How Are Car Trends Changing And What Will The Future Bring?

The automotive industry has always traditionally been seen as one of the most forward-thinking and has always been one of the first to benefit from major technological advances. But of all the hundreds of intricate automotive trends affecting the sector, what are the ones that are really going to have some immediate transformative impacts in the next few years? 

Here, we’ll focus on the trends that are not predictions or vague ideas but trends that are here with us right making major waves and changing the future, today.
 

Leasing over ownership

Many experts predict the end of ‘traditional’ car ownership in recent years and foresee our cars becoming more like our phones - interchangeable models that we lease from a distributor and upgrade every few years. This is still a solid decade away from becoming a mainstream concern though. So for now, companies such as ZenAuto offer a more personal car leasing service that acts as a middle ground between traditional ownership and the future.

Autonomous cars

They might have once been seen as the stuff of science fiction but autonomous cars are here and there are going to have a major impact on the sector in coming years. It might be a few more years yet before safety standards can be guaranteed but even so, experts expect self-driving cars to account for around 40% of all traffic within just the next 12 years. This is going to change the automotive industry completely on a foundational level.
 

Connected cars

We should have seen the writing on the wall all the way back in 2003 when the first in-built sat-navs were released. This was the start of a major trend in the sector which has seen IoT-enabled cars becoming the rule rather than the exception in recent years. Vehicle-to-vehicle communication and more thorough data sourcing mean that annual services might be a thing of the past sooner rather than later.

Alternative fuels

Whilst purely electric cars still make up only a fraction of the number of cars driven worldwide on the road, there has been a vast surge in electric adoption in the last few years and there are more people than ever before opting for hybrids that offer the best of both worlds. The public perception around electric vehicles is changing thanks to the success of vehicles like the Nissan Leaf and the Toyota Prius and there’s plenty more where they came from.

3D printing

We’re not yet at the point where a car can be 3D printed faster than it can be manufactured traditionally but we are almost there and once we breach that golden threshold it could very well end up being the ultimate automotive game-changer.


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