FUTURE PROOF
A new automotive dawn is upon us, says Paul Horrell, and this is just the beginning
Deep inside the German car companies, something very big indeed is shifting. Inside five years, they’ll drastically reconfigure how they design, develop, build and sell. I’d love to tell you what sort of cars this means we’ll get. But it’s too early to say. Except they won’t have engines... and this revolution is about far more than just electric drive.
This week BMW announced a new line-up from 2025, calling it die Neue Klasse. That’s significant. The name was used for the generation of BMWs that began with the 1500 in 1962. Those sporty four-doors saved the company, and today’s 5-Series traces a continuous shining thread straight back there. Sure enough BMW’s boss Oliver Zipse wants this second Neue Klasse to be relevant beyond 2050. Crucially, he says it’ll have completely new software and IT.
Software is the new frontier. That’s what Tesla and some of the Chinese – notably Nio – have been doing for some years. Tesla got its early lead by coding the car’s ‘software stack’, rather than taking multiple systems from suppliers. Then continually updated it with live data. The same, only more so, for Autopilot. Team Elon aims to capture your whole car life: vehicle, sales, services, comms, all the ecosystem.
“THE BATTERY-DRIVEN PLATFORMS NOW EMERGING MIGHT SOON BE OBSOLETE”
This is the kind of integration BMW wants. We seem to be beyond the bent-metal-first era. The VW Group is thinking the same way. Audi has a hothouse team called Artemis. Its objective, says Audi chief Markus Duesmann, is matching Tesla’s software in Audis and Bentleys on sale from 2024, by using entirely new onboard electronics and connectivity. Two years later comes a new bunch of VWs, simplified from Artemis. Project Trinity, it calls that. Meanwhile Mercedes will have a bunch of cars codenamed MMA, again digital first.
Strangely, this means the battery driven platforms just now emerging – what’s under the VW ID cars and BMW i4 – might soon be obsolete. I dunno, maybe they can rip out their electronics and install new stuff later.
What does all this mean for the cars? Ultra-high bandwidth for infotainment. The live, high-res mapping that’ll get them closer to self-driving. Better efficiency too: Mercedes talks about going half as far again per kWh as today’s cars.
Also, far simpler manufacturing. Cars will be built with all the hardware, then you pay monthly fees to activate features. Upgraded UX? Fine-grained parking apps? High-end torquevectoring? More power, but only in summer? Better driverassist just for the long holiday drive? Car sharing?
Apple makes money from selling devices, then more afterward from the App Store and Music and Apple TV. Car manufacturers fancy a piece of that action: getting you to pay now and pay later too. Does all this make cars sound boring? It shouldn’t. If we don’t want them in the first place, their manufacturers will be stuffed for good.