7 - Outlook

Summary

There are in principle two types of innovations: incremental and radical. While incremental innovations improve key market features on the basis of existing methods and technologies, radical innovations are based on new technologies that either revolutionize an existing market and/or even create a new one. The uncertainty of the consequences of an innovation increases from incremental to radical. For example, the costs and improvements for an incremental innovation can generally be assessed more easily than for a radical innovation. A radical innovation often requires more investment and holds a greater risk of technological failure. The important aspect, however, is that a radical innovation has the chance to change a market so profoundly that – among other consequences – it will leave behind those who did not perform the change (see e.g. [1]).

At the time of writing, there were two automotive innovation fields with potentially far-reaching consequences: alternative drives/electric vehicles and automated driving. For both innovations, networking is extremely important and both require the vehicle to be connected to the worldwide network. Furthermore, both have the potential to change the car related user behavior, significantly more fundamentally than e.g. the introduction of navigation systems did. With the limitations of current battery technologies, the reach of an electric car is shorter than that of a car with a combustion engine. Because of the shorter reach, it is extremely important to be able to correctly predict the remaining reach at any time. Users will then become aware of the difference it makes if they switch off the air conditioning or infotainment and they might develop new behavior patterns. This includes wearing gloves, opening the windows, or accepting a detour if this avoids very hilly terrain. The impact of electric cars will be profound.