Vehicle features go through a cyclical lifecycle in the automotive market – moving from initial implementation through gradual consumer acceptance, peak market demand, and then a gradual decline as the feature is replaced by newer, more advanced, technologies. So how does the automotive feature marketplace look today?

In this VehiclePlannerPlus newsletter, we will be looking at a variety of features while understanding how their availability has changed over time. We will then focus on a smaller subsection of features and see how penetration rates are affected by a rise or decline in demand.

Availability

The chart below showcases the availability of a variety of features across several categories from 2013 to 2022. Please use the drop-down menu to view the feature groups available.

Availability Vs. Penetration

Taking some of the features with the largest change in availability, we can then see how the penetration rate of that feature compares and if it follows the same trajectory. Please use the drop-down menu to select the desired feature.

In the majority of cases, it can be seen that penetration follows the trend set by availability and vice-versa. This is because consumer demand pushes OEMs to include features on vehicles which, in turn, leads to greater penetration through the consumer demand in the first place. Features such as drive mode selectors and blind-spot monitoring follow this trend. However, there are some instances where consumer demand far outweighs the feature availability, and availability itself falls behind the demand and penetration from consumers. This can be seen most clearly in the Voice Recognition and LED Headlight charts. This could be due to cost of development and implementation being too high for some OEMs which therefore slowsdown the push to market.