Pop quiz: do you know what they call Thai food in Thailand? Food. Do you what they’ll call electrified cars in an electrified future? Cars. And autonomous cars in an autonomous futur- you get the point.
Recently I was pushed to defend MotorTrend’s take on electric vehicles (EVs) and the burgeoning autonomous car segment. It was a bit awkward and uncomfortable, because I do very much believe that the world is moving in both of these directions and that someday, there will be more electric and autonomous vehicles than cars powered by internal combustion engines (ICE) that we pilot ourselves. How soon is the question.
I’m conscious of the fact that for all the hype of the two plus decades, progress in both arenas has been less leaps and bounds, but fits and sparks. And I should know, because MotorTrend was there from the beginning, with our first test drive of GM’s new for 1997 all-electric EV1 in the June 1996 issue.
Over 10 years later, we followed up with a road test of a funky new electric roadster backed by a Silicon Valley nerd interloper with a funny name. Elon Musk’s initial salvo, the 2008 Tesla Roadster, was impressive enough but the real shock came an election year later, in the fall of 2012, when MotorTrend was the first major media outlet to recognize the triumph of the Telsa upstart, by awarding Model S Car of the Year 2013. A year later, after Model S took the world by storm, Tesla’s CMO at the time, told me our COTY award was “the inflection point” that turned the tide of public and business opinion. While the electric + autonomous buzz is real, nowadays, seeing a Tesla Model whatever auto-piloting through your ‘hood is no longer Instagram-worthy.
You’ve probably heard this story before. Remember when all phones were just, you know, phones? Maybe it had a dial or push buttons, but it certainly wasn’t cordless, mobile or smart. And then phone companies added things like call waiting (oh hey, can you hang on a sec?) while manufacturers threw in answering machines while removing pesky cords. Don’t get me started on how quickly we went from Motorola pagers to RAZRs, and then from texting in alphanumeric shorthand (43770) on Nokia 3310s to group FaceTiming on the latest iPhone. And yet, it’s difficult to recall the pre-smartphone era; how did we ever get around without Waze or Lyft? Or eat without Yelp, OpenTable or PostMates? And check-in with friends before Facebook or Instagram?
The other day, I watched a YouTube video (on my phone, no less) that had gone viral: two teenagers had been given the task of dialing a simple 9-digit phone number on a rotary telephone. They had 4 minutes to complete the task and failed hilariously. It’s fun to eyeroll and laugh, but there will come a day when parking by hand, guiding a car down on a highway, and filling a car’s fuel tank with liquid petrochemicals will be just as comically mystifying.
Just before our latest issue went to press, I was in Detroit for the last wintery North American International Auto Show (it moves to summer in 2020.) Ironically, it was unseasonably warm; press days saw clear skies and none of the expected snow or slush on the ground. Though it was relatively quiet as the NAIAS goes, there were still a couple of long-awaited debuts of ICE-powered rocket ships. The long-awaited, much anticipated Toyota Supra and Ford Mustang GT 500, with well over 1,000 gas-burning horsepower between them, led motortrend.com’s coverage by a significant margin. The third-place finisher? Ram’s new Heavy Duty line of trucks. That these bad boys dramatically outperformed a couple of exclusives we landed on new EV concepts, both with tales of autonomous whiz-bangery baked in, shouldn’t be a huge surprise. It’s still early yet; the most compelling EV and autonomous stories have yet to be written.
But rest assured, MotorTrend will be here, telling car stories for as long as they are called, you know, cars.
More from Ed Loh:
- Why Toyota’s Supra-Z4 Partnership With BMW Makes Sense
- Super Served and Richly Deserved
- Moment in Time
- Nike vs Adidas, Coke vs Pepsi, Tesla vs …?
- Doubling and Tripling Down on Best Driver’s Car
The post Countdown to Our Electric, Autonomous Future: How Soon Is Now? – The Lohdown appeared first on Motortrend.
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