Although Genrich Altshuller is perhaps better known for his development of his Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), his work also includes eight trends of technical system evolution that he believed could be used to predict the future of products or systems. Those working in any high-tech industry have always sought techniques to better forecast the evolution of their product in order to pursue the most promising of multiple possible evolutionary paths and to make the most fruitful investments of time and money in new technologies. The authors are interested in including Altshuller's trends in their toolbox for predicting the future of the automobile but felt it would first be prudent to look back on the auto industry's approximately 160 year history to see if Altshuller's trends appear consistent with that history. The assumption is that if the past history of the evolution of the automobile is consistent with those trends, then increased confidence can be had in any future predictions made by applying those same trends to the current state of the automobile to predict the future. When the history of the automobile was examined in roughly decade-level time intervals, it was observed that, in each time interval considered, typically six or more of Altshuller's eight trends were apparent. Interestingly, the authors found that there were a number of unsuccessful products throughout history that were largely consistent with the trends. This suggested that satisfaction of the trends of system evolution may be a necessary condition for system evolution but is not a sufficient condition for success. This work proposes that consideration of context and satisfaction of some typical system architecting heuristics can largely differentiate past success vs. failure amongst various systems that satisfy the eight trends, and hence recommend a hybrid approach consisting of Altshuller's trends of system evolution with specific attention to system context along with application of system architecting heuristics as a potentially useful and valuable way to predict the future evolution of the automobile.