Will you still be reading car reviews in 10 years?

You've read the headline. Do you think you'll still be reading car reviews in 10 years? It's something that is, perhaps not surprisingly, on the mind of someone who writes and edits car reviews for a living. If the answer is no, I hope I can come up with some other form of employment by the time 2032 rolls around.

But before I start taking TV/VCR repair correspondence school courses, let's at least take a look at why I'm asking the question in the first place. There's really two ways to look at it: the car side and the review side.

From the car perspective, if the majority of cars out there are autonomous electric transport pods, then who the hell wants to read about those for fun? My refrigerator autonomously keeps my beer cold with electricity, but I can tell you definitively I don't sit around with my morning coffee reading the latest news and reviews on Fridgeblog. In this doomsday scenario for car enthusiasm, car reviews will strictly be for consumers, much like those for other consumer goods, with content types perhaps falling more along the lines of early adopters and mass market than anything resembling enthusiasm.

In the last year, though, I've seen plenty of signs that this autonomous electric transport pod doomsday isn't on the horizon. First and foremost, I think we're going to see autonomous flying taxis before mass market, citizen-owned autonomous cars. Which is to say, not soon. There are just too many technological, psychological, logistical and legal challenges for the foreseeable future.

Then there's the electric part of the equation. The most interesting cars I drove in 2021, without question, were all electric. The Mercedes-Benz EQS, Porsche Taycan GTS and Ford Mustang Mach-E were equal parts fascinating and fantastic — two descriptors that should make you want to read about them. EVs that I have yet to drive, including the Rivian R1T, Lucid Air, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6, are those I have read about for fun and am eager to try — not just in a professional, I-have-to-drive-everything-cause-job reasons, but because I'm legitimately curious and interested as a car enthusiast.

Considering that we're only at the very beginning of the industry's EV conversion, just imagine what might be available in 10 years? Oh, there'll definitely be anonymous transport appliances, much as there have been in the past powered by gasoline, but I don't think we'll be bereft of cool cars.

The "review" part is the trickier and more problematic element for people like me. For starters, what exactly is a review? Is it just a 1,500-word written article, read on desktop, tablet or mobile, that's more or less consistent with what was established by print magazines long ago? Is it a highly formatted document created for people researching their next car, most likely integrated within online buying platforms? Or, is it a caption on an Instagram photo? Or a video loaded to YouTube or TikTok by one person as opposed to a publication that employees many?