Overview of current automotive trends

Welcome to the wonderful world of automotive! Writing a section on automotive trends is always challenging since trends are continuously evolving. Thus, this section becomes a snapshot of the current trends at the time of this writing. Of course, we recognize that something that may be a trend in this snapshot of today may have lost steam in some time and that there may be a new trend, buzzword, or hot topic when you are reading this book.

For example, an excerpt of automotive trends from a book in the 1980s may have sounded something like the following:

“There is a new in-vehicle communication protocol called Controller Area Network (CAN) that will revolutionize communication between Electronic Control Units (ECUs). CAN offers several benefits including reduced complexity of in-vehicle networks, improved scalability, and reduced weight and cost of the wiring. Using CAN allows ECUs to communicate with low latency and high reliability...