Original 2021 statement: Your car will have credit card capability embedded into the dashboard, in order to streamline drive-through and curbside pickup interactions
What Jim has written about this
From “Daily Inspiration: “It’s time to move from triage to tomorrow!”” (January 2023)
Your car dashboard of today will be obsolete in but 18 months, just like your smartphone
The cost and complexity of car maintenance will have collapsed with the arrival of electric vehicles because there is really nothing to maintain
Your self-driving car will ‘talk’ to a lot of the other self-driving cars around it in order to figure out where it is going and how to safely get there
From “The Trends Scorecard: Retail & Consumer - What I Predicted, and What Actually Happened” (July 2026)
By 2015 I was telling rooms of retail CEOs that if they didn’t understand mobile, they should be out of a job. The sharpest version of the call was about the humble cash register and the plastic card. if you think about it, Apple has eliminated the concept of the cash register in stores. And more importantly, they’ve rendered the plastic credit card obsolete with Apple Pay.
In my “20 Trends into 2030” piece, I wrote a single dense paragraph about what retail looks like at the end of the decade. It packs several of my long-running calls into one place. While we used to go to stores to get the stuff that we need, we now find that the majority of stuff comes to us via a wide variety of automated, intelligent last mile delivery technologies - delivery bots, automated drones and more. Most homes now have drone pads on their driveways and robotic storage lockers that safeguard the product after delivery. When you actually do go out to get things, your car takes care of much of the process - it has become a shopping cart with credit card payment technology built in. Malls? They’ve become museums if not just entertainment hubs - the entire focus for commercial retail real-estate has evolved to logistics hubs, shipment warehouses, drone-ports and more.
From ““54 Things You Haven’t Thought About with Electric, Self-Driving Cars”” (July 2017)
you car will become a credit card. At the same time that companies equip cars with cell capability to turn the vehicle into a Wi-Fi hotspot, they’ll also put a SIM card and technology in place that will let the car do an automatic credit card transaction. Apple put Apple Pay into a mobile device, and as the car becomes a phone, it will become an Apple Pay device too! You’ll pay at the drive-through simply by putting your thumbprint on the dash.
there’s a massive rush for skills : Delphi is hiring 5,000 software engineers and wants to double it in the years to come. Most car companies don’t have the skills they need, and the war for talent will go super-nova.
no one is talking about open source vs. closed source cars . Linux vs. Microsoft anyone? As cars become computers, some people believe that they should be built on an open source foundation, because this will be the best way to provide for reliability and safety. 20 years ago, the running joke was that if Microsoft built the operating system for the car of the future, the car would shut down in the middle of the highway randomly, and the dashboard would simply say, ” General Car Fault .” Open source concepts will quickly come to the car industry, and could be pretty disruptive. Watch the video below - I was talking about this in 2004!
Read the full pieces on jimcarroll.com:
Daily Inspiration: “It’s time to move from triage to tomorrow!”
The Trends Scorecard: Retail & Consumer - What I Predicted, and What Actually Happened
”54 Things You Haven’t Thought About with Electric, Self-Driving Cars”