The End of Cars As We Know Them
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Cars are evolving into truly convenient appliances.

I’m not a car guy. I’m an appliance guy. I don’t get turned on by appliances and rarely talk about them. But I do appreciate appliances that look, feel and work the way they’re supposed to. And I am not immune to the aesthetic pleasure of admiring elegant lines and textures.

To me a car is a big appliance. I don’t tie my ego to my car any more than I tie my self-esteem to my refrigerator, computer or cellphone.

That’s why I’m delighted by the advent of electrics from just about every major car brand out there, including Chinese upstarts like BYD. Electric cars will be quieter, cleaner, simpler and — within a half dozen years when efficient batteries are mass-produced by the tens of millions rather than crafted by the thousands — cheaper.

Goodbye engines, transmissions, drive shafts, differentials, radiators, water pumps, oil pumps, fan belts, oxygen sensors, mufflers, catalytic converters, tailpipes. Goodby to about 90% of the big complicated metal moving parts that require incredibly tedious amounts of skilled machining, bolting and maintenance.

That means goodbye to time spent with car magazines and talk shows in the waiting rooms of repair shop, pumping gas, getting smog checks.

In short, at long last cars will become true conveniences in our daily lives rather than the annoyances they often can be.

There’s another upside to the coming changes. The ejection of all those bulky mechanical parts with hard space and weight requirements means that car designers can start focusing on ergonomics and aesthetics. The future success of car companies will ride more on how well they capture the sensual and aesthetic pleasures of motion and a pleasing seating environment than on the hardware under the hood.

Imagine how popular iPods and iPhones would be if they were constrained by the need to pack in bulky hardrives, motors and cooling fans.

So car companies will evolve into something more akin to fashion brands than industrial giants. Their profits will turn more on how well they capture the imagination and sensibilities than on how cheaply they pack in horsepower and turning radii. Those concerns will devolve to industrial juggernauts who can produce billions of batteries at the lowest cost.

The cost of entry into the auto business will also become far smaller. Hundreds or thousands of boutique brands will spring up to capture niche tastes for random paintjobs, exotic interiors and fanciful body lines. Before you know it, each of us will become our own car designers, picking custom combinations of shapes, accessories, interior seating, speaker configurations, intelligent auto-drive packages and paint jobs.

I’ll take that one there with the clean lines in basic white, thanks.