# The Trends Scorecard: Automotive & Transportation – What I Predicted, and What Actually Happened
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"The future of the automobile was never about a better engine - it became a computer on wheels.Tesla built it, but BYD is now cashing the check." - Futurist Jim Carroll This is part of my ongoing Trends Scorecard series, where I go back into my own archive, dig up what I actually predicted years ago, and grade it honestly against the world of 2026. No cherry-picking, no rewriting history. This time the industry is Automotive & Transportation. Here's the scorecard. We will likely never see a bigger self-own and business failure than the imminent disappearance into irrelevance of the North American automotive industry. And it didn't really need to happen. I have been on stage talking about the transformation of the car since before most people thought there was anything to talk about. I told a senior leadership team at Mercedes-Benz, in Stuttgart, back in 2006, that the entire business model of the automobile was about to be turned inside out. They laughed at me. For years I argued that the car was about to stop being a mechanical object and start being a computer, that the engine was going to give way to the battery, that Silicon Valley would take the steering wheel away from Detroit, and that the very idea of who builds a car, and how, was going to fragment into something unrecognizable. So when I sit down to grade myself on this industry, I do it knowing I have a long paper trail. Here is one of the lines I kept coming back to, year after year, talk after talk: The future always happens -- the rest is just timing. Hold onto that line. It turns out to be the key to the whole scorecard -- including the one prediction I want to flag honestly at the end. And it's not like I've been a stranger to this industry. I had Claude dig through my blog and pull together the automotive and transportation groups I've keynoted for over the years. Quite the convoy: Automakers & Vehicle Manufacturers — Mercedes-Benz, DaimlerChrysler, Volvo / Mack Trucks (multiple events), Kalmar Ottawa, Magna Dealers & Dealer Associations — National Automobile Dealers Association, American Truck Dealers, Canadian Automobile Dealers Association Summit Trucking, Fleet & Telematics — Omnitracs, National Association of Truck Stop Owners, Truck Parts & Service, International Road Transport Union World Congress, FleetOwner Magazine Aftermarket & Repair — Autoglass Automotive Finance, Lending & Leasing — Credit Union Direct (Drive Conference), American Financial Services Association, Canadian Finance & Leasing Association Transit, Roads & Infrastructure — Trapeze Group, Colorado Department of Transportation, Ontario Road Builders Association Logistics — Concentric Symposium (AI in Transportation & Logistics) And those are just the ones I've blogged about : there have been plenty more. So how did my calls hold up? Let's pull the receipts. Prediction #1 — "The car becomes a smartphone you can drive" (2013) — Verdict: Hit Back in 2013, speaking to the Canadian auto dealers, I argued that customers would stop judging their cars like cars and start judging them like the devices in their pockets -- and that the whole emotional relationship with the vehicle was about to change. Shifting customer expectations are driving part of that change as drivers will now expect their vehicles to be as advanced, easy to use and even as "replaceable" as their smartphones and tablet devices that are so central to their lives. The grade: Hit. In 2026 this is simply how cars work. The screen is the car. Software updates arrive over the air overnight. People shop for infotainment, range, and app ecosystems the way they shop for phones, and they trade up far more often than the old ownership cycles ever assumed. The "replaceable as a smartphone" framing was the right instinct about where the customer's head would go. Prediction #2 — "Vehicles become computers on wheels, and a whole new electric DNA takes over" (2014) — Verdict: Hit A year later, keynoting Colorado's transportation summit, I put it even more bluntly. The 100-year-old architecture of the automobile -- carbon, mechanical, hydraulic, driven by a person -- was being replaced by something with completely different DNA. Vehicles are essentially becoming large, sophisticated computers on wheels. The challenge is that Ford, Mercedes and Honda have never been in the computer industry, and know very little about computer interface design issues. The grade: Hit. The "computers on wheels" phrase has since become so common it is almost a cliche -- which is exactly the point. In 2026, a modern vehicle is a distributed computing platform that happens to have wheels, and the legacy manufacturers spent the last decade painfully relearning themselves as software companies, often badly, exactly as I warned they would. Prediction #3 — "Because electric is simpler to build, a flood of new manufacturers shows up" (2017) — Verdict: Hit In 2017 I wrote a long piece on the things people weren't thinking about with electric, self-driving cars. Near the top: the engineering of an electric vehicle is so much simpler than a combustion car that the barrier to entry collapses, and a lot more players come into the game. the simplicity of the design means more companies enter the car and truck industry. Carbon and gas is tough; electric and tech is much easier. Electric involves a motor, some wheels, and some stuff to connect the two, with a few computers thrown in. The grade: Hit. The 2010s and early 2020s produced a wave of new automotive names that simply could not have existed in the combustion era -- a swarm of EV startups, and above all a generation of Chinese manufacturers who used the lower electric barrier to entry to go from nowhere to global force. Fewer parts, fewer moving pieces, lower barrier -- more entrants. That played out almost exactly as described. Prediction #4 — "The field swells to dozens of competitors, then brutally consolidates" (2017) — Verdict: Live, and trending toward right In that same 2017 piece, I tried to put a number on the shakeout. I said the explosion of new entrants would be followed by a vicious consolidation. One estimate suggests that there are currently 50 major competitors in the space today; that might be reduced to 5 or 6 within a decade. The grade: Live, and trending my way. "Within a decade" lands right around now, and we are clearly deep into the consolidation phase -- the EV startup graveyard is real, funding dried up, and several once-celebrated names have folded or been absorbed. We are not yet down to a clean "5 or 6," so I won't claim a full hit. But the direction is dead on: boom, then bust, then a handful of survivors. Call this one playing out on schedule. Prediction #5 — "The very purpose of a car fragments, and cars start traveling in packs" (2017) — Verdict: Early This was one of my more ambitious 2017 calls. I argued that once the car was software-defined and increasingly autonomous, the single general-purpose vehicle would splinter into many purpose-built ones -- including cars engineered to travel interlinked, in packs. the purpose of a car will fragment. Cars today are designed to get you from point-A to point B. In the future, specific cars will be designed for a specific purpose, with the result that the very concept of a car is going to fragment. There will be cars for long-distance vs those built for a short commute; those built for peloton travel (i.e. interlinking with other cars in a pack) vs. those which are engineered to excel at navigation for narrow city streets. The grade: Early. The fragmentation half is clearly underway -- purpose-built robotaxis, dedicated delivery pods, and last-mile city vehicles are real in 2026. But the "peloton" idea, cars electronically interlinking and traveling as a cooperative pack on the highway, is still mostly trucking pilots and lab demonstrations rather than everyday reality. The shape of the prediction is right; the timing on cooperative packs ran ahead of the world. Prediction #6 — "Tesla's model -- electric, software-first, sold direct -- becomes the template" (called in 2003, documented 2021) — Verdict: Hit This is the one I am proudest of, because the paper trail is long. I described the Tesla-style business model to Mercedes in 2003, years before Tesla shipped a car. By 2021, when Tesla crossed a trillion dollars in value, I wrote it up plainly. I've been covering Tesla on stage for almost a decade - and I predicted the business model at an event for Mercedes-Benz in 2003. They laughed at me. The grade: Hit, and then some. Electric drivetrain, software at the center, direct-to-consumer sales, build-to-demand instead of build-to-inventory, the showroom replaced by a website -- in 2026 that is not the Tesla model anymore, it is simply the model the rest of the industry has been scrambling to copy. The companies that laughed in 2003 spent the 2020s trying to reverse-engineer exactly what I described to them. The one I want to flag honestly If I only showed you the hits, this wouldn't be an honest scorecard. So here is where I have to be careful with myself: full self-driving. For years I bundled "self-driving everywhere" into my fast-future talks alongside everything else, and that was too optimistic on timing. To my credit, I caught my own error in public. After a year of living with my own Tesla and its Full Self-Driving package, I wrote this in 2022: "Full" self-driving car technology, while promising and an amazing technical leap, won't really be here for a long time. Tesla has pulled off an extremely sophisticated feat with its current self-driving technology; the mind boggles when you realize what they have managed to accomplish Yet, IMHO, it is nowhere near real FSD, and won't be for a long time, if ever. The grade: A correction I'm glad I made. In 2026, autonomy is genuinely impressive in narrow, geofenced robotaxi zones -- and still not the universal, go-anywhere reality the early hype promised. The technology trend was right; the timeline was wrong, and for a while I let the excitement get ahead of the calendar. The lesson is the line I keep repeating: the future happens, but getting the timing right is harder, and more important, than getting the trend right. What the scorecard tells us about what's next Here's the method behind all of this, and why I bother grading myself out loud. I don't predict by guessing gadgets. I predict by watching where the deep forces point -- in this case, the shift of a mechanical industry into a software industry, the collapse of complexity from thousands of engine parts to a battery and a motor, and the migration of innovation speed from Detroit to the Valley. Get the direction right from the forces, and most of the specifics follow. The only thing the forces don't reliably tell you is the timing -- which is exactly where my one honest miss lives, and why I now spend as much energy on when as on what. So where does the auto industry go from here? That's a separate conversation, and a longer one than a scorecard can hold. I've mapped it out sector by sector in my current series, The Way Forward — the trends, the barriers, and the playbook for acting on them. If these receipts convinced you the method works, that's where you'll find where it's pointing next. Next in the Trends Scorecard series: Education. I have been predicting the unbundling of the classroom and the rise of always-on, just-in-time learning for almost as long as I've been predicting the death of the gas engine. We'll see how that one graded out.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/06/the-trends-scorecard-automotive-transportation-what-i-predicted-and-what-actually-happened/