Trends we Love but Didn’t Think we Would

The automotive world is a fickle industry because every automaker is working to come up with that one trend or item that would actually allow them to capture a new part of the market. When you’re known as a maker of sports cars it’s hard to push other models on the public, but it’s been done. The same goes for a name that’s synonymous with models that have little style but tons of safety. What the automotive marketplace does to keep us interested is amazing and there are some trends that seem blasphemous at best, but we love them anyway.

Making SUVs as a Sport Car Manufacturer – For many years all Porsche and Lamborghini made were sports cars and that was just fine. Porsche was the first to enter the market of SUVs when they saw the trend toward sport and away from utility. The Cayenne and Macan are two of our favorites on the market now and have quickly become tow of the trendiest vehicles to drive. With that proven success we now see other brands such as Aston Martin, Alfa Romeo, Jaguar, Maserati, Bentley, Rolls-Royce and Lamborghini climbing on board to make their own version of a luxury SUV for us to love.

Hybrid Electric Sports Cars – When you think of a hybrid car usually the thought of a car that isn’t exciting comes to mind. The hybrid electric sports car phase began when Tesla showed that an EV doesn’t have to be boring or slow with the Model S and has now translated to the LaFerrari, Porsche 918 and McLaren P1 as performance cars that have hybridization or EV motors on them. Even more automakers offer hybrid sports car now than you would think, consider the Acura NSX and BMW i8 which are both amazing hybrids to admire.

AWD and Turbocharged Muscle Cars – A muscle car by its normal definition comes at you with massive power and only a little control. These cars are known to have a loose back end that takes skill and ability to actually bring them under control. Now we see the Camaro, Mustang and even the Challenger will offer AWD and some of these cars are being built with turbocharging under the hood. While there’s no replacement for displacement there’s certainly an advantage to having a car that offers turbo and AWD when it comes to turning laps at the track.

Automatic Transmissions on High Performance Cars – There was a time this would be the biggest blaspheme of all, but now we see that computerization has taken over the automatic transmission world and can make faster and smoother shifts than we can on our own. It makes sense to have this as part of the build and now we see some sports cars that only come with an automatic transmission rather than a manual. These include the Acura NSX, Alfa Romeo 4C, Ford GT, all the Lamborghini models and all the Ferrari models to name only a few that have gone this route.

Coupe SUVs and Four-Door Coupes – A coupe used to mean you had a raked roofline and only two doors on a car. This was a great way to distinguish the sport model from the sedan model, but things have changes. You can now buy some SUVs with only two doors or a raked roof on an SUV that seems to be as small as a hatchback. By that same token some larger coupes have four doors on them now and offer easier entry and exit for those in the back seat. There’s no reason to think this trend won’t continue because this makes for easy to enjoy driving in these vehicles.

These five trends have marked some of the greatest advancements in the automotive industry, but when they were first presented to us we might have thought the automakers were insane. If some of these ideas had been around twenty or thirty years ago they would have ended up in the wastebasket of the design team. Now we love the way technology has advanced and the blending of what was once only expected on some vehicles for us to admire. The auto industry is constantly moving forward, no doubt in five years we’ll have a whole new list of blasphemes to discuss.