Fifteen years ago, Jacques Nasser, Ford’s CEO, was fired, in part because he dared tell the assembled automotive industry at the 2000 North American International Auto Show that “horsepower and zero to 60 times” were dead. He — and Yahoo’s then-CEO, Jerry Yang — said that, in the future, automotive performance would be measured in megahertz and access times. Nasser even introduced a concept car — the 24.7 — deliberately rendered as a characterless box to emphasize that, to the future’s customers, only the car’s interior and its connectivity to the Internet would matter.

The attempted transformation bombed. The 24.7 was roundly pilloried, Yahoo was eclipsed by Google and, barely 18 months later, Nasser was ousted, on his way to dismantling Polaroid, yet another American icon.

Fast forward 15 years and one of the most eagerly anticipated reveals at the 2015 Los Angeles Auto Show was Volvo’s Concept 26 — so named because Volvo believes self-driving could “reclaim” as much as 26 minutes of wasted time during each commute. Volvo being one of the leading lights in automotive autonomy, the standing-room-only crowd of assembled automotive journalists anticipated a truly phantasmagorical vision of the future, hidden underneath the requisite silk drape.

What they got when Anders Tylman-Mikiewicz, general manager of Volvo’s Monitoring and Concept Center, lifted the drapes was — spoiler alert — a seat and a dashboard, Volvo’s deconstruction of the automobile into nothing but a life-support system for computerized apps and cellphone connectivity, even more complete than Ford’s. Behold the brave new world, Volvo seemed to be saying; it doesn’t even have wheels.

Indeed, while the cars released at the actual motor show were a lunchbag letdown — when Volkswagen’s jacked-up-10-millimetres Beetle Dune is roundly acclaimed as the highlight, you know an auto show was boring — the real highlight was the show’s Connected Car Expo.

For instance, forget Uber. You know that taxi driving as a profession is dead when the president of L.A.’s taxi commission tells an incredulous audience that the future of inner city commuting is “taxibots,” tiny Google-like self-driving runabouts without drivers. The upside, says Eric Spiegelman, is that taxis will be able to self-drive 100,000 miles a year rather than the 50,000 a human driver is limited to. And by eliminating the expense of having to pay a driver — the hardest thing about listening to nerds talk about autonomous vehicles isn’t that they don’t love cars or driving, but that they view human beings as line items — Spiegelman estimates the cost of a Los Angeles cab could be reduced to as little as 25 US cents a mile, a dramatic reduction from today’s US$2.70.

That makes the annual cost of cabbing your way to the 13,500 miles the average Los Angelino commutes every year just US$3,500, Spiegelman says, a long way from the estimated US$7,500 he estimates a Toyota Camry would cost to operate. This would also result in the “democratization” of taxicab service, as roboticized cars would have no trouble picking up fares from the “hood” (Spiegelman’s words, not mine!). Of course, this would mean some 3,000 Los Angeles cabbies would be out of work. And for all the Uber drivers (30,000 strong in L.A., says Spiegelman), gloating at their conquest of the taxi industry – that affects them, too. Even public transportation will be threatened, Spiegelman says, noting that the taxibot will be cheaper than bus fare for rides of less than seven miles.

And unlike the seemingly stalled electric car revolution — there wasn’t a single major EV announcement at the Los Angeles show, usually the greenest of shows — the rush toward automation is almost out of control. Following Tesla’s somewhat premature unveiling of Autopilot — owners are already posting scary videos of out-of-control Model S’s — Brian Cooley, CNET’s editor-at-large and emcee of the Connected Car Expo, noted Audi’s anticipated introduction of Piloted Driving next year, Cadillac’s Super Cruise the year after and a seemingly endless litany of autonomous projects rolling on to 2025. Indeed, automotive autonomy is such a growth industry in Silicon Valley that there is a shortage of robotics engineers. Uber, for instance, has raided so many engineers from Carnegie Mellon that it has decimated the university’s Robotics Engineering Center, and Elon Musk is so desperate for “hardcore software engineers” he recently tweeted that he will be “interviewing people personally.”

Lost in all these disruptive announcements — mechanics may not be needed for future car repairs and updates because they are done “over the air,” while the 100 million lines of computer code in our cars will soon grow to 300 million — there was some comfort for we old fuddy-duddies. Edison Research, for instance, concluded that, despite the onslaught of Internet-based infotainment, in-car audio entertainment is still very much radio-based. Oh, the terrestrial stations are dying, but Sirius satellite is now four times as popular as it was five years ago. According to Larry Rosin, Sirius XM’s segmentation — Margaritaville (for Bohemian alcoholics still searching for that lost shaker of salt) to Chill (poor Johnny Rotten reduced to elevator music) — is negating the need for the personal playlists promised by Pandora and other Internet radio upstarts.

And — despite warning that the automotive industry’s “clock speed,” the five to seven years automakers currently require to revamp their cars, is being threatened by the speed of the software and smartphone industries’ updates — Gary Silberg, KPMG’s resident automotive expert, is still bullish on car ownership. “Calling for the death of cars would be wrong,” Silberg told Connected Car attendees, noting that autonomy might see more “mission-specific” cars and that self-driving will actually see “miles commuted per person” in automobiles “soar.”

Nonetheless, when industry experts need to defend the very existence of the automobile against the intruders in California, you know that the motor world is changing. Somewhere in semi-retirement, Jacques Nasser is smiling.