Car giants need to move fast and break things
I don&#x27;t have industry insight, so this is just my view as an opinionated consumer on specifically new car sales:<p>Everyday consumer cars haven&#x27;t offered anything interesting to the consumer for nearly 20 years, and I&#x27;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:<p>1. New Technology is fun, but it&#x27;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&#x27;t improving anymore. If you find your near new car isn&#x27;t meeting your needs, it&#x27;s a different model, not a new version that you want.<p>2. I wonder if the personal image of car ownership isn&#x27;t being diminished. An awful lot of money to spend on something you don&#x27;t do much with. For many it&#x27;s just been assumed that you need a car and that it&#x27;ll be expensive, so you&#x27;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.<p>Just like inflated housing costs, the only reason we&#x27;ve been stomaching the cost of new cars is thanks to easy finance. When you live paycheck to paycheck, it&#x27;s easy to mask the costs. But when people are getting squeezed, not even that works.