ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA - FEBRUARY 26: A general view of the Ford logo ahead of the V8 Supercars Clipsal 500 at Adelaide Street Circuit on February 26, 2015 in Adelaide, Australia. (Getty Images)

In 2015, U.S. auto sales set an all-time record for the first time in 15 years. Aided by the slow but steady economic recovery, low interest rates and depressed gas prices, the 2015 economic environment was a carmaker's dream.

But give it some time.

That dream – at least for members of the industry establishment like Ford Motor Co. (ticker: F), General Motors Co. (GM), Honda Motor Co. (HMC) and Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) – may morph into a full-fledged nightmare in just a few short years.

Glancing at U.S. vehicle sales in 2016 thus far, you'd see no particular reason to predict gloom and doom. In fact, they may set another record.

But sales don't give you the whole story. The state of traditional automakers only appears ominous when you look at the long term – and notice how legacy carmakers are behind the ball on some of the industry's most powerful and inevitable trends.

Automakers are falling behind. Let's just get this out of the way: Tesla Motors (TSLA) is an agent of chaos in its industry.

Tesla has been making all-electric vehicles with ranges of more than 200 miles since 2008, when it came out with its first car, the Tesla Roadster. Today, the company has two vehicles, the Tesla Model X, an SUV, and the Tesla Model S, a sedan, that also go more than 200 miles on a single charge.

"Tesla will absolutely have a huge impact" on the traditional auto industry, according to Ale Resnik, CEO and co-founder of the online automotive marketplace Beepi.

Innovation is in Tesla's DNA, Resnik says, "in contrast to traditional automakers, who are now partnering with technology companies. In a world in which cars will have more software and are quickly becoming computers on wheels, Tesla has an advantage."

Don't get it twisted: Traditional automakers are making electric cars too. They're just not very good.

The 2016 Nissan Leaf, for instance, has a range of just 107 miles. A short trip from the District of Columbia to Philadelphia would turn into a very long one as your battery died 32 miles short of our nation's original capital. The Volkswagen e-Golf is all electric but gets just 83 miles per charge; the Ford Focus Electric has a range of 76 miles.

GM seems to be the only old-school automaker taking electric vehicles really seriously: The 2017 Chevy Bolt will be available by the end of the year and will go 200 miles per charge and cost $37,500 before incentives.

To be fair, Honda and Ford are both planning long-range electric vehicles as well, but each is more than a year away and has generated very little buzz.

The Tesla Model 3, by contrast, will likely steal the show when it debuts in late 2017. The sedan is priced at $35,000 before incentives and will boast a range of at least 215 miles.

Unlike the Chevy Bolt, the Tesla Model 3 has sex appeal and a premium brand name behind it. Like all Teslas, it will feature extensive autonomous driving capabilities, allowing Tesla to build its lead in yet another area where the auto leaders of yesteryear are falling behind.

Customers placed more than 325,000 reservations for the Model 3 in the first week Tesla began taking deposits.

The wild popularity of the Model 3 – Tesla's first truly affordable, mass-produced car – signals the beginning of a major shift in consumer tastes. But the auto industry seems to be silently ignoring the consumer that demands a driverless, or even all-electric, vehicle.

With Silicon Valley companies increasingly moving into the fold, there's no time for automakers to spare, according to Gary Silberg, a partner and national automotive leader at KPMG in Chicago.

"The auto industry doesn't have time to ignore its true innovators, and traditional automakers must absolutely invest in, and seek solutions to, this phenomenon we call the 'clockspeed dilemma' or they risk becoming obsolete very quickly," Silberg says.

There are more options for consumers. The stubbornness of legacy carmakers isn't the only thing that's working against car companies mired in tradition.

Mobility services like Uber and Lyft are changing the way younger consumers think about buying cars. Why worry about a down payment, a monthly payment, routine servicing costs, insurance and the hassle of driving when you can pawn all that off on a stranger for a reasonable price?

For young adults who still want or need their own vehicle, do you really think millennials – who are frequently impugned by the mainstream media as wanting everything served to them on a silver platter, yesterday – will opt for a gas-guzzling, non-autonomous car that they can't turn into their own money-making ride-hailing service while they sleep?

Oh, that's right.

Part of Tesla's recently unveiled "master plan part deux" involves making autonomous vehicles that can drive themselves around and pick up fares for you while you work or sleep, reducing the cost of owning a Tesla and flooding the market with mobility options.

With a bigger fleet of ridesharing vehicles than ever, the cost of hailing an Uber, which is also working on a driverless car, will likely fall, making buying a car even less appealing than before.

Scott Corwin, a managing director of Deloitte Consulting, estimates that by 2040, "shared autonomous vehicles will account for almost three-quarters of vehicle sales in urban environments," and that "shared autonomous vehicles will become the dominant segment overall for vehicle sales."

Tesla isn't the only Silicon Valley company pushing into the auto space. Apple (AAPL) and Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) are also working on driverless cars, electric cars or both.

With all these new entrants to the market (and more surely on the way), it's very, very difficult to imagine that the Big Three U.S. automakers – GM, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCAU) – won't lose some meaningful market share in coming years.

Are we at near the end of a cycle? Unfortunately, the bad news doesn't end there. A more immediate concern for automakers emerges from the industry's notoriously cyclical nature.

This could be yet another all-time best for U.S. auto sales, but it's way too close to call, and a near-zero growth rate could augur looming sales declines in years to come. It appears that the industry is at or very close to the peak of its current cycle.

In a matter of years, an industry more than a century old is being turned on its head. While slow to adapt, entrenched industry titans are in fact working seriously on electric vehicles, autonomy and mobility.

GM in particular seems to realize the importance of investing in tomorrow's technologies today and took a $500 million, 9 percent stake in Lyft in January. Two months later, it bought a San Francisco, California-based startup that develops self-driving car technology, Cruise Automation, for over $1 billion.

But it may very well be "too little, too late" for old-school industry leaders that spent too long with their heads in the sand.

"Almost every week we see new examples of the automakers announcing plans to fight becoming irrelevant," Silberg says. "Now we just have to see which plans pay a dividend and which plans fail."



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