"There would be a number of other obstacles to overcome before what Wagner calls "the 2020 Hot Rod" could become a reality, GM cautions. There's the matter of safety. Few modern coachbuilders have the resources to do their own crash testing, but GM planners say they'd likely offer their assistance, and in the future, much of the basic work would be done in the virtual world of a supercomputer. There also would be the issues of liability and reliability. Just resolving all those issues could take another 20 years, GM executives say.
Back in the '50s, the industry's most popular models would rack up sales closing on a million units a year. Today, it's the rare car that tops 250,000. There's likely always to be a market for cookie-cutter cars like the Toyota Camry and Ford Taurus, but "there's a tremendous cry among consumers for something that's truly individual," says Bill Robinson, an automotive design instructor at Detroit's Center for Creative Studies. While the great coachbuilders may be gone, smart manufacturers are looking for new ways to deliver consumers precisely the products they want, at a cost they can afford. So sometime in the not very distant future, you may be able to piece together precisely the car you want, like ordering a wardrobe from a catalog." - Popular Mechanics
