The Future Car Business?? How Its Gonna Be..

The Future of The Car Business is Another Question

Few products have had as big an impact on society over the past century as the car. Now, just when the automobile seems to finally be approaching its decline, America’s most fêted corporate visionaries seem determined once again to reinvent it, or at least how it’s used.Evidence is mounting that Apple wants to develop an electric car. That would pit it against Tesla’s Elon Musk, who is trying to take zero-emissions electric vehicles mainstream. And then there’s Uber, cashed up and on a mission to “basically make car ownership a thing of the past” by making it easier to get one, with a driver, just when you need it.
That these efforts come from America, land of the car, seems fitting. You could see them as Silicon Valley’s attempts to redeem the car—to show a new, environment-conscious generation that you can, as it were, have your car and eat it too.But whether that’s actually possible remains to be seen. Many question the economics behind Apple’s rumored move. Cars are a high-cost, low-margin business and the industry is highly competitive. If the company is indeed building one it may be motivated, at least in part, by the whims of its chief designer, Jony Ive, a car fanatic who is underwhelmed by existing vehicles. “There are some shocking cars on the road,” Ive told the New Yorker in a profile published this week. “One person’s car is another person’s scenery.”

Car Business

Musk is happy to wait years to turn a profit, and seems motivated at least as much by a desire to save the planet. At the moment, Wall Street seems happy to go along with him. As for Uber, its globally successful model has inspired an almost equally global backlash. The future of the car may be here, but for the future of the car business, we might have to wait a little longer.
A challenge posed by this change for car companies is the migration of the so-called ‘online/offline customer experience’. Nowadays the average number of showroom visits a customer makes before a new car purchase is on an average 1.4 – down from four visits. Customers walk into a dealership with their homework done. They will have browsed websites, read reviews, visited social networks and community forums – and at that point, the role of the dealer will no longer be that of an information source, but that of a product experience provider. In order to avoid an anticlimax, dealers and vehicle manufacturers need to collaborate and facilitate a seamless transition from the online to the offline (dealership) experience.
But whatever the future of the car looks like, it will be tough to overturn the incumbents in a business where clever technology is only part of the equation. Despite a reputation, once richly deserved, for sloth in adopting new technologies, most big carmakers are pouring resources both into battery power and other alternative forms of propulsion, and into automated driving. Ford and Nissan have both opened research labs in Silicon Valley. Tech firms may get all the attention, says Haroon Hassan of Mitsubishi UFJ, a bank, but carmakers are formidable innovators and understand their business well.
via Quartz, John McDuling