The future of the car - HBR podcast Oct '21

Will the Internal Combustion engine car (ICE) of the past 120 years have a silent death in the coming decade ? This is an interesting point I was discussing with my friends and colleagues over the past two months. They have all been unanimous that the IC Engine car is on the death bed, it is on the way out. The ICE car business model is dead. It is not worth spending money on a new ICE car.

While listening to the HBR podcast on the Future of the car (click here) with Ford's Hau Thai Tang, Oct '21, what surprised me was the fact that the automobile is moving from the Internal Combustion Engine to a high tech item. More than being mobility vehicles, they are instruments of mobility providing solutions to many of our daily problems.

Modern day cars are going to be

• electrically powered, 
• increasingly autonomous and driverless
• connected over the air for software updates, 
• able to collect data on driving distances, and driving style
• able to predict future component failure and plan preventive maintenance schedules
• not owned by driver, shared mobility
• high-tech needing higher computing intensity 
• have more processor chips to automate many decisions 

In a US study it was found that the 2.5 tonne modern day cars, 80% are used barely for less than 14 miles daily with 20% less than 2 miles daily and only 5-10 % are used more than 100 miles a day. The cars in our homes are used for barely 2 hours daily, less than 10% of the time with the other 90% of the time, the car sitting idle. Spending about INR 10-15 lakhs for such a dead investment, does it make financial sense ?

Should we be looking at shared mobility solutions in the future, with lead taken by Ford itself to enable customers to rent out their cars to willing customers, that can reduce the number of cars on the road, leading to benefiting the environment, reducing pollution ?

Can multi-modal solutions help with customers being able to move over long distances over different modes like car, cycle, bus, train etc all networked with data sharing ?

Lets eagerly wait for a bright and better electrically powered future for mobility.

George