What Is the Best Site for Car Reviews New York Times
Farhad Manjoo
The Await of Cars Is Driving Me Out of My Mind
A production manager at Mercedes once told me that he expected to run into more changes in cars and the machine business in the next 20 years than we've seen in the past 75. That was six and a half years ago, and so far, his prediction has been spot on; I struggle to think of a consumer business now undergoing a more total transformation than what's happening in automobiles.
The showtime revolution is electrification. Encouraged by environmental regulations and accelerated past competition from Elon Musk'southward electric car juggernaut, Tesla, much of the industry plans to abandon its defining technology, the gas-powered engine, in favor of electrical motors and batteries.
Then there's autonomous driving. While the fully self-driving machine remains far-off, many cars are beginning to pick upwardly the routine drudgeries and avert the sudden catastrophes of your daily commute. Cars tin can brake for pedestrians, modify lanes and keep stride with other cars on the road, even in stop-and-become traffic. Some, like models bearing General Motors' Super Cruise arrangement, don't fifty-fifty require yous to continue a hand on the wheel.
And finally, in some other trend shaped past Tesla, cars are turning into smartphones on wheels. They come up packed with gigantic touch-screens and loads of cameras and tin can proceeds features through updates over the internet. The electric machine start-up Fisker recently unveiled a model, the Ocean S.U.V., that carries a monstrous 17.one-inch screen on its dash that can be rotated into "Hollywood manner" — horizontal orientation for watching movies and playing video games while the auto is parked.
With so much change going on in the machine concern, I'd been looking forwards to visiting the Los Angeles Machine Testify, one of the earth's largest. But it wasn't long after arriving on the testify floor last week that I began to feel — how to put this delicately? — bored out of my mind.
Cars may be undergoing huge changes on the inside, simply yous wouldn't know information technology to await at them. Everywhere I turned at the prove, I saw the aforementioned basic vehicle, a selection equally bland and monotonous as a supermarket's TV dinner aisle.
Machine enthusiasts have been lament about homogeneity for decades, merely the problem seems to have grown dire. Most cars at the show looked like most others in their categories, and because Americans have converged on a very narrow range of auto categories, the sameness felt oppressive and, ultimately, quite lamentable. Cars were in one case a playground for aesthetic experimentation, a showcase for the world's nearly inventive and daring industrial designers. Now they actually are like smartphones; every new iPhone is merely a slight evolution from the last one, and then is every new automobile.
"Compared to how crazy the stuff is that's happening in the tech world of cars, it's baroque how much they all look the aforementioned," said Doug DeMuro, who hosts an splendid motorcar review YouTube aqueduct.
The sameness may be a product of a tendency that has roiled the industry since the 1990s: the steady sales growth in S.U.5.s and crossovers, the smaller cousins of S.U.V.s that are congenital more like cars than trucks, and the reject of passenger vehicles, including sedans, hatchbacks and wagons.
Today the bulk of vehicles sold in America are crossovers or S.U.V.southward, and pickups have also long been popular. Aesthetically, the pickups are nearly duplicate from 1 another. Even Ford's new F-150 Lightning, the electric version of the longtime acknowledged vehicle in America, looks pretty much like every other pickup on the road.
The S.U.5.southward, and crossovers, meanwhile, come in two basic shapes: boxes and bubbles. The boxes are the Southward.U.V.s, which range from huge (Jeep Grand Cherokee, Ford Explorer) to actually huge (Chevy Tahoe, Ford Trek). The bubbles are the crossovers, whose sales take shot up over the past couple of decades.
Until a few years agone, the Toyota Camry sedan was the best-selling passenger car in the United States, a position it had held for nearly two decades. The Camry has since been dethroned by a bubble.
Every bit of Oct, Toyota's RAV4 crossover was the nation's best-selling nontruck passenger vehicle of the year. Honda'south similar-looking CR-V is but backside information technology. Automakers have been backing away from sedans. In 2018, Ford said it would terminate making sedans for the U.S. market.
Collectively, S.U.V.due south and crossovers will account for nearly 55 pct of vehicles sold in America in 2021, co-ordinate to Stephanie Brinley, an automotive analyst at the market enquiry firm IHS Markit. Pickups are projected to make upward an boosted xviii.four percent of the market. In other words, most three out of every iv passenger vehicles sold this year were trucks, crossovers or S.U.5.s.
At that place are many forces pushing for sameness. Constraints imposed by safety regulations and aerodynamics have left car companies niggling room for experimental designs. The bigger constraint is what customers want — vehicles with roomy interiors that ride high, with the feel of a living room, or perhaps a throne.
Brinley and others in the car industry look consumer preferences to stick even as everything else about cars changes. A very popular Tesla vehicle is the Model Y, a pretty traditional-looking crossover. When Ford decided to put upward a stiff rival to Tesla, it, too, went with a crossover: the new Mustang Mach-E, which looks much like the Model Y and nothing like any Mustang that Ford ever made before. By 2025, Brinley predicts, S.U.Five.s and crossovers will account for 59 percent of sales, and pickups almost xx percentage — meaning that 4 out of every five cars sold volition be pickups, bubbles or boxes.
I take written oft of my honey-detest relationship with cars. I love cars as products; I hate them equally infrastructure. I honey watching the car manufacture for its dynamism, its technological innovation and the way it has anticipated and contradistinct the public's artful preferences; I hate the manufacture for the style it has dominated politics and urban planning, for the way information technology has billed its products as a necessary part of modern life.
But every year the product side of cars offers less to love. The manufacture's biggest innovations are now driven by Silicon Valley — by advances in batteries, cameras, networks and artificial intelligence. Cars are growing brains, and I'k glad for it. I just wish they weren't also losing eye, soul and personality.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/opinion/smart-car-technology.html
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