The long and winding road

The recent FT Future of the Car summit proved that no one knows the future of the car.

Long term, almost everyone agrees it’s electric, at least in some form. But short to medium term it is, to paraphrase Churchill, a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’.

The seamless path to a silent and smog-free EV tomorrow – as cheerfully imagined by the car industry and legislators just a few years ago – is now a daunting obstacle course, full of potholes, dead-ends and wrong turns. EV sales lag far behind expectations, residuals nosedive. Those bold makers who promised an all-EV future in just a few years – Volvo, Mercedes and Peugeot among others – now hedge their bets. Others scale back targets that now look ridiculously ambitious.