Every year around Thanksgiving, we like to reflect on the trends in the industry that we are thankful for. This year, we were thankful for enthusiast cars like the Porsche 911 T, affordable EVs, car makers building fewer boring models, FCA's commitment to 700 hp cars, and the expansion of performance divisions such as AMG. Now that the year is almost over, people are crafting their New Year's resolutions. We thought that we should represent the auto industry and come up with five resolutions that the industry should improve upon in 2018.

Our first resolution for the industry is to not give up on building sports cars. We understand that SUVs are much more practical than sports cars, but that doesn't mean that companies should abandon fun cars all together. While people are making their resolutions to be more adventurous, we hope that the car industry does the same, by building more interesting sports cars. We saw some awesome sports cars near the end of 2017, like the Aston Martin Vantage and the Corvette ZR1, both of which will be available with the next item on our list.

One popular New Year's resolution is to be more active in order to lose weight. We'd also like people to be more active, by buying a car with a manual transmission. People always say that they want to be more active by using the stairs instead of the elevator, or walking more. Why not be more active everyday by buying a car with a manual transmission? The manual transmission is slowly dying off, but we hope that the industry continues to humor the small minority of people that just love to row their own gears.

Another common resolution is to embrace technology. Many people are hesitant to try new things, and the reason why is because technology is constantly changing and can be difficult for some people to relearn. Connected car features are one of the biggest pain points for consumers on new cars. On many reliability studies, consumers complain that the Bluetooth and other systems on their cars doesn't work properly. We wish that car manufacturers could build systems that don't experience issues and create more universal platforms. We prefer Android Auto and Apple Car Play to most proprietary systems, even though these systems have a few of their own issues.

People always want to improve themselves in the new year. One of the biggest flaws in new cars are the annoying driver aids. We enjoy using many of the self-driving aids, but things like lane departure warning systems are just irritating. Studies have shown that around 66% of people end up turning these systems off because they find them so annoying. We hate the way many of these systems feel intrusive or use annoying beeps and buzzes. Automakers need to work on making these systems feel more streamlined, or else their purpose becomes completely defeated.

Our final resolution is a bit of a selfish one. We know that the industry is moving towards turbocharged cars, which has many advantages. Unfortunately, modern turbocharged engines have a habit of being more muted than normally aspirated ones. For example, we don't think that the turbocharged Ferrari 488 sounds as good as its naturally aspirated predecessor. Some companies, like Mercedes-Benz, have found ways to make turbo engines sound great, and we hope that more automakers figure out how to do it too.