Lord Charles March expressed his thoughts on the future of cars and specifically the autonomous vehicles, in a recent interview he gave to Bloomberg.
Driverless cars are going to enter our lives sooner or later and Lord March, being involved with the modern car market is aware that they represent the next step in car’s development. Google is actively working on building its own while Group VW is already developing its own technology through Audi. He’s worried that the autonomous vehicles are going to be popular due to the audience’s growing indifference towards the ‘mobility joy’.
“Urban today kids don’t pass their drivers test anymore. They’re uninterested in that. In the future they’ll just get a card, take a car, drive to the country. I worry that the joy, the mobility joy, has been taken away by the digital world. Car manufacturers feel it’s a real concern that not so many people are taking their test any more. It’s catastrophic”, said Lord Mach, “The car companies will become irrelevant. Cars will just become a house for the software.”
However, he believes that real cars will still continue to exist, albeit in a different context. Helped by an example of what happened in the watch industry, when quartz replaced mechanisms to power watches, and then with cell phones really replacing all of them, Lord March said:
“Men who spend lots of money on watches (will continue to) spend lots of money on cars. It’s the same thing: It’s mechanical. It’s beautiful. A car is just a big watch. In the future people will want to buy real cars like they want to buy real watches: You’ll still pay a fortune for P1 McLarens because everyone still wants the mechanical deal. And for the man on the street who wants to buy a car for $5000, he’ll just buy a self-driving thing.”
Lord Charles March is the mastermind behind the world’s most prestigious car show, the Goodwood Festival of Speed. His passion for cars and motorsports are globally known and his ability to turn the Festival of Speed from a British eclectic gathering to a major key celebration of the automotive calendar is still wildly impressive.
His thoughts on the future certainly represent a growing concern that lies inside the automotive scene about what’s coming.
What do you think? Feel free to comment below.
By Michael Karkafiris
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