Consumer taste and preference is always a cyclical thing. Today’s popular items will be on sales bins tomorrow. That kind of change has always happened and will continue to happen since consumers are always after the next big thing. The same principle applies in the auto industry, which is exactly what Volkswagen’s executive director of design Klaus Bischoff alluded to when the told Auto Express that SUVs will eventually become “dinosaurs” once autonomous driving vehicles hit the market.
“Maybe SUVs will start to look old at some point and people will point at them and say, ‘He’s driving a dinosaur,’" Bischoff said. “We don’t see that now, but I strongly believe that we’re going to see much different vehicles when we get to Level 5 autonomy, and then it becomes much more open.”
The comparison to the extinct reptiles sounds a little harsh, but there are some nuggets of truth to what Bischoff is talking about. More than most industries, the automotive business is susceptible to the winds of change, especially when revolutionary technologies like electrification and autonomous driving start to take center stage. There once was a time when vans and minivans were considered the go-to people movers. Then crossovers and SUVs arrived and those same vans slowly started losing popularity to the point that only a handful of automakers still make them these days.
Today, crossovers and SUVs are as popular as they’ve ever been, but according Bischoff, the next automotive “game changer” will be Level 5 autonomy, or the ability for cars to completely drive by themselves without any sort of human assistance. The shift itself isn’t necessarily tied into the convenience of being able to do something else as the car drives by itself, but rather the opportunity that designers will be presented with to completely alter a car’s interior to suit a number of different lifestyles, including the “lounge layout” that Volkswagen presented with the ID Concept at the 2016 Paris Motor Show.
That kind of design is a possibility if cars with Level 5 autonomy become the norm in the industry. In the event that happens, would you still drive an SUV?
Continue after the jump to read the full story.
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