Bob Lutz is an outspoken individual. The former Ford, Chrysler, BMW and General Motors executive holds some pretty blunt opinions on various topics, including Tesla. But, Lutz has also become a haunting voice for the automotive industry we know so well.
It began after the former GM executive penned an opinion piece with Automotive News last year. Then, he said the automobile will soon reach its peak. He doubled down on this future at the recent SAE conference, according to EVANNEX.
His speech pointed to numbered days for the automobile and he once again gave “regular” cars a few more decades of life. In the future, self-driving pods and transportation methods will ultimately take over driving duties for humans.
And although it’s a bleak future, specifically for dealerships and OEMs, it’s not all bad. Lutz argued that consumers won’t care if GM or Mercedes-Benz makes a specific autonomous pod, but he does firmly believe society will appreciate other benefits. The executive expects self-driving vehicles will cut down on traffic congestion and potentially eliminate 90 percent of traffic deaths in the United States.
Where do enthusiasts stand? Lutz has already likened the bunch to horse owners. One day, the cars we know and love today may be saved only for the track or particular areas to enjoy.
Comments
Bob Lutz is a smart and accomplished man.
…And we need more “blunt” and “outspoken” honest people like Lutz in the world now.
Blunt and outspoken, you mean like Drew? “Cadillac needs to return to its real American livery”!
I’d say Drew is more “blunt” and “mistaken”.
Smoking too much blunt makes one mistaken.
He is indeed, but he said “he once again gave “regular” cars a few more decades of life.” I can live with a few more decades.
The world he speaks of is not today, tomorrow or next year but it is coming at some point.
It will also be a way to better control or place power over large groups of people controlling when, where and how they travel. You know for the overall collective good of society as they will say.
Don’t believe it can happen. We used to thing the V8 large sedan was never going to go away and Ford will always build cars.
Scott3, you are a supporter of John Kenneth Galbraith, yay!
So you support the idea of freedom of movement. Let’s give that right to Labor, shall we? Let’s allow workers to travel to jobs with absolute freedom. That will be great for workers, and for employers, correct? Let’s cancel the whole passport and border control system for workers! That’s exactly what JKG advocated. Of course, right now we allow profits and banking to flow free across borders, just as Alfred P Sloan liked. So what’s wrong with adding factory-line-workers to that system, huh?
Enjoy while you can. These are the real golden years of automobile history.
I just need to score myself a big V8 truck and manual Camaro while I can.
So long as people need to get from point A to point B, vehicles will never go away. Since this is a tangible need, technology can only improve it but not eliminate it.
The problem today is that many auto analysts use pure imagination to dream up intangible possibilities.
I do agree with Bob’s future vision, but I have no idea as to when it will happen? I may not be around to witness these changes?
As long as it happens when I’m long dead and buried. I cannot fathom being a car enthusiast and being forced to have a computer drive me where I want to go, lose all control of what kind of vehicle I can buy and what equipment it has all to theoretically reduce accidents and congestion. Not only will this put millions of people out of work from the major loss of car dealerships it will also kill off all the magazine editors like Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Road and Track etc because there will no longer be any need to talk about how a car drives because we aren’t driving them! Naturally the younger generation will fall right into line with this hook line and sinker.
Lol it seems to me the younger generation has better things to do than sit in traffic all day in their enthusiast-mobile. “Falling for it hook, line, and sinker” seems pretty enlightened from that point of view.
I look forward to more car dealerships going out of business. Their value-add is limited, especially for enthusiasts who know what they want, what to pay, and how to take care of it. Dealerships are the toll-collecting obstacles to getting your car with their monopolistic practices, not the enablers. COPO doesn’t exist anymore.
I look forward to the day my autonomous car gets me to work trouble-free, and I get to drive the enthusiast mobile in my spare time when I can actually enjoy driving it rather than being tired and disgusted from driving in commuter traffic all week.
Thank you, sir. Brilliant and accurate.
Even if it may be accurate, I cannot understand why someone would be “looking forward” to businesses going down and people losing their jobs… Let’s at least hope alternative businesses can be established, and people can get new job opportunities if this ever materializes.
My guess is that once autonomous becomes the “norm”, manual driving will be banned and restricted to specific areas, for so-called security reasons. What you wish for, will probably result in “no enthusiast driving”.
Mike “Belgium”, do they have Monticello in Belgium? Er, no. How about Bondurant, P1, or Thermal?
Y’know, even though horses aren’t allowed on the freeway, they still hold the Kentucky Derby every year, there’s pony rides at the county fair, and a horse’s life at the Girl Scout ranch is pretty darn easy and well-fed.
And your assuming everybody lives in a hell hole like you do that has traffic congestion where your sitting in traffic all day. Well that is certainly not the case anywhere I have been or lived. So it just drives my point home even more. Let the population where they live decide on how they want to drive there car or don’t. We do not need to have the automotive landscape turned upside down to accommodate certain congested cities shoved down all of our throats.
And if you think an autonomous lump is going to get you to work trouble-free every day your living in a fantasy world. Traffic congestion is not going to evaporate the second self driving driving cars appear. And what do you think all of the other million people that are driving to work the same time as you are going to do? The Jetson’s flying vehicle hasn’t been invented and probably won’t be for some time
This response makes hope this happens even more! Just so I can watch people like you melt down and lose their minds over stuff like this!
Stop being a dinosaur!
Ah…..Bob Lutz, part wise automotive sage…..part crazy old man that believes the russian lesbian communists are going to take his steering wheel away…….
Trust me because I know, Russians aren’t Lesbians. They’ll do it for money, of course, but that doesn’t necessarily qualify it as technically accurate.
As for Bob, he saved us from communists in his service as a US Marine. That deserves respect. In an era when the President is more afraid of p-p tapes held in Russia than he is afraid of losing the power to be the true “leader of the free world” TO Russia, folks like Bob Lutz are the ones I’m going to believe.
Awww. you almost completed the idiot trifecta…..you forgot to bring up Hitler in someway…so I’m going to have to take off some points.
Good pointless rantply though……really off topic, nice work.
Idiot trifecta = russian lesbian communists.
But hey, if you can’t take a joke, then maybe you shouldn’t try pushing one. Before 2016: “Lefties should stop pushing PC”, after 2016:”Lefties should be more PC”.
Besides, after Charlottesville 2017, we don’t need big-H for Godwin’s law anymore.
There are soooooo many laws to be passed on this yet. Not to mention how insurance will be handled along with litigation. We have a ways to go I think. Enter special interest groups and lobbyists….
Lutz used to play poker with Henry Ford
i don’t understand how congestion is supposed to go down in this future world.
most people will still need to show up to work at the same time and most will go back home at the same time and that is when traffic occurs. how do pods fix that? are you telling me in the future, everyone is going to want to carpool? combining efficiency and convenience isn’t easy.
and i don’t buy the assertion that there will be a lot less cars. you don’t need enough cars to satisfy the average usage rate. you need enough to satisfy the maximum extreme usage rate even though that might happen only 1% of the time. so in other words, we’ll have a lot of pods sitting around doing nothing most of the time just like we have cars today.
Agreed. The whole premise of commuter pods to reduce traffic is patently STUPID. We will simply stop commuting more likely than not. There is really no reason for most of us to be commuting anyway. Working from home will be the solution to traffic.
So how do you explain light rail, or subways, or buses? It’s just a form of getting people from one place to another the most economical as possible!
If you think this will never take off you are just not seeing the future, and if you think this is being forced on you then your wrong. People like you are going to choose to do this, because people will no longer have to own cars or trucks anymore! They will subscribe to a driving service and order a ride to where ever they are going.
No more paying for a car payment, no more fixing or maintaining your car, no more having to buy a house with 2 or 3 car garage. I could go on!
Owners who enjoy driving and working on their cars will not like it but let me assure you that we are in the minority. Most people hate paying for a car, hate working on a car, hate paying for repairs, ect!
This is going to happen, learn to deal with it or your going to give a lot of entertainment to guys like me who love watch people lose their minds over issues like this.
theoretically you can get anywhere in los angeles using public transportation but few do unless you can’t afford a car. explain that.
Its because mass transit doesn’t fit their schedule! People are to fill of themselves
Everywhere where public transportation is the norm means short and simple trips by car – 15 miles or less with a 20min travel time; now are 1hr or more via public transport. The only place I have been that had public transportation that was extremely efficient – Japan and Korea – still took an average of 10-20mins MORE vs a car.
That’s said, congestion and traffic in the cities was still so bad that it really didn’t matter. It was a choice of crowded bus or train, with lots of transfers and waiting, or your own car sitting in traffic and non existent parking.
The only thing that will reduce traffic and congestion is less vehicles on the road. That includes buses. The solution to traffic is no daily commute. It’s completely unnecessary if you don’t work in an industry that involves physical labor, there is no reason whatsoever for the daily commute.
The true revolution in traffic congestion will come from working from home. We have the internet, we have webcams, there’s no reason to commute unless you work in a job where your physical presence is necessary. The reality is that most office and non-manual labor jobs simply do not require a human presence. All can be done effectively via the Internet and web cam.
Additionally, mass transportation is a money sink. Even in urban areas it’s a net drain on the gov budget. And it’s completely ineffective in suburban and rural areas. In the future, along with eliminating commuting all together, the transportation system will be a combination of public and private depending on the needs of the populace in the region. There is no one size fits all solution. Only compromises.
Self-driving car pods are a technical marval that increase the complexity of problem vs simplifing or eliminating the problem.
I think the future looks a lot more like Mad Max Fury Road. Nothing electric there. LOL
Bob Lutz is an old over-the-hill moron. There are a million reasons why these cars will never hit the pavement just like flying cars will never happen either. 1) Insurance companies won’t have anything to insure. 2) you can’t have some autonomous cars driving along with regular cars and there are 263,000,000 cars on the road today. 3) hacking = unsafe. 4) They are dumb. Humans are smart. We have the ability to use judgment. AI does not. It is a smart as we make it. Just a few reasons, there are a million. I think the number one reason is that people don’t want them. Only cellphone geeks that were born after 2000 want stupidity like this. Bob comparing cars to horses was where he lost me. Horses can’t be improved. Cars can and have been for over 100 years. Keep them gas guzzlers going! Remove all the so-called green electric vehicles. Remember, they are more polluting than gas cars… 😉 Look it up. It just all happens when that battery is created vs. during driving.
You reduce congestion on roads by have everybody on a schedule grid like a subway does. People will leave the house with enough time to get to their destination. All cars will be going the same or similar speed, you wont have people driving crazy, one person speeding the other doing 15 mph under the limit, weaving in and out of traffic.
I am not young and I cant wait for this to happen (and I love to drive)! As for the amount of regular cars vs self driving cars on the road will even out with less and less regular cars being offered!
so to take a 10 mile trip, i’m going to need what 4 or 5 transfers and at each transfer i’m probably going to have to wait 5 or 10 minutes. and how many stops to pick up people? so a 10 mile trip is going to be 1.5 or 2hrs? nobody is going to go for that.
This is why ordering a personal car for your trip is going to be huge!
The way cars are built and their propulsion system may change is a given due to the advances in technology and while some of this is good, there will still be some individuals who will still want to actually drive their cars with the ‘autonomous’ big brother turned off because who wants to simply be a passenger in a Chevy C8 Corvette or Cadillac Escala without having the chance to actually drive it.
This is a futile argument. When the US dollar collapses, due to a loss of confidence, you Americans will be lucky if you will be able to afford a rickshaw. Lol
The Chinese yuan is coming like a bullet train. They intend to replace the petrodollar.
I’ve been hearing how the Chinese are going to dominate us for decades, stick a chopstick in it.
You need to take a look around and inform yourself. China with Japan own a large portion of your debt. Almost everything you buy in retail, (Wal-Mart , Costco, dollar stores… ) is made there. More than half your pay check goes straight to China. Appliances, construction materials, virtually everything electronic, nearly 100% of food additives, pharmaceutical ingredients… The list is nearly endless. Essentially, you can’t manufacture a toaster in the US without Chinese components. Not a single car by any brand.
If China really wants to give it to Trump up the backside, all they have to do is stop shipping and the entire US economy is shut down. US military relies on Chinese made microchips. Isn’t that real power, far more than any military toys. Apple, the largest company in the world, makes 100% of all products in China can be shut down tomorrow by the Chinese dictatorship.
Try to grasp that with your chopsticks.
If China isn’t selling what it produces how do you think it effects their economy?
But they are a dictatorship with absolute power and the population willing support the communist party. Especially if it means winning against its main opponent and enemy. In the Chinese military doctrine, it’s perfectly acceptable to suffer losses up to 40% of the population, if it is the means to victory. In this case, it would only be an economic slowdown.
That’s why Trump can’t win a real trade war against China in a democracy with a divided country.
China may throw him a bone so that he can claim a victory and pump his chest out like he did with North Korea. But if they decide to fight, he’ll lose because they have so many means at their disposal.
Their objective is clearly to become the world reserve currency and when they do, the US will be a third world country drowning in debt with a worthless currency.