The Smart, Quiet, Bizarre Future Of The Luxury Car

Artificial intelligence and fast, cheap algorithmic design are about to transform the automobile – and it will only get weirder from there.

- Josh Condon

For as long as anyone could remember, a car was a car was a car. And then, one day, it wasn’t. Which is to say the notion of an automobile going back 100 years – a multi-box design on four tyres, with a wheel and pedals, aimed by people and powered by orderly little explosions – has been upended by a maelstrom of globalisation, technological revolution, environmental reckoning and a wholesale assault on the ownership model. Such extreme disruption has unleashed a rapid evolution of the automotive species, with strange creatures now roaming the roads: Rolls-Royce SUVs and silent, battery-powered Croatian hypercars; Cybertrucks and fin-shaped hatchbacks with gull wings and brains big enough to take the wheel for a spell.

Take the luxury car. Not long ago the term meant something fairly specific: a large, imperious saloon with a respectably immoderate petrol-burning engine and a leathered and carpeted backseat with ample space for raising a family. Now it’s as formless and atomised as the rest of the sprawling luxury universe. Tesla’s austere, vegan-friendly robots are the must-have choice for the Silicon Valley set even as six-figure SUVs proliferate like 2,270kg bunnies in the exurbs. Meanwhile, a younger generation of buyers appreciates zero-emissions vehicles but would really rather the automobile had the good sense to go away entirely.

Yet there are signs the automotive industry is finally coalescing around an idea of what a car will be in the future – and down that road lies an interesting potential detour: the luxury car, instead of simply representing a pricier version of whatever the car du jour is, branches off into something else entirely. For the first time, a difference not just of degree but of kind, transformed by three interconnected forces: artificial intelligence (AI), the rise of niche manufacturing and increasing rarity.