The 2024 version assumed younger customers would move in a fairly straight line toward autonomous vehicles, subscriptions, shared mobility, sustainability-led choices and virtual retail.

Some of those behaviours may grow. Treating them as a generational certainty is the problem.

Automotive product and retail decisions live for years. The evidence used to justify them needs to be stronger than a label such as Gen Alpha or digital native.

Customers increasingly encounter products that update, remember preferences and carry identity between devices. That creates a reference point for vehicle software and digital services.

It does not mean every buyer wants the same interface, the same level of automation or the same willingness to share data.

The useful planning signal is the behaviour itself: which functions customers actually use, where they abandon a process, what they pay for and which failures damage trust.

Subscriptions, leasing, rental, ride-hailing and shared mobility change the menu of access options. They do not make private ownership obsolete by default.

Urban form, household structure, income, parking, public transport and vehicle use still change the economics dramatically.

A better mobility strategy therefore models where access substitutes for ownership and where it merely sits beside it.

Environmental performance can matter to customers while price, range, convenience, quality and residual value still dominate the final decision.

Planning becomes unreliable when a stated preference is treated as purchasing behaviour without checking the trade-off the customer actually accepts.

The stronger evidence comes from what changes conversion, retention and willingness to pay.

A vehicle programme may run for years while channel behaviour, software expectations and financing preferences move much faster.

The organisation therefore needs short feedback loops around customer data, retail process, digital-service use and ownership economics.

Those signals should be able to change commercial execution even when the physical product cannot change quickly.

Customer strategy is stronger when it starts with observed behaviour and economic constraints rather than a forecast of what an entire generation will become.

The planning question is not what younger customers will inevitably demand. It is which behaviours are already changing, how fast they matter commercially, and which parts of the operating model can adapt before the next product cycle.