Best of the Decade: These were our fave 2010s industry trends

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Remember way back in 2010 when autonomous cars still sounded like science-fiction instead of a certainty? When 300 horsepower was a respectable number for a V8 to make and you’d laugh if someone told you Ferrari wants to build an SUV?

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A lot has changed in the industry in the past decade, for both good and bad, depending on how you look at it, but if plotting out all the things that are different now versus then feels overwhelming, don’t worry — we got our writers to highlight the trends they felt had the biggest impact on the cars we drive. Or don’t drive.

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Best of the Decade: These were our fave 2010s industry trends Back to video

Jil McIntosh

Mobility, Ride-Sharing and Autonomous Vehicles

Over the last decade, major changes in vehicle technologies, phone apps, city congestion, electric charging infrastructure and consumer buying habits have led many automakers to start looking at not just making and selling cars, but at how they fit into the mobility picture overall.

In 2016, I attended a press event where self-guided robots spilled out of a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter to deliver packages, and now they’re being tested on city streets. In 2018, Ford bought an electric scooter company. Daimler grew its Car2Go carsharing service over the decade, and is now testing automated ride-hailing vehicles in California. And in 2015, I rode in a self-driving Freightliner tractor-trailer, on a public highway in Nevada.

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All-in monthly auto subscriptions haven’t worked as well as carmakers hoped, but every company now offers online shopping tools, while Tesla and Genesis sell direct-to-consumer. And the outgoing decade also laid the groundwork for the day your autonomous car drives a little slower at dinnertime past the restaurant that partnered with the automaker, or its screen pops up a “buy it now” when it stops at a light and sees you eyeing something in a storefront window.

Clayton Seams

Sport Utilities Go Up-market

SUVs from high-end brands! In 2009, Porsche was the only truly high-end carmaker offering an SUV. In 2019, Porsche offers two different SUVs, and it’s been joined in this endeavor by brands like Alfa Romeo, Jaguar, Maserati, Bentley, Rolls-Royce and Lamborghini. All of these are from the past ten years! Even Ferrari is getting in on the action with its so-called Purosangue SUV.

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The buying public has shown they’re not so interested in purchasing two-door sports GTs but they are overjoyed to pay large piles of money for SUVs with a high-end badge on the front. Sigh . Each one boasts more than 500 hp in the proper trim, and each one is completely tasteless. Saying you drive a Lamborghini when you have an Urus is like saying you own a ‘Vette when you have a Chevette.

David Booth

Electrification and Gas-Guzzling Trucks

The biggest positive trend of the last decade has been, of course, electrification and all its attendant emissions reduction. The problem is that it’s been overshadowed by the biggest negative trend, which is North America’s headlong rush into everything truck and SUV. As a result, despite the growing efficiency of the internal-combustion engine and the increased proliferation of electrified powertrains, the average fuel economy of a North American automobile has remained largely unchanged over the last few years.

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Indeed, I did a little calculation for Motor Mouth earlier this year and for every Model S, 3 or X Tesla has sold in Canada, Ford has put nine more F-150s on Canadian roads. And, as I said in my November 23, 2018 Motor Mouth , “that’s not the number of F-150s sold each and every year – about 135,000 – or, like the Tesla number mentioned, the total number of trucks Ford has sold since 2012 (that’s 890,284 up until the end of September 2018) but the increased number of pickups –184,000 in all – that Ford has sold since Tesla started selling the Model S.”

Yes, Tesla fanatics, all your religiosity has been for naught. You can scream “electric revolution” till you’re blue in the face, but we’re still polluting more now than we did when Tesla was just a twinkle in Lord Elon’s eye.

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Peter Bleakney

Heated Steering Wheels

I’m sure my colleagues will find many meaningful safety and tech trends to trumpet about, so I’ll focus on something somewhat more frivolous — the democratization of the heated steering wheel. Trivial you say? Hardly.

On a cold, dreary winter morning, nothing lifts the spirits like a warm steering wheel. And once you’ve experienced this wee slice of motoring bliss, it’s damn hard to go back.

I will credit Hyundai-Kia for bringing this Godsend to the masses, as they offer it (usually free of charge) in all their models. Other manufacturers are playing catch-up. Some premium automakers are now serving up heated armrests. That’s your cue, Hyundai.

Jonathan Yarkony

Ventilated seats

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Peter may like his hands warm in winter, but I desperately need a fresh breeze on my backside in our sticky, sweltering summers.  Sure, plenty of luxury brands offered it in their flagships and the very top trims in their core models, but credit Kia again for putting pressure on all companies to start offering this cool feature when they made it available on vehicles as humble as the Kia Rio.

Graeme Fletcher

The Me-to-We Shift in Ownership

One trend that’s been gaining traction over the past decade, and will continue to do so in the next, is the shift from a car-based culture to a mobility-focused society. This me-to-we shift has the potential to kill the pride of ownership and the freedom of mobility found in just going out for a rapid Sunday afternoon boot in a car just because it is a car.

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Yes, I’m an old gearhead who loves the oily bits and, yes, I love burning rubber because it’s mine and I paid for it and didn’t rent it! Moving forward, the proliferation of self-driving cars and the growth of ride-sharing culture will surely see the number of truly memorable rides dwindle as the years advance.

How long will any manufacturer continue to cater to the “driver” when the “rider” becomes the primary focus? Fortunately, my driving gloves will be retired long before this new culture becomes too pervasive. Sometimes, age does have its advantages!

Derek McNaughton

The Horsepower Wars Are Back On

More horsepower and torque. Back in the 1970s, the horsepower summit peaked with the oil crisis, effectively choking off anything above 500 hp. It would take years to see average numbers climb above 200 again, but demands for efficiency and power propelled automakers to revisit turbocharging, supercharging and even electric motors, all of which led to a gradual rise in power across all cylinder counts, to the point where, today, 750 horsepower is the new bar for a real performance car.

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But small cars benefited, too. In 2010, the average four-cylinder produced 167 horsepower; today it is closer to 200, with some over 300. The average six-cylinder in ’10 produced 239; today it is 300. For V8s, the rise went from 295 to close to 400. All of which had led to one result: more driving pleasure.

Brian Harper

The SUV Segment’s Second Wind

It would be easy to say the green car movement, manifested by almost every mainstream auto manufacturer embracing hybrid and electric powertrains, is the biggest industry trend of the decade. But that’s a trend still very much evolving. I’m going to suggest the explosive growth of the sport-utility segment has had a bigger, more immediate effect on the auto industry over the past 10 years.

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Once the domain of iconic nameplates such as Jeep and Land Rover, with tough, truckish, utility-focused machines, other automakers – most with no previous history building sport-utes (and their softer-riding crossover cousins) – are filling every niche of the segment and creating new ones. BMW, as an example, now has eight specific SUV/crossover models ranging from subcompact to extra-large.

The proliferation of these vehicles has come at the expense of previously dominant auto nameplates, with some manufacturers (Ford and GM, notably) all but abandoning the car market (goodbye Taurus, Focus, Impala, Cruze and others, victims of significantly shrinking sales). And with the exception of the Detroit Three, whose pickup trucks are perennial bestsellers, most Asian and European brands find at least one of their sport-ute models at the top of their sales charts.

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Lorraine Sommerfeld

Electric Cars’ Ranges Growing and Growing

In 2013, at the Detroit auto show, we saw electric cars boasting anywhere from 132 kilometers of range (the Honda Fit EV) to 426, from that newbie on the scene, Tesla and its Model S (the 85-kWh spec). The numbers were mind-blowing, even keeping in mind the ever-present asterisks of weather and driving styles.

We’d barely finished sorting out hybrids that gave us 20 km of run time on a charge, which only made the advances more significant. Today, that Tesla is approaching 600 km of range, and every manufacturer is galloping along to reach realistically useful numbers.

Around the same time, we started seeing concepts with no steering wheels and interior “pods” that looked like living rooms. Articles gasped about cars that could park themselves, and sensors that knew metal from flesh. We’re still getting there, but more has happened in the past decade than in any before it.