MOTORING NEWS - The global automotive industry and many related facets of the business are changing rapidly as the digital revolution causes major disruption.
This makes it essential for motor businesses to adapt or die.
Mobility megatrends
The arrival of self-driving autonomous cars sooner rather than later was also a topic for many of the speakers. Martyn Briggs, an industry principal of Frost and Sullivan in the United Kingdom and one of the keynote speakers, presented on the topic 'Megatrends and the future of mobility', an area of the industry where he is an expert. His address was an ideal scene-setter for the intriguing series of presentations that followed.
A lot of what Briggs told the delegates was admittedly about future developments but he also had plenty of facts and figures about what was happening right now in terms of ride sharing, car sharing and ride hailing apps as well as the increasing use of apps to assist in finding a parking space in congested cities.
Briggs went on to explain how digital dealerships using small showrooms in shopping malls, with only one or two cars on display and doing business online, were proving increasingly successful in the UK. He predicted that this trend is expected to spread worldwide.
He added that most people now know exactly which car they want to buy by the time they entered the relevant dealership and on average only visited the dealer only twice when doing the deal to buy a new car.
Briggs said that car design is another aspect of the automotive world that is being influenced by the changing digital landscape and the manner in which more and more vehicles are being used these days.
This is resulting in the so-called trifecta design proposition whereby traditional body styles like hatches, sedans, MPVs and SUVs are being crossed and morphed to make hybrid designs. Examples here are the Suzuki SX4 and Tesla Model X.
