The car represent the the largest and most universal object of desire in our society today. Even after a 100 years they’re still on top, well beyond PC’s, mobile phones, fashion handbags and watches. This puts them at the top of the list for potential in platform design.
While the car industry has been sharing chassis and other parts between car models since the inception of the assembly line, it has never expanded this flexibility to customers. Yes, you can get the your choice of colors, rims and stereo, but these are mundane and commonplace. The automobile industry similar to other industries fear the idea of loosing control of their brand image embodied in their products.
This said, car models have been on the rise for the past 10 plus years and they’ve really started to multiply exponentially in the past four. This is not because management wants more to sell. It’s because of ever increasing desire by customers to get exactly what they want. Whether that is in functionality or in style. Unfortunately this flexibility commonly manifests itself at options packages.
We strongly believe that an automobile design from inception as a platform design could prove very popular among many consumers. Just imagine, a car that you can really choose the majority of components that define the look, feel and function.
Someday we here at PD would like to sponsor a platform design car competition. But for now we’ll have to wait and watch the car company inch ever so slowly toward the goal.
I good example of the car industry poking around to find out if people are really willing to buy a platform designed car is the Cooper Mini roof designer and roof studio. You can see our thoughts on it here.
Unfortunately many consumers are simple not interested to getting exactly what they want. It hard to believe and fly contrary to basic free market principles (if you leave out the influence of advertising). More choice should be a good thing. But as you can see by this quote form a Chicago Sun Times article this is not the case.
“Some 73 percent of vehicle shoppers polled by the Autobytel.com auto Web site say there are too many new vehicle choices, and 69 percent say it’s more confusing to buy a car today than it was five years ago.”
The irony of it all is that the article goes on to state their eagerness for the World of Wheels custom car show!
“I look forward each year to the World of Wheels custom car show at McCormick Place.”
*Images above are from Automoblox a modular car toy made of wood.
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