Autonomous driving will bring forced obsolescence to cars
The concept of built-in obsolescence should be familiar to anyone that has ever bought a piece of advanced consumer electronics. Back in the early 2000s, a brand new gaming PC would be out of date faster than its owner could notify all his or her friends of the acquisition. Over the past decade, smartphones have taken over as the devices that keep tempting us to buy new hardware with ever-escalating specs and capabilities. And as we look forward to the next few years, it looks like self-driving car technology will be one of the fastest-moving areas of innovation. Only one problem with that: people don’t buy cars anywhere near as often as the oncoming cascade of upgrades will arrive, and if each of those requires us to buy a new car,...