You wouldn't want to be a multinational car company CEO in 2020. It's right up there with the least appealing jobs of our time, sandwiched between being chairman of the Edward Colston fan club and JK Rowling's publicist. There are so many potentially ruinous challenges facing car manufacturers right now it's amazing every board meeting doesn't end with some variation of: "Well, we've had a good run for 100 years. Let's just wind this thing up and find new jobs."
But let's say you were ultimately responsible for making those big decisions on behalf of an automotive titan. Would you, at this point in time, continue to fund investment into the current generation of car architecture? Or given that there's a global recession looming (which will necessitate widespread spending cuts) and that the penalties for exceeding fleet average CO2 limits could literally run into the billions, would you in fact divert your limited resources to an entirely new range of heavily electrified platforms instead?
Whatever your personal preference, it would surely have to be the latter. You'd do so hoping that between today and those clever new platforms coming on stream four or five years from now, charging infrastructure will have improved beyond recognition and buyers will feel energised to make the big switch to full electric or plug-in hybrid cars.
We all know this seismic technological revolution is heading our way and I'm beginning to see what the short-term consequences are going to be. In the past few months, I've driven a number of new models that made me believe R&D investment in traditional vehicle platforms (that is, those driven by combustion engines only) has already been cut off at source. The focus is rapidly switching instead to new underpinnings that have batteries at their core as much as they do piston engines, if they have those at all.
It isn't just combustion-only platforms that will cease to be developed any further, because the same will eventually be true of combustion engines themselves. Petrol and diesel engines will of course remain in production for a good while yet, but I suspect the basic four-stroke technology that underpins them has now been developed about as far as it's going to go. Volkswagen, for instance, has already said it won't continue to refine and iterate its piston engines after 2026.
Following a century or more of breakthroughs and improvements and innovations, then, it seems the humble combustion engine as we've known it for all these years might soon come to rest up against a buffer with nowhere to go beyond that.
I wonder if the last big step-change in the development of combustion-only cars is already behind us. If it is, that would suggest we're now in a period of stasis, suspended in a sort of developmental purgatory between the old technology being allowed see out its days and the next generation of heavily electrified platforms reaching production.
But as the industry hangs there, gently bobbing up and down while it waits, car manufacturers still need to sell cars. So how would you, the beleaguered, wizened CEO of one such company, sustain new car sales over the next half-decade or so? I think you'd take a leaf out of Ferrari's book and astutely extend the lifespan of your big-selling models, bridging the gap between the here and now and the onrushing new era.
When I drove the F8 Tributo - successor to the 488 GTB, itself successor to the 458 Italia that was launched in 2009 - I came away thinking it was as close to perfect as any supercar I'd tested. It's so broadly capable; so devoid of any glaring weaknesses. But then so too was the 488 GTB before it. The F8 Tributo is a genuinely great car, improved in some detailed ways over the machine it replaces. But it progresses the supercar genre not one bit.
At the other end of the scale, I thought something similar last week when driving the new Mk8 VW Golf. Again, it's a very fine vehicle indeed - but so was the Mk7. All this new model has to offer above and beyond it is an updated cabin with a very modern-looking human-machine interface (which I found to be far less intuitive than the more conventional system in the old car; touch-sensitive sliders to adjust the air-con temperature? No thanks - just give me a rotating knob).
The Golf, therefore, is another new car that doesn't advance its discipline in any meaningful way. Now, I know VW has traditionally updated the previous Golf before introducing an all-new one (the Mk3 became the Mk4 before the all-new Mk5 was introduced, which itself evolved into the Mk6, only to replaced wholesale by the Mk7). With each of those evolutions, though, there was genuine progress. That's not the case as the seventh-generation model evolves into the eighth.
To me, the F8 Tributo and Mk8 Golf feel like interim cars. They are placeholders, the F8 plugging the gap between the 488 GTB going off sale and the next all-new, entry-level mid-engined Ferrari coming to fruition (almost certainly with genuine next-generation SF90 Stradale-style plug-in hybrid tech). The Mk8 Golf does much the same, keeping us occupied until the ninth-generation Golf arrives with ID.3-style electrification, its motors and batteries hard-wired into its platform (whereas the current Golf platform has been hacked this way and that to swallow a hybrid powertrain).
This might be the end of a significant chapter, then - the best and most exciting combustion-only cars already with us now, if not long gone. But maybe there is another way. Car makers are looking very closely at carbon neutral synthetic fuels, a non-finite, non-polluting alternative that might yet offer a lifeline to the old suck-squeeze-bang-blow cycle that we feel so wedded to. Here's hoping.
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