It is 2030 and your electric VW has developed an annoying habit of pulling to the right. A few years back, when your last petrol car started doing something similar, a local mechanic in overalls spent half an hour wrestling underneath it with a torque wrench and a few muttered expletives. Today, you link to the car’s control system from your tablet at the breakfast table and talk through an online portal to a VW technician in Hyderabad. Sure enough, it’s a software glitch. A patch is sent over the internet, and the repair is done.
As a Financial Times series has highlighted this week, demand is surging for electric vehicles as the world accelerates towards an epochal industrial shift. Since Henry Ford installed the first moving assembly line for mass production of an entire automobile in 1913, the internal combustion engine car has been a mainspring of industrialisation and globalisation. Today, almost everything modern economies produce ends up in cars in some form: copper for the wiring, rubber for the tyres, steel for the frame, and silicon chips for the computerised “brains”.
Not all of that will change. Yet a striking feature of the re-engineering of the auto is the reduction in moving parts, from some 2,000 in a petrol engine to about 20 in an EV drivetrain. A host of auto components familiar for up to a century will vanish. Some new ones will replace them, such as battery and charging systems, including brakes that partially recharge the battery. But the implications will be profound.