Until recently, buying a car meant obsessing over horsepower, transmission types and brand heritage. But step into the market today and the showroom floor looks entirely different.

With the aggressive expansion of electric vehicle production and the entry of smartphone giants like Xiaomi and Huawei into the car market, vehicles are rapidly transforming into rolling computers.

This shift raises a fundamental question for the modern market: are younger consumers beginning to evaluate cars the exact same way they evaluate smartphones?

To understand the buying behaviour of young consumers, we must first recognise that the car industry is undergoing a profound digital transformation. Traditional factors like brand prestige and mechanical engineering, while still relevant, are steadily losing ground to software capabilities and digital integration.

Tech-focused manufacturers are prioritising software-driven car systems, leaving legacy car makers struggling to adapt. For millenials, this technological pivot is not just an added bonus; it is becoming a baseline expectation.

Market-specific factors like electric vehicle pricing and availability in regions like China may accelerate this trend, but the underlying data reflects a broader, cross-national generational shift among digital natives (someone who grew up around digital technology, such as smartphones) are revealing this shift in China, North America and Europe.

A generational perspective

When technologically minded consumers encounter an electric vehicle, they do not necessarily see a mechanical machine with a motor; they see a hardware platform waiting for an operating system.

Consequently, this mindset shifts how they judge the vehicle’s core anatomy. When this demographic evaluates electric vehicles, they base their decisions heavily on “product technological development” (how well the in-car technology works, for instance) and “charging infrastructure” alongside financial incentives.

This directly mirrors how a consumer evaluates a smartphone’s operational speed, battery longevity, and software updates rather than traditional, outdated car metrics.

This paradigm shift also rewrites how cars are bought and experienced. Long before a consumer ever sits in a driver’s seat, the purchasing journey has fundamentally changed. Younger consumers demonstrate a strong inclination toward online platforms and social media as their primary shopping channels, relying heavily on digital interactions and visually rich experiences.

Rather than turning to traditional dealership visits or print brochures, they depend on user-generated content, peer opinions, online reviews and digital advertising to inform their purchasing decisions. Furthermore, recent studies show that this target group’s evaluation criteria continue to mirror the metrics they apply to mobile technology.

Mirroring digital lives

When car shopping, research shows that gen Z consumers seek out technologically advanced and highly personalised experiences, showing a specific interest in the entertainment capabilities and software ecosystems of modern vehicles. This indicates they are evaluating the digital and entertainment experience inside the car, much like they would evaluate the apps of a new phone.

The intense brand loyalty traditionally reserved for Apple or android phones has seamlessly transferred to the car market. Seamless ecosystem integration via systems like Apple CarPlay or Android Auto is treated as a mandatory requirement. If a car fails to mirror a driver’s digital life instantly, it fails the test.

Younger consumers scrutinise a vehicle’s multimedia and infotainment systems with the same hardware expectations they apply to smartphones. If a touchscreen exhibits input lag, clunky user interfaces, or poor user experiences, it severely damages their perception of the entire vehicle.

Unlike older generations who harbour a habitual attachment to driving, younger cohorts base their transport choices on metrics such as travel time, cost efficiency and service reliability. They evaluate transport options rationally rather than emotionally.

Younger demographics increasingly prioritise shared mobility programmes, such as Uber and Grab, over private vehicle ownership. They expect personal settings and digital profiles to sync instantly upon entering any vehicle. This allows them to listen to their latest music playlists or read messages on their smartphone. This mirrors the multi-device continuity they experience when using, for example, tablets and smartphones.

Just as smartphone consumers agonise over app permissions and data tracking, tech-savvy millennials, as well as gen Zs, view connected cars through a lens of data security. Trust in the way vehicle technology and data is handled have become a primary psychological barrier to adoption.

However, a fundamental disconnect explains a striking corporate blind spot identified in recent market research: while 80% of automotive executives believe they are delivering an exceptional digital customer experience, only 8% of customers actually agree. Traditional manufacturers are failing the software test because they still think like mechanics, not app developers.

Brain overload

Treating a car like a smartphone, however, raises a potential problem related to the physical reality of driving. While younger consumers demand the deep customisation and flexibility of touchscreens, replacing physical controls with digital sub-menus creates massive cognitive overload.

Forcing drivers to navigate complex digital layers to adjust basic climate or safety settings diverts visual attention and increases the risks of an accident. One study argues that reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or under the influence of drugs.

This has sparked an inevitable regulatory and design backlash. Safety organisations and designers are pushing back against pure “touchscreen-isation”, noting that a car is ultimately a high-speed vehicle, not a handset.

Even major car manufacturers, such as Volkswagen and Mazda, have publicly admitted that eliminating physical buttons was a misstep, leading to a hybrid design mandate where tactile controls for core functions must coexist with digital entertainment.

Ultimately, younger consumers are evaluating cars through a smartphone-tinted lens. Yet, the future of the car market will not belong to the brands that simply build iPhones on wheels.

The winners will be the manufacturers that successfully balance the digital native’s craving for software-driven connectivity with the uncompromising, safety-first reality of car design.

Svetoslav Georgiev does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Some 23,000 years ago, during the coldest part of the last ice age, people walked across the muddy margins of an ancient lake in what is now White Sands national park, New Mexico.

The footprints they left behind have transformed our understanding of when people first reached the Americas. When we reported dates for the White Sands footprints in 2021, our findings were met with controversy. They placed people in North America thousands of years earlier than other widely accepted sites.

Subsequent work using several independent dating techniques strengthened that chronology. Our latest research takes the story a step further. Rather than simply asking when people were at White Sands, we can begin to ask: what sort of world did they experience?

The answer is a surprisingly dynamic one that was marked by periods of rapid climate change. Our expanded excavations at White Sands have identified 20 different horizons or packages of sediment containing human footprints. Together they span almost two millennia, from about 23,500 to 21,700 years ago, firmly within the last glacial maximum (the height of the last ice age).

Alongside the footprints, the sediments contain a remarkable archive of environmental change. Pollen records the vegetation growing around the basin, while organic molecules preserved in the sediment – including waxes originally produced by plant leaves – provide information about temperature and rainfall.

Together, these allowed us to reconstruct the landscape through which people were walking.

At the beginning of the record, White Sands looked very different from today. A large body of water, Lake Otero, occupied much of the basin. The surrounding mountains supported conifer forests and average annual temperatures were around 4°C colder than today.

But conditions did not remain stable. From around 23,600 years ago the lake began to shrink as temperatures rose. Conifer forest declined and was increasingly replaced by oak and sagebrush.

As a result of this warming, the basin became progressively drier as evaporation increased. Superimposed upon this longer term change were much sharper climatic swings.

Around 23,200 years ago, for example, White Sands experienced a short but severe drought. Rainfall declined, the lake became more saline and drought-tolerant vegetation expanded. This dry period coincided with a rapid climatic change recorded thousands of miles away in Greenland ice cores.

And people were there. Indeed, the earliest footprint horizon in our expanded sequence occurs around this climatic transition. Footprints continue to occur at intervals as the lake retreated and the environment changed.

Our new evidence therefore shows that people visited this landscape repeatedly while experiencing substantial environmental change.

Rapidly changing world

The footprints capture a world changing on timescales that could have been noticed by the people living there at the time. It is tempting to go one step further.

Were people particularly attracted to White Sands during difficult climatic episodes? Did the shrinking lake concentrate animals, plants or other resources that made the basin especially important during drought?

Perhaps. But footprints come with an important catch. What gets preserved is not necessarily a full picture of what happened. In a separate recent study, we used an agent-based computer model to explore what a footprint record such as White Sands actually represents. Agent-based models are rather different from conventional models that attempt to predict something such as tomorrow’s weather.

Instead, they populate a simplified world with individual “agents” following basic rules. Complex patterns can then emerge from their collective behaviour. Our virtual world consisted of people moving around a fluctuating lake.

When they crossed mud they left footprints. Those footprints gradually disappeared unless changing water levels created the right conditions for them to be buried and preserved.

The result was revealing. People could be active around the lake while leaving virtually no fossil record. At other times, relatively few people could produce large numbers of preserved footprints. What mattered was not simply whether people were present, but whether their presence happened to coincide with the right geological circumstances.

Arriving in pulses

Preservation was particularly likely during environmental transitions. A dry period could expose large areas of footprint forming mud. Subsequent wetting and sedimentation could then bury the tracks and preserve them. When we compared this model with the real White Sands record, we found something striking.

The footprint surfaces occur as irregular pulses that tend to cluster around periods of climatic and hydrological change – just the pattern predicted by the model.

Footprints are snapshots, not a movie. But this study changes how the White Sands record should be interpreted. The footprints demonstrate unequivocally that people were present at particular moments.

But the gaps between footprint surfaces do not demonstrate that people were absent. Nor does a surface covered in footprints necessarily indicate a population boom. A handful of people repeatedly crossing soft ground can leave hundreds of tracks.

So we should be cautious about turning the correlation between footprints and climate into a simple story in which people arrived at White Sands whenever drought struck. Instead, there are two histories intertwined here.

One is a human history: people repeatedly inhabited this landscape for almost two millennia while the lake shrank, vegetation changed and the regional climate swung between wetter and exceptionally dry conditions. The other is a geological history determining which tiny fragments of those human lives happened to survive.

Footprints provide an intimate connection with ancient people, but they are not a continuous record of their lives. They are individual frames – moments when human behaviour, mud, water and chance came together.

Matthew Robert Bennett receives funding from UK AHRC.

Sally Christine Reynolds receives funding from the Art and Humanities Research Council grant: "The Peopling of the Tularosa Basin"

The question of when animals first evolved is one that has confounded scientists since the time of Charles Darwin. Studying rocks in north Wales in the mid-19th century, Darwin found the sudden first appearance of animal shells and skeletons in layers dating back over 500 million years perplexing. He had predicted a long history of evolution, with animals slowly gaining complexity through time, rather than this apparent instantaneous appearance of complex animals.

The sudden appearance of complex animals has led scientists to argue that animals must have a “hidden history”, a period in Earth’s past prior to their fossil record where they existed but have left no trace of their presence in the rocks. Our new study may help scientists understand how long this hidden history may have lasted.

Palaeontologists have made significant progress since Darwin roamed north Wales. The oldest animal fossils are now recognised in rocks 574 million years old from the UK and Canada. Although these fossils do not have hard skeletons, they are nevertheless visible to the naked eye and relatively complex just like Darwin’s Welsh fossils. Scientists have pushed the date of the first animal fossils back in time, but researchers still haven’t resolved why these oldest remains of animal life are so complex.

Molecular clock studies aim to tackle this problem. A molecular clock works like the speed = distance/time equation. The genetic difference between two living species’ DNA provides the “distance”. If we can estimate the “speed” at which those differences accumulated, we can work backward to estimate the “time” at which their ancestors separated. Fossils provide important dated anchor points that help calibrate the “speed”.

In some instances, such as the divergence of humans and chimpanzees, (when they split from a common ancestor and became different species) molecular clocks can be incredibly effective at estimating the timing of evolutionary origins. However, in the case of animal evolution, molecular clocks give wildly different answers. Depending on how the clocks are calibrated, estimates for the first animals can be hundreds of millions of years apart. Some suggest animals evolved 800–700 million years ago, but others indicate that they evolved only around 600 million years ago. In short, scientists don’t know when animals first evolved.

With colleagues, we set out to address this issue in our recent paper. Much of the disagreement between molecular clocks is due to the different fossil calibrations used in the models. For example, 590-million-year-old rocks in China, which have the conditions to preserve early animals as fossils, but don’t show any evidence of animal fossils, have been used to suggest animals hadn’t evolved by this time.

We show that approximately 550-million-year-old rocks from Mongolia also have these same fossilisation-promoting conditions but still do not preserve animals. The problem is that animals have been found all over the world in rocks 550 million years old. Animals existed elsewhere at the same time. Their local absence in Mongolia might be because they didn’t live in that place or were not preserved. An empty fossil deposit like the one in Mongolia can tell us that animals are absent from that deposit, but not necessarily that animals were absent from the entire planet.

Earth’s deep past

The same could be true for the 590-million-year-old rocks in China. Perhaps animals are not preserved in them because they simply didn’t live there or were rare at the time. This casts doubt on our ability to use the Chinese rocks to argue animals were yet to evolve 590 million years ago.

We argue that palaeontologists need to use several deposits of roughly the same age from around the world, with each demonstrating the right conditions for animal fossilisation but producing no fossils. Only then might we have more confidence in the result.

We suggest that there might be enough deposits meeting these criteria around 900 to 720 million years ago to justify calibrating the animal molecular clock in this interval. Even then, we think that we could only do so with around 70% confidence (and a 30% chance that our evidence of absence is wrong with animals already having evolved).

Using these older rocks suggests that animals originated between 850 and 715 million years ago. Intriguingly, this older age revitalises the idea that animal evolution coincided with snowball Earth, when ice may have covered much of the planet.

The timing of animal origins remains uncertain. But by learning how to read not only the fossils preserved in rocks, but also the fossils that are missing, we are beginning to bring the hidden early history of animal life into view.

Ross Anderson receives funding from the Royal Society.

Orin Lole Durbin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.