ABSTRACT
What would Henry Ford think of the modern car? Presumably some of it would be eminently familiar. Cars still have four wheels and an internal combustion engine, and even the production-line principles used to build them stem from the same industrial-age principles that Henry Ford set in motion over 100 years ago. On the other hand, so much of a modern vehicle would have been unthinkable at the turn of the last century: not just the unthinkably high levels of vehicle performance, handling, comfort, refinement and fuel efficiency – these are merely technological extensions of what drivers of the Model T had – but the truly unimaginable things like drive-by-wire, infotainment, brand DNA, soft displays and driver automation. None of this would have been conceivable in the days when the horseless carriage first matured into the recognisably modern automobile.
