Bob Lutz is a former vice chairman and head of product development at General Motors. Recently, he had this to say about the future of the auto industry. 

Here are a couple of powerful snippets:

It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era.

The auto industry is on an accelerating change curve. For hundreds of years, the horse was the prime mover of humans and for the past 120 years it has been the automobile.

Now we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules.

Everyone will have five years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap or trade it on a module.

Bob is 85 years old. This is somebody who spent his entire life in the auto industry telling us that the old model is now done. 

It reinforces something that I wrote about here, where the “end of the automotive era” was pegged at around 2021. 

And it is part of the mental model that I have started relying on today for decision making.

Photo by Alessio Lin on Unsplash