare in five years’ time, but if the situation improves you may be seeing (if not hearing) more of them then than you do now.
The decline of diesel
Although the Volkswagen Group’s emission fixing scandal was by no means the first, it has become by far the most famous, and it’s still not clear how badly VW and its subsidiary companies will be affected by it. What is certain is that it has raised a lot of questions about how suitable diesel really is as a fuel.
The popularity of diesel cars has soared in recent years because, whether you fiddle the figures or not, they produce less CO2 in official tests than equivalent petrol ones. The resulting tax advantages, along with the superior fuel economy, became almost the only thing most people talked about, even though other problems concerning particulates and oxides of nitrogen were well-known.
Now that more questions are being asked about diesels, it’s quite possible that people will be discouraged from buying them through limits on usage (already planned for Athens, Paris, Madrid and Mexico City) and tax disincentives, leading to a greater demand for hybrids and electric cars in the coming years.
The £39,995 car
From April onwards, cars sold in the UK with a list price of over £40,000 (regardless of any discounts) will be subject to an extra £310 of Vehicle Excise Duty annually from year two to year six. Customers will be keen to avoid this, so it’s possible that manufacturers will offer some premium models in a special tax-busting form for a very slightly lower amount such as £39,995.
There is another possibility. The DVLA considers a £38,000 car bought new with £4000 of optional extras to have a list price of £42,000, so its owner would have to pay the extra £310 each year. If, however, the options were fitted later, they wouldn’t affect the list price as far as the DVLA was concerned.
In that case, you’d still have paid £42,000 in total, but because you originally paid only £38,000 you wouldn’t be subject to the extra tax. Manufacturers might therefore offer dealer-fitted “retro” options, as Abarth did a few years ago (though for quite different reasons) with its Esseesse high-performance kit.
Car companies buying each other
Within the past year, Mitsubishi has joined an alliance formerly consisting only of Renault and Nissan, General Motors has agreed to sell Vauxhall and Opel to Groupe PSA (owners of Citroen, DS and Peugeot) and Fiat/Chrysler boss Sergio Marchionne has been dropping hints that he is keen for his company to be bought by another multinational.
This sort of thing is not new. Ten years ago it would have been difficult to imagine Jaguar and Land Rover being owned by an Indian company or Volvo by a Chinese one, yet today they are. It’s impossible to predict who will own who in 2022, but you can be certain that the situation won’t be the same as it is today.
There has been some concern about whether Vauxhall will survive the PSA buyout or be absorbed into Opel. Generally, though, the brands that are around now will still be around in five years’ time. They just won’t necessarily be owned by the same people.
How cars will look in future
There has arguably been no radical change in car design since headlights were incorporated into the bodywork before the Second World War, and there’s almost no chance of another one happening in the next five years. Passengers will continue enter the car through doors in the sides, most of the luggage will still go in the back, and so on.
Cars will look different only in detail. Exterior lights have developed tremendously since 2012 and will carry on doing so. There will be further developments in aerodynamics. Some designers will really let rip, as the ones at Toyota have recently done with the C-HR, but most will try to avoid scaring more conservative customers away with extravagant shapes.
Sadly, inadequate rear windows (the single worst aspect of car design these days) will probably still be around, unless manufacturers are forced to mend their ways after a hugely costly series of legal cases sparked off by someone reversing over someone they couldn’t see.
Popular car types
According to JATO Dynamics, SUVs extended their lead over all other car types in February 2017, taking 28% of the European market with superminis second on 21.9%. The popularity of SUVs, due mostly to their practicality and high seating positions, means that manufacturers as diverse as Dacia and Bentley now sell them. Few companies (McLaren being a rare exception) feel they can avoid doing so.
Unless there is some kind of scandal, or an extra tax on vehicles over a certain height, it’s difficult to see SUVs falling far from their current position in the next five years, at least in Europe. In the USA and Canada the favoured vehicle by a very long way is the large pickup, but road conditions make them impractical on this side of the Atlantic.
Car construction
Car bodies have traditionally been made of steel, but aluminium (usefully light, though expensive and difficult to work with) has become common on Audis and Jaguars, among others. While it may never entirely replace steel, you’ll probably see it being used more often over the next few years.
Another material worth watching is carbonfibre, as used by McLaren. It’s not cheap and it never will be, but it is immensely strong and doesn’t weigh much. It could be used on progressively humbler sports cars and increasingly for lightweight panels on high-performance saloons in the future, though it will still be rare in 2022.
Higher levels of equipment
This one is a very safe bet. Manufacturers invent things that had never been thought of, such as car radios, seatbelts, airbags or ABS. They appear at first on very select models, then become common and eventually universal. Satellite navigation, adaptive cruise control, automatic braking and smartphone charging are all at various stages in this process.
In five years they will all be more common than they are now, and other features currently seen only at the top end of the market will be available further down. Some of the new items will be very important, others more trivial – the Lavazza espresso machine available as an optional extra on the Fiat 500L is unusual, but other car companies may start offering similar things.
Increased connectivity
Manufacturers are scrambling to give their cars as much digital connection to the outside world as possible, and that process won’t be slowing down any time soon. The motor industry seems to be working on the basis that if a phone or computer can do it, customers will demand that their cars can do it too.
This is not easy to achieve. Even making a car able to pair up with every type of phone is technically challenging, and designers have to make sure that drivers can operate their devices while still paying attention to the road ahead. They will keep working on these things because the market will insist that they do.
Dials and buttons
Digital instrument displays are starting to replace conventional dials in more expensive cars and will increasingly do so in cheaper ones.
Touchscreens, nowadays usually operated in the same way as a tablet device, already cover all sectors – you can even find them in city cars nowadays. Manufacturers often report that they have put as many minor controls on to the screens because market research tells them people don’t like buttons and switches.
There are, however, early signs of a backlash. Some screen-based controls (such as changing the speed of a heater fan or choosing a different radio station) are harder to operate than conventional ones. Once the novelty of attractive digital graphics in your car has worn off, there may be an increasing demand to Bring Back The Button, quite possibly within the next five years.
Safety
Cars are enormously safer than they used to be, thanks both to improved crash protection and to the ability to prevent a crash in the first place. Manufacturers would have been working on this anyway, but they are encouraged to do so more urgently by the risk of bad publicity from low scores given by Euro NCAP and other safety organisations around the world.
Test requirements become more stringent almost every year, and they will certainly be harder to meet in 2022 than they are now. Thanks largely to this process, electronic stability control has become universal, at least in Europe, and automatic emergency braking is heading the same way. Within five years, there may be (or at least should be) more emphasis on rollover and side impact protection, which would force manufacturers to improve their cars in these areas.
Autonomous driving
No motoring topic has increased in public perception over the last five years so much as the ability of cars to drive themselves. There are passionate views for and against this, but since most accidents are caused by human error there is a very strong case for letting the cars do the work.
Without question, it’s technically possible. Cars and lorries have already been made to do it on test tracks and in controlled conditions on public roads. The challenge is to make sure they can do it everywhere and all the time without causing havoc.
Assuming this is sorted out, there is also the issue of public perception. The tipping point will come with the arrival of a generation of teenagers who think driving a car is as ridiculous as drying their clothes with a mangle. That may not happen this century, though, and definitely not within five years.
Where's my flying car?
As long ago as 1940, Henry Ford said, “Mark my words: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come.” In March this year, his great-grandson Bill Ford, now executive chairman of the family company, described the idea as “not so crazy”, but added: “I would say they had better be autonomous. Most people can’t drive in two dimensions, let alone three.”
Several companies, including AeroMobil, Moller and Terrafugia are trying to develop practical flying cars. Airbus displayed a concept called the Pop.Up at the 2017 Geneva Show and said it might have the real thing ready within a decade.
The technical challenge of making a car equally capable on the road and in the air is, however, immense, and there are also major safety issues. Despite Henry Ford’s optimism, it seems unlikely that all this will be resolved before the end of the century. Five years from now? Forget it.