The auto revolution is here
Burton Booz
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By Shira Ovide
In the past few weeks, conventional cars have been put on the endangered list.
The electric carmaker Tesla turned its first full-year profit in its history. News broke that Hyundai has been negotiating with Apple to manufacture a driverless car. Start-ups like Rivian and Lucid are racing ahead with entirely novel ways to make vehicles. And General Motors said that by 2035, it would stop selling gasoline-powered cars.
“I’ve been writing about the auto industry for 19 years, and I’ve really never seen anything like this,” my colleague Neal E. Boudette told me. We discussed the future of cars and whether traditional automakers or tech-focused companies, like Tesla and Apple, would rule the next generation of the roads.
Shira: Are traditional automakers, like G.M., serious about electric vehicles?
Neal: G.M. wouldn’t have said that it will stop making internal combustion engines by 2035 unless it were dead serious. Ford and Volkswagen haven’t committed to a deadline, but they’re spending tens of billions of dollars to develop electric vehicles. These companies are convinced that there will be a tipping point that spells the death of conventional cars.
Electric vehicles, especially in the United States, are a fraction of car sales. Maybe this isn’t a tipping point?
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The movement toward electric cars could slow down, especially if there are economic downturns or shortages of raw materials. But I don’t think that there’s any going back now because of climate change and governments’ determination to fight it — including in China, some European countries and the United States.
Put these developments into context for us.
When I saw the G.M. news, I sat back in my chair and reflected on how revolutionary this was. G.M., for more than a century, has been producing internal combustion engine vehicles, and soon it won’t be.
We’re on the cusp of one of those big industrial transformations in which we shift from an old way of doing things to a completely new one, and everything will be turned upside down.
OK, wow. So who will lead this new car world? Auto companies or tech companies?
It’s not either-or. The companies that succeed will need to think like the other side. Auto companies need to adapt the mind-set and expertise of tech firms, and vice versa.
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The marvel of Tesla is that it completely changed the concept of a car from a mechanical product to software. Instead of a car being something that was made once and didn’t change much, Tesla made it like an iPhone. The braking system or transmission can be upgraded and adapted after the car is on the road.
The traditional automakers were slow to catch on, but they may turn out to be very strong competitors to this new mode. And they’re good at something that Tesla still isn’t: conducting the orchestra of tens of thousands of parts, and assembling them to exacting standards at a rate of 100,000 or 300,000 cars a year.
What do you make of Apple’s vehicle project and its negotiations (now on hold, it seems) with Hyundai to manufacture those cars?
It shows that Apple doesn’t want to do what Tesla did and build its own car factories and machinery. If it happens, it would be an interesting melding of Apple’s expertise and Hyundai’s manufacturing skills.
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