Life in 2021 felt a lot like the lingering hangover that no one fully recovered from. Every moment that a semblance of normality emerges, you realize that it is a hologram of what you thought you knew … the venue may be the same, but what you experience doesn’t seem to be recognizable. Not just a shift, but a complete and total reversal, in complete contrast to what came before.
This phenomenon was central to the automotive world in 2021 and, if expected, provided a clear perspective to look at the great cultural changes in consumption, technology and design in the post-Covid world. Here are some of the trends we saw in the automotive industry in 2021:
Year of cooperation
The current conversation in the automotive world revolves around sustainability and what legal (and customer) requirements mean for the future of automotive development. In contradiction to this, there is a new mainstream that is adopting car culture as fashion. And while consuming car culture doesn’t necessarily mean consuming new cars, it has manifested itself in a whole new world of co-branded products that go way beyond the car dealer gift shop t-shirt.
Undoubtedly, this seemingly unstoppable increase in automotive collaborations represents an economically beneficial relationship for both car brands and fashion brands, but does it add something to the conversation about cars themselves? Or is it just more product to sell? For the car brand, they buy into a certain culture or zeitgeist and hopefully connect with valuable future customers who may not be ready to buy a real car just yet. For the Collaborator brand, it’s a great storytelling opportunity through real creative collaboration and concept production, as in the case of the L’Art de L’Automobile Porsche 968. Authentically, you get an L’Art 968 … and sometimes you end up with one T-shirt that feels like a graphic design exercise to benefit from a new consumer. Common interests are not the basis for cooperation. Common values are. The conversation here should be bigger than a capsule collection or trim kit.
The stock x-ification of the car market
Call it what you will, but this year consumption became an investment strategy with products and assets blurring their previously separate lines. The market spun on supply chain issues related to the pandemic and, presumably, also because of the escalation of its inevitable extinction. Mercedes stopped selling V8s in America for at least a year due to vague declarations of supply chain and quality control issues, depending on the source, resulting in 100 percent price increases on G-Wagen. Porsche GT3s, historically recognized as the ultimate sports car with supercar performance, are listed by resellers at over $ 300,000, raising questions about its value proposition and place as a performance measure.
Whatever the reason, brands and car dealers will certainly benefit from the circumstances. While it’s nice to lose less money on the car you might already own, nobody wants to pay more than MSRP for a new car, let alone a generic car, which sadly was the norm in 2021.
Year of the brand resto mod
Resto mods are nothing new in the auto world. While enough time has to pass to qualify a car as “resto-worthy” and, moreover, the technology has to change in any way that gives value to the “mod” part, its ancestry can often easily be traced back to the manufacturer will their cars still be produced today (reputation, anyone?). The Porsche space is undoubtedly the dominant world where you can find such products as the Lanzante TAG Turbo (our favorite Porsche this year) and various Gunther factory models, but in 2021 that segment exploded and it was the year It It became clear that Resto-Mods could be brands-and-manufacturers themselves, aside from the bespoke, custom-made one-offs they were in the past.
Outside of the Porsche Iverse, our favorites were the Automobili Amos Futurista, based on the Lancia Delta Integrale and the Officine Fioravanti Testarossa. Even manufacturers such as Bentley and Jaguar jumped into this area and offered “continuation models” such as the Bentley Blower Car Zero and the E-Type 60. In fact, these are newly built old-timers from old-timers with different degrees of modernization, which offer customers an exclusivity that other new cars, no matter how limited, simply cannot achieve. Because what is more limited than something that is not actually produced?
The de-monochromatism of cars
Over the past decade, the most popular car colors have been black, white, silver, and gray. These four colors represented more than 70 percent of the cars produced worldwide. How boring. That changed in 2021 … noticeably, if not statistically. From social media initiatives to “Make Green Great Again” to events like “Rare Shades,” which celebrate Porsche’s famous history of paint-to-sample cars, color has become mainstream. Mercedes, a typically strict color supplier, has also presented its new SL, historically probably the most important model of the brand, in sunny yellow.
The standout moment in color space in 2021, however, was none other than the world record sale of the McLaren F1 Chassis 029 at the Gooding & Co. Pebble Beach auction in 2021 for $ 20,465,000 in non-black, white, silver, or gray, or even green, but … Creighton Brown. Brown. Actually not quite brown, more like a pink brown, metallic mauve. I had several conversations with McLaren F1 collectors, servicers and auction houses following this sale, all of whom agreed that color alone made such a price seem unthinkable in the past. But this is where the factors of this year’s review converge, and when cars are fashion and the market is crazy: do and buy whatever you want, green, yellow, purple or brown.
Car of the year
This wasn’t meant to be Car of the Year, but as people inevitably ask … my favorite car I’ve driven this year was the Alpine A110 Pure. If you live in America I am sorry. This car is not available, but there is good news: this is the most exciting segment of the auto world, and it is still growing. The Porsche Cayman, Lotus Emira and Alpine A110 are the most exciting, enjoyable and competitive segment of cars right now. These are sports cars that aren’t the fastest, most powerful, or the most expensive, but it’s the cars that somehow manage to make the most of the connective tissue between your brain and the car. Here you are offered the experience and fascination that we associate with driving a car as a selfish pleasure, not as a means of transportation.
A prominent topic in the auto world is currently the “superization” of everything. Supercars that, supercars that and the reality is, almost none of us drive supercars. This superization leads to car critics, chair internet racers and marketing teams from car manufacturers transforming themselves into a room for the “best” as opposed to the “best for”, which actually takes use cases and context into account. The reality is that we are post-performance metrics. They don’t mean anything anymore and you shouldn’t care about them because in a world where a $ 75,000 electric car is going to outperform most supercars on single arbitrary metrics, what does it all mean? I can tell you from experience that there is almost nothing more boring than driving a 700 hp car at 20 MPH in traffic. If you want to buy a car for yourself because it means for other people, your choices are simple. Instagram will tell you what to have. The supremeization of automotive narrative has made the auto world feel out of reach and a little bit boring, but if you know where to look and what to look for, your car experience today can be whatever you want it to be. In 2022, focus more on your car experience and less on your Autoflex.
