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posted by martyb on Monday November 13 2017, @11:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-prefer-the-Age-of-Aquarius dept.

Bob Lutz, former General Motors Vice Chair, opines:

It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era.

The auto industry is on an accelerating change curve. For hundreds of years, the horse was the prime mover of humans and for the past 120 years it has been the automobile.

Now we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules.

The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you'll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.
...
The vehicles, however, will no longer be driven by humans because in 15 to 20 years — at the latest — human-driven vehicles will be legislated off the highways.

The tipping point will come when 20 to 30 percent of vehicles are fully autonomous. Countries will look at the accident statistics and figure out that human drivers are causing 99.9 percent of the accidents.

Is he right? Is the age of the automobile coming to an end?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @02:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @02:43AM (#597113)

    Bob Lutz hasn't been an executive at GM for several years now.

    I would say GM has taken another direction. They've put their money on trucks, SUVs, and more recently a bunch of utterly generic crossovers. Sure, they have things like the Volt and Bolt, but their bread and butter is still trucks. The next time gas goes over $4/gallon, we'll be bailing out their failed asses, again.

    What GM needs to do is kill off another couple of useless divisions like Buick and GMC* and start focusing on cars that are well designed and fuel efficient and that people would want to buy, instead of yet another stupid CUV.

    *Except perhaps the large commercial vehicles that don't have an almost identical Chevy equivalent.