To find out more about what’s buzzing in the automobile market right now and what people are wanting to see in their cars right now, Bored Panda spoke with Saule Magomedovienė-Lengvenytė, an industrial and automotive designer, who shared some very interesting insights with our readers.

It turns out that just like interior design and fashion, automobiles also have trends. Lengvenyte explained that “when creating a design of a vehicle, one of the biggest challenges is to foresee the future trends. This is because creating an automobile takes much longer than other products, for example, clothes.”

“At the moment, electric cars are the biggest hit among the newest car models. And when it comes to future conceptions, we see a trend in autonomous solutions,” Lengvenyte explained. She added that designers now try to adapt many car models for car-sharing systems.

When asked what’s her view of odd-looking and more unusual car models like Fiat Multipla, Lengvenyte believes that Multipla’s creators have surely achieved if not surpassed their goals. “It’s very rare that a good design receives that much attention,” she said.

There are many different criteria that drivers are looking at when choosing their automobile. That includes their lifestyle, values, and financial abilities, the automotive designer argues.

“The most important criteria is the customer’s needs, therefore it’s important to formulate some key points in the beginning of each project. They include: what driver will be driving this model (what do they like, where are they going to use it, what are they going to bring with them, etc.) Things like what kind of environment the automobile is going to be used in are also important, and can vary from city to race, or off-road, and so on.”

There are about 1.446 billion vehicles on Earth in 2022, according to automotive market research data by Hedges&Company. About 19% of those vehicles are in the United States. Meanwhile, Asia has over a third of all vehicles on this planet with a whopping 531 million vehicles on the roads in the far east.

Moreover, the same data showed that the average age of trucks has remained relatively unchanged at around 11.6 years, but the average age of cars is approaching 13. The US fleet has gotten progressively older over the past decade, as consumers hold on to their cars and trucks longer.

With the slowdown in new vehicle sales due to the pandemic, the age of the average vehicle in the US will continue to creep upwards.

Meanwhile, the experts claim that the future of cars is largely electric. Unlike internal combustion vehicles, the emissions from electric vehicles are zero when in use and are instead concentrated on the production of the vehicle and the power supply.

That means that the production of an electric car battery requires mineral resources, the extraction of which has an undeniable environmental impact, and their refining, like the production of batteries, also consumes energy. In the production phase of the vehicle, electric cars emit more greenhouse gases (in addition to other environmental impacts) than combustion cars, because of the addition of the battery.