Interview with an Expert: What will define the future of automotive and mobility in 2026 and beyond?

Ask the Expert Series | June 2026

Interviewer: Matt Vicenzi, Senior Vice President, Hall & Partners
Expert: Jason Mantel, Executive Vice President, Managing Director, Auto Practice, Escalent

Executive Summary: The vehicle is becoming a thinking machine. In this edition of Interview with an Expert, Matt Vicenzi sits down with Jason Mantel of Escalent to explore why the research methods used to evaluate vehicles haven't kept pace. Building the AI-enabled vehicle is only half the challenge. Knowing whether consumers actually trust, value, and want to live with it is the other.

What does the future of automotive and mobility look like?

Q1: How is AI reshaping what a vehicle actually is?

AI holds the promise of fundamentally transforming the vehicle from a “useful muscle” into a connected, intelligent and adaptive mobility platform. Automakers are building software and AI into vehicles to create more responsive, individualized experiences for both drivers and passengers, based on real-world usage patterns and behavior. This is laying the foundation for connected ecosystems where vehicles interact with drivers, riders, other vehicles, infrastructure, and the energy grid, accelerating the path toward fully integrated vehicle-to-everything (V2X) mobility.

Vehicle connectivity also extends the customer relationship well beyond the initial purchase, enabling automakers to deliver ongoing value through digital services, remote diagnostics, and predictive maintenance…while generating new revenue streams. Supporting technologies (alternative powertrains, autonomous driving, voice recognition) are advancing quickly. The industry is still closing a critical gap: connected vehicle capabilities are expanding faster than consumer adoption or willingness to pay.

The opportunity and challenge facing automakers

Q2: What's the biggest opportunity — and the hardest part of capturing it?

The real challenge is the pivot away from legacy vehicle development and production models toward a pace of iteration closer to technology products: learning quickly how customers respond, what they actually use, and what they're willing to purchase.

To capture this opportunity, automakers need to:

• Identify the needs of time-strained consumers facing increasingly complex vehicle purchase decisions, and build solutions with demonstrable value

• Treat the vehicle as an ecosystem of potential — building partnerships that create a synchronous experience across drivers and passengers

• Balance core transportation needs with an ecosystem of in-vehicle solutions consumers will actually pay for

• Reinforce the vehicle's role and importance in daily life, much as the smartphone redefined its category over the past two decades

How should the industry solve this challenge?

Q3: If today's vehicles need 21st-century evaluation, what does that toolbox actually look like?

Vehicle personalization, AI enablement, and connectivity represent a significant expansion of the addressable market. But the research methodologies used to evaluate these vehicles are still rooted in the 20th century, and increasingly unable to capture the customer experience that will determine the future purchase reasons.

Escalent's response was a design-thinking initiative (internally called FutureDrive) focused specifically on redefining how consumer insight evaluates advanced vehicle products. Future vehicle evaluation must move from judging isolated features at a single point in time to assessing an intelligent, adaptive, connected mobility system across real moments, repeated use, and the broader ownership relationship.

It’s about expanding existing research methods by adding new tools that matter for an AI-enabled vehicle.

New dimensions for evaluating the AI-enabled vehicle

Q4: What does this look like in practice?

Escalent has identified six dimensions of future-ready vehicle evaluation, alongside dozens of new research methods and a three-phase approach for transitioning to AI-enabled techniques. Two methods illustrate the shift:

• Contextual Intelligence & Predictable Behavior evaluates whether vehicle AI behavior feels appropriate for the moment, comparing responses across trips, weather, urgency, and environment to ask: did the timing feel right, and would this behavior feel helpful or intrusive?

• Adaptive Learning & Relationship Trajectory evaluates how trust and perceived value shift over time (through onboarding, updates, failures, and recovery) asking whether trust would grow or decline with repeated use, and whether a single AI mistake would change how the vehicle gets used.

Key Takeaways

• AI is turning vehicles into adaptive, ecosystem-like platforms comparable to smartphones

• Adoption, not technology, is the bottleneck. Connected capability is outpacing what consumers are willing to pay for

• Legacy, fragmented research methods can't capture how consumers actually experience an AI-enabled vehicle

• Evaluation must shift from single-moment feature testing to trust and value across the full ownership relationship

• New dimensions like contextual intelligence and adaptive learning trajectory are key to understanding how consumers respond to AI behavior over time

Conclusion

The vehicle of the future will be judged on whether it earns trust, adapts appropriately, and proves itself worth living with overtime.

That requires a fundamentally different research toolbox, one built for relationships rather than single transactions. At Escalent and Hall & Partners, we partner with automotive and mobility clients navigating exactly this shift, helping them understand not just what consumers will buy, but what they'll trust enough to keep.