Hasta La Ideas

Within the broad range of professions that an industrial design education can lead to, automotive design is something like neurosurgery is to med students: Prestigious, aspirational, even glamorous. Is there any chance that will decline within our lifetime?

In the last entry we looked at how personal poverty in Italy is leading to declining car sales. But according to The Economist, wealthy countries do not have the opposite situation. “In the rich world,” they write, “the car’s previously inexorable rise is stalling.” While there are still millions of Brazilians, Chinese and Indians keen to get their first set of wheels, other nations, say academics, may be reaching an automotive saturation point.

While that point can be debated, there is another fact that cannot: Right now rich economies are filled with older drivers, and in order to sustain that car-buying population, those economies need to keep producing younger drivers. And the past 24 months have seen a rash of articles from seemingly every major paper on how that younger-driver factory may be grinding down. Here’s the buzz:

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