Vehicle innovators face fight to win hearts and minds

When the most sought-after $1m supercars are hybrids, when hatchbacks are being made from carbon fibre and when manufacturers are promising volume vehicles that can drive themselves, it is clear the world’s car factories and showrooms are geared up for change. Driven by regulations and shifting customer demands, carmakers are pushing the boundaries of how we drive, fuel and interact with cars.

Tomorrow’s vehicles will be less polluting, lighter and safer. They will be more intelligent and better connected – less of a petrolhead’s toy and more of an extension of the office or living room.

When this summer BMW launched its i3 model – an electric car made from carbon fibre in a factory powered by wind turbines – Ian Robertson, the carmaker’s head of sales and marketing, said the vehicle’s technologies “have the potential to push the industry further forward in the next five years than it has in the past 100”.

Trailblazers who have taken gambles on future technology have seen their efforts pay off.

Toyota’s Prius brand is a household name, while US company Tesla’s success with luxury electric cars continues to turn heads. Innovators such as Continental, Daimler, Nissan – and outsider Google – have shown that self-driving cars are not science fiction.

However, the road to a greener, safer and more advanced future is by no means guaranteed to be a smooth or well-signposted run.

In research-intensive areas such as alternative engines, carmakers understand the need to change but are far from united about how. Cheerleaders for certain fuels are anxiously checking their mirrors to see if others are following, while late adopters fret that they have missed the bus.

Big breakthroughs that many foresaw years ago have failed to materialise. Batteries are still too heavy and too unreliable, while the very public demises of Better Place, which pioneered switchable batteries for electric vehicles, and Fisker Automotive, a Californian company that produced electric cars, underlined the gulf between plausible and viable.

Legislation and public acceptance pose the biggest roadblocks. Many technologies such as driverless vehicles or car-to-car communications are almost road-ready, but introducing those innovations could take years as lawyers pore over the implications and customers remain wary.

Xavier Mosquet, managing director at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), says: “Safety, comfort, connectivity and fuel efficiency are the three things that drive the future for carmakers. But all these things cost a fortune.” Nevertheless, progress is essential. With sales growth in the US, Europe and other mature markets expected to remain subdued in the longer term, carmakers are under ever greater pressure to deliver more advanced offerings with each new model to keep customers returning to showrooms.

Trends such as a sustained rationalisation of the number of platforms – the frameworks upon which car models are built – and increased sharing of models between brand alliances to cut development costs – mean that companies have to introduce fresh features to stay ahead of rivals.

Philip Watkins, director of automotive research at Citigroup, says: “It’s going to be all about differentiating yourself, giving yourself a better product, meeting consumer demands.”

Hybrid, pure-electric and hydrogen-powered cars are driving on the world’s roads today but progress in finding a definitive replacement for the venerable internal combustion engine will probably continue to be elusive.

Acceptance of greener powertrains – the mechanisms that transmit the drive from the engine to the axle – is slowly revving up, lead by the Prius, Nissan Leaf and others. Even ultra-luxury sports cars such as the McLaren P1 or the LaFerrari boast hybrid powertrains, though transferring that technology to volume cars will be crucial.

Pure electric and hybrid vehicles are expected to account for a mere 4 per cent of global sales in 2020, according to LMC Automotive, which tracks and analyses industry trends. Tellingly, BMW designed its i3 to include a petrol engine as a back-up to the electric motor and battery.

“While consumers might say that they care about emission levels, they still care less about that than the price of the car,” adds Mr Watkins.

Spluttering progress in alternative fuels and uptake of hybrid, fuel-cell and pure electric engines mean the almost 130-year reign of spark plugs and pistons is in little danger of being overthrown immediately.

Batteries, on which plug-in hybrids, pure electric cars and fuel-cell technologies rely, need to be lighter and cheaper. Stefano Aversa, managing director of AlixPartners, says: “I still don’t see the conditions for a big surge in alternative engines – the behaviour of consumers has been incredibly rational.”

“The best way to reduce the weight and the emissions is to build smaller cars with smaller engines,” says Mr Mosquet at BCG. “The evolution of the standard gasoline engine is definitely going to be the main driver of fuel efficiency for the next 10 to 15 years.”

With ever more stringent curbs on carbon dioxide emissions being set by governments, carmakers need to develop smaller, more efficient combustion engines to go into smaller, lighter vehicles.

In a nod to the future, Ford’s European version of its EcoSport SUV weighs just 1,300kg and is powered by a one litre, three-cylinder EcoBoost engine.

Advances in autonomous technology look unstoppable, and the race to lead the pack in self-driving is well under way.

“We’re in a fascinating time,” says Mike Woodward at Deloitte. “When the most important things cease to be performance and become how well it actually takes you from A to B, the characteristics we will look for in a car will change.”

Cars that stop themselves to avoid potential collisions are already on the roads. Even executives at rival companies call Volkswagen’s Up! “uncrashable” at low speeds, while Nissan has promised to sell the first car that needs no human hand on the wheel by 2020.

Meanwhile, cars that can sense obstructions and brake faster than humans can react are slowly entering the mainstream, in turn throwing up questions for both manufacturers and customers.