5 future car technologies that will be commonplace within a decade

5 future car technologies that will be commonplace within a decade

What would be mainstream in the motoring industry in the next couple of years?

Predictions are, by definition, hit or miss. And, if commentators from the 1950s were anything to go by, mostly miss – otherwise, we would all be zipping around in flying cars today. To avoid the same embarrassment, The Peak eschews blind optimism and scours laboratories for promising, nascent technologies, to make educated guesses on what would disrupt the automotive mainstream within 10 years. Here is what we found.

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03: BODY LIGHT

Stiffer yet lighter than steel or aluminium, carbon fibre-reinforced plastic (CFRP) helps cars locomote faster, handle better and consume less fuel. This high-tech material made its automotive debut in Formula One in the early 1980s, quickly finding its way into production in a 1992, 391kmh McLaren supercar. But little headway has been made since. Today, it is still rarely seen outside of limited-edition, million-dollar exotics. This is because CFRP suffers from a big problem: It is complicated – read: expensive – to produce, making it uneconomical for mass-market cars. But as it is with new technologies, costs are starting to slowly come down, thanks to massive investments in research and development. In 2014, the BMW i3 electric city car became the first high-volume car to be made extensively with CFRP. Stricter emissions laws will surely push manufacturers harder to drive costs down.

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