Take a look at a press release for any modern vehicle launch, and you’ll notice an interesting trend. In recent years, automakers have stopped focusing on engine specs, placing them far lower in the announcement than they used to. That’s for good reason, according to Ford’s vice chair, John Lawler, who said that buyers don’t care about powertrains the way they did in the past.
“I don’t think that consumers really think about powertrains the way they did 30 years ago. Where combustion engines defined what a vehicle was; the horsepower, the displacement, the torque, and everything about the vehicle; I think a lot of that is gone,” Lawler said at a recent conference.
While Lawler’s sentiments will likely be unwelcome to most enthusiasts, they reflect the shifting demographics behind today’s car buyers. Many younger people don’t care about cars at all, and if they do, their efforts to buy one focus on the most affordable, safest, or most technologically advanced models. Electric vehicles may also be part of the shift, because while some models offer staggering acceleration and performance, the focus on compression ratios and mechanical specifications is gone.
It’s still possible to find vehicles with focused specs and performance, but their numbers are dwindling. That said, some automakers find out the hard way that some people still care, such as Mercedes with the recent AMG C 63 S E Performance, which moved away from its iconic V8 engine in favor of a high-tech four-cylinder with disastrous sales results.
[Images: Ford]
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