Car giants need to move fast and break things
economist.com
economist.com
Everyday consumer cars haven't offered anything interesting to the consumer for nearly 20 years, and I'm not sure what they could possibly offer. For the longest time the branding drive for cars has been about new technology, signaling success and personal branding. But I see a few shifts in society that make these less important:
1. New Technology is fun, but it's reached a peak of usefulness to the consumer in cars. For the vast majority of people, a car is a utility, and their basic usefulness isn't improving anymore. If you find your near new car isn't meeting your needs, it's a different model, not a new version that you want.
2. I wonder if the personal image of car ownership isn't being diminished. An awful lot of money to spend on something you don't do much with. For many it's just been assumed that you need a car and that it'll be expensive, so you'll get it financed, which hides the real cost of the car inside weekly expenses. I see that changing, not least because the middle class has less money than they used to.
Just like inflated housing costs, the only reason we've been stomaching the cost of new cars is thanks to easy finance. When you live paycheck to paycheck, it's easy to mask the costs. But when people are getting squeezed, not even that works.
An upmarket car used to be an indication of your financial status, now it just shows you can put your signature on a loan application. The flashiest cars in my neighbourhood are parked outside the housing association properties.
(part time car dealer in the UK here)
While I don't think that's completely true, I think it's pretty much right. Most cars just offer incremental improvements over the previous model, and styling changes. They're clearly better in most ways, but tend to be larger and heavier because of this.
I have a 12 year old van (Renault trafic) as my daily transport (6 seater as my gf has 4 kids). Its got 230000 miles on it, drives perfectly and still does 40mpg. For work I sometimes hire a new equivalent (I play bass in the band of a 1970s rock star, and drive us to some UK gigs), and while it's a bit smoother and nicer to drive and had features like cruise control, to buy one would be about £25000... And the kicker? Worse on fuel than my own van! (I've hired several, across other manufacturers, none beat 35mpg,and that was on motorway runs).
Cars have got to the same point Microsoft Word did in 97.
If you look back to the days when cars were less utilitarian and more sentimental, the key difference was that people would modify them. They'd put on bigger wheels and performance parts, cut them up and turn a truck into a camper or add aftermarket features to the interior.
You ever see that show about Count's Customs? People used to do that at home. But basically every car on that show is 1980s or earlier for a reason.
Modern cars are unibody, they don't have a separate frame so you can't put on a different one. Everything is not only done by computers but done by opaque undocumented non-standard computers. You can't so much as replace the entertainment system in your car because it's integrated with the climate controls and everything else.
Some of that (like unibody) is for a reason, but most of it isn't. It doesn't have to be this way.
And when it wasn't was when people actually cared about their cars. That's how you get people to pay you all of these maintenance dollars -- get them to push their cars hard on the track or off-roading or on cross-country road trips but then care enough about them to pay you the money to repair them when they wear out. Get people to love them because they have hundreds of hours into them and brand loyalty means something because all your spare parts and systems knowledge are for Chevys and not Hondas or vice versa.
They all think they want to be Apple but more phones run Android and more servers run Linux and Tesla is already being Apple. Be something else. There are a lot of customers looking for something else and not a lot of competitors providing it.
Trucks of course are the exception as you have to go with body-on-frame and in that case we do see a much larger modding community and a huge after market.
There should be third party forks of your entertainment system on github or you're doing it wrong.
> Decisions about components + software are made way in advance of the car being made, so softwarey type things are outdated by the time they come out.
They're doing this wrong.
You have an infotainment system which is basically a PC/tablet built into the dash. It should be completely open. Like you should be able to rip it out and replace it with an actual PC or tablet running entirely third party software and it should still be able to do everything.
Then it should talk to all the other parts of the car over ethernet using published standards, no secret APIs. Not publishing the code for the ECU is silly but that allows them to do it and not have that infect everything else in the car, because its internals can be a black box but all the public interfaces aren't.
Then it doesn't matter how outdated your infotainment system is because anybody can install the latest version after the fact or replace it with an entirely third party one and all you need is a "driver" that translates the API version used by the ECU and other vehicle components into something that infotainment system can work with.
For infotainment, its not actually as easy as you think. Its definitely rated QM or maybe ASIL-A because it can do things like control climate or on some cars put it into different modes. Failures in these systems might not be catastrophic, but they need to be correct to some degree and failure or poor design, can lead to this
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-r...
Granted, should they have connected everything the way they did? No, but car companies are barely engineering firms, they are just basically assembly firms that contract out all their components except for things like the ECUs. If they don't know how to specify security requirements to a vendor, it won't happen. They are learning though and it takes time.
I think the biggest reason people don't modify their cars anymore is simply that they aren't allowed to. Fewer people outright own their cars and their loan and insurance terms and conditions won't let them modify the car, as it would void the vehicle warranty.
For what it's worth, there's still a huge car modifying culture where I live, and no car I've owned stays stock for long. But you're right, as soon as it hits around about the late 90s year models, you don't see as many of them modified.
While OBDII was a great improvement for ECU diagnostic standards, there are still dozens of smaller proprietary microcontrollers within most new cars. The manufacturing and materials also play a role in making them more difficult to modify cleanly. It's just hard for the hobbyist to keep up with design and manufacturing processes.
I don't buy it. The average car in the US is almost 12 years old. The warranty is up and the loan is paid off.
It also doesn't make sense for the warranty to be affected by things like software changes to the entertainment system which anybody could revert in five minutes if they were causing problems. They should practically want that to happen because it gets people to show up at the dealership with a non-problem you can fix in five minutes which gets them into the dealership where you can upsell them on something or show them all the new cars.
The problem is everybody wants to be a gatekeeper and what they don't realize is that they're Samsung and not Apple. They're much better off to have more and better third party software for their cars by publishing standards and not locking everything down, so more people buy their cars, than to have a walled desert full of nothing because they're trying to control everything.
Electric cars are a huge innovation and comfort improvement when driving.
Cars could have way better entertainment systems.
Better integration with your phones is generally a feature people like
Advanced Automation like Autopilot are Super Cruise are popular and a useful technology
Modern active safety features are a great technology
Seems to its just that many automakers do a bad job on many of these things. Those that don't generally have less issues.
I feel like in car entertainment and phone integrations are a mismatch in industries, where cars should last 10-20 years or more, their software is going to be out of date in 5 years at best. It would take a system more like Tesla's to keep up, where they have constantly updating vehicle software. But you get that because you're a subscriber to their infrastructure, and you car is constantly internet connected.
Well, there is not the battery capacity and the company make no money from them so they don't sell them.
> It would take a system more like Tesla's to keep up
Pretty much all companies have started working on that. The big issues they usually put together tons and tons of vendor software. Another big issue is that some of their lower level parts are not upgradable at all, so even if you can upgrade your main computer that does not mean you can be quite as complete as Tesla can be.
In recent years navigation has become standard, that is probably the single biggest obvious difference in the last 20 years.
That's the danger with software companies being the wealthiest ones in the world, people think that others companies should apply the same recipes and earn more money.
You can move fast with web and mobile apps, if you break something a page didn't load and someone is unable to see number of likes on his last Instagram pic of his dinner, fine, let's redeploy and it should work again.
Even Azure or AWS provide something like 99.99% SLA on their services, imagine if Boeing/Airbus/BMW/Mercedes/etc. had the same level on their products, we would have dozens of airplane crashes per day... (Okay maybe not now during the lockdown).
This culture can't and shouldn't be applied in other domains.
I think cars are kinda 'done' from a 'cool' feature perspective, because really how much fun can a car be at a low price point (so not talking about sports or luxury cars)? There are lots of safety features that are probably gonna become standard over time, such as the Corvette rear view mirror actually having the option to be a screen attached to a camera on the back. Driver assist is also going to become more prevelant
A modified "Cash for Clunkers" revival sounds pretty smart. My family's driving has plummeted, and now we have an extra car which we never drive. Meanwhile there's (I presume?) increased interest in the car-based gig economy. If someone were to want my 18 year old rust bucket (runs great!), I'd off it for cheap, since the insurance, registration, and its physical form are all deadweight. Then I'd buy a new car once the economy begins to recover. Why not make this dynamic part of the automaker bailout?
The problem is that there are huge amount of used cars now, and way more used cars are coming of leases. Don't expect to get much more for your old car for a while.
At the same time some Automakers have access vehicles on the logistical trail that dealers don't want to take on, as they are already have to many cars.
The Auto industry is gone run into big issues going forward. They are like banks and their assets are plummeting in value, specially the resale value of all those ICE cars.
>Most carmakers were fitter going into this crisis than the last recession a decade ago.
The article fails to mention that as a term for accepting loans during the last "once in a lifetime" financial crisis, automakers were held by the scruff of their neck and forced to eat their spinach. Pontiac was shuttered because politicians fondly remembered Buick and the Aztek was a design that pissed off basically anyone over 30. Fiat bought Chrysler, and the same mid level managers who were chortling over the theft of the E-Class design during the ripoff partnership with Mercedes were now finishing cafeteria crow pie and packing their desks.
>Credit Suisse, a bank, expects GM and Ford to burn through $10bn and $14bn of cash
Someone needs to check the ford offices for a gas leak, because they brought this entirely on themselves by wiping out automobiles in favour of SUV's and muscle cars. They turned the 'Stang into an electric crossover and got rid of the focus ST to be replaced with the ecosport, the most sterile compromise since Obamacare. Meanwhile GM is stuck trying to figure out what to do with Buick, a car thats remained the automotive equivalent of a knock-off rolex for over forty years. by comparison, Ford dropped their mercury brand in 2011 and so are spared the absolute nightmare of marketing this car without a buyer.
Americans --the majority of them-- want cheap cars that are inexpensive to maintain and reliable to own. full stop. Capitalism says otherwise and auto loans are a 1.1 trillion dollar bubble, with an average lending period of six years. Im frankly shocked no one is talking about an impending collapse of auto lending.
Focusing on SUV and Trucks is the only reason they still exist at all.
The problem is not them building SUV or Trucks, but not innovating fast enough and not being able to effectively beat out VW and Toyota in many global markets.
> Americans --the majority of them-- want cheap cars that are inexpensive to maintain and reliable to own. full stop.
That is contrary to every evidence we have. People want big cars that they can pack their family and 10 shopping bags in.
> Capitalism says otherwise and auto loans are a 1.1 trillion dollar bubble, with an average lending period of six years. Im frankly shocked no one is talking about an impending collapse of auto lending.
In the car industry people are absolutely talking about that.