Is The Car Industry Really Giving Us What We Want?

The rules of supply and demand are absolute. Where there’s a demand, someone – or many people – will be willing to supply.

Cars are still in high demand after more than 100 years as an integral part of the mainstream transport network. Sales are strong in many countries, suggesting people are happy with what’s out there. But how true is that, exactly?

Can we really rely on the automotive industry to give us what we really need at any given moment in time? Cars take years to design, engineer and bring to market. The designs being sketched on today’s drawing boards won’t see production until the next decade. But whatever happens in the world; whatever Trump does and whatever goes on in China, most of these designs will still be built.

Manufacturers are thinking years ahead. They’re designing autonomous cars with collapsible steering wheels, swivelling seats and remote self-parking systems. They’re designing new looks, new engines and new in-car technologies. And when it comes to it, we’re going to be told that that’s what we want.

How do they know? They don’t have crystal balls and they don’t sit outside at night divining their plans from the stars. It seems far more likely that we simply accept what we’re given. There’s so much choice and so much variation in the most popular parts of the market that the chances are that something will tickle your fancy.

But this does raise the question of whether car makers can be trusted not to sell us up the river with designs that are needlessly expensive in order to maximise their own profits. I’m not talking about today’s more complex panel designs, which cost more to make. No, I mean stupid ideas like gear selector dials that rise up out of the centre console and render the car undriveable when they fail. With their own electric motor and electronic sub-systems, things like this add pointless expense.

Is this really our demand, and do we really want to pay for it? Would we miss having a separate climate control zone for the rear seats, or would we really struggle to turn our own headlights on when it goes dark? Sure, the technological progression is making it ‘easier’ for drivers, but just think how much cheaper cars would be if things were kept simpler.

But image is king in 2016. Manufacturers’ focus groups are full of people who don’t care what the car is so much as what they look like driving it. You could offer people a price-reduced model with none of the silly excesses that are so common in new cars now, but no one would buy it because they’d be afraid people would see them as cheap. People, and non-car people in particular, like to glory in the technology they surround themselves with. They tell themselves their life is better because of it, when in reality these things are just expensive gimmicks. As a species, you’d think we were smarter than this.

There’s also legislation to think about. Emissions laws have so far killed off the finest naturally-aspirated engines ever made. Turbocharging is great, but we’ve lost something magical. Hybrids are great, but they’re also cold and calculated rather than emotive. With sections of the German political elite calling for an outright ban on new internal combustion-engined car sales, even hybrids could, in our lifetimes, be looked back on as racy examples of archaic excess.

As far as the environment goes there’s only one way we have to go. Oil is limited; pollution is bad. Electric cars today have to be powered by dirty coal-fired power stations, more often than not, but at least we can see it’s a step in the ethically correct direction. If we ruin the atmosphere we all suffer, but car fans are going to lose out either way.

As members of the public there’s almost nothing we can do about the things that are being taken away from us by a combined effort from the legislators and the car makers. Our lot seems to be to simply take what is supplied to us. Whether we demand it or not.