The 2010s in Car Tech

The 2010s marked one of the most exciting and innovative decades in the history of the automotive industry. Cutting-edge technology like radar cruise control and lane-keep assist have made their way from select luxury cars to $30,000 Hondas. Certain brands have made massive leaps in quality while others have stagnated. Electric cars have hit the mainstream. The market in the US has also begun a dramatic shift away from conventional passenger cars in favor of SUVs and trucks. 

Let’s start with the decade’s biggest success story in terms of car brands: Hyundai and Kia. Korean manufacturer Hyundai entered the US market in 1986 (no easy task when up against the stiff competition from already-established Honda and Toyota), and found their niche in cheap cars which were known to be built with, to put it gently, exceptionally poor quality control. Hyundai was once said to stand for “Hope You Understand Nothing's Driveable And Inexpensive.”

At the onset of the 2010s, however, Hyundai (and Kia, which Hyundai owns 30% of and shares parts with), began to hit its stride after years of work to improve its designs and reliability. Take a look at recent Hyundai models that are still on the road, and you’ll see how generally solid Hyundais are today. A local example comes in the form of a Kansas woman’s 2013 Hyundai Elantra. As a long-distance delivery driver, Farrah Haines of Olathe put a staggering 1,000,000 miles on her Elantra in just 5 years - a feat that even Hyundai’s engineers had a hard time believing until they inspected the car and confirmed it. These days, Hyundai and Kia have a strong presence in the luxury market in addition to their solid lineup of inexpensive cars. The Kia Telluride luxury SUV, for example, won Motor Trend’s 2018 SUV of The Year award. Hyundai and Kia’s progress in quality this decade came so fast that many still stigmatize them as unreliable and cheap when truly they are ahead of some other brands. 

Even more so than strides in quality, advances in automotive technology have really characterized the 2010s. Lane-keep assist, radar cruise control, and collision avoidance are among the autonomous safety features that hit the mainstream. These features can help prevent collisions in certain scenarios, but they may also encourage distracted driving and widen the growing disconnect between car and driver brought on by the digital age. Ultimately, such technology should come with a disclaimer: it is always the driver’s responsibility to pay attention, and these systems should not change that. 

Other tech features that sprang up over the decade are Android Auto and Apple Carplay (both launched in 2014), which turn a car’s infotainment screen into an extension of your phone. There are many advantages to these digital innovations, but in addition to the aforementioned encouragement of driver distraction, some complain automakers’ digitization of dashes has gone so far as to be cumbersome. For example, Honda began replacing the physical volume knob on its head units with digital buttons on the screen a few years back. The 2018 Ridgeline, for example, has this volume control system, and their drivers do not find it beneficial. And Ridgeline owners are not alone in their complaints. In fact, Honda received such backlash that it once again added a physical volume knob to every model in its 2019 lineup. 

As we leave the 2010s behind us, it is worth looking back on how far our vehicles have come, both over the past 10 years and over the past few decades. Cars are safer, more capable, and more feature-packed than ever, and much of the new technology that has become standard arrived over the past decade. Still, perhaps a lesson has arisen in regard to the digitization of car drivetrain and interior tech. Innovation, I believe, is good; but more is not always better.