Car as a service
image by Vjornaxx
This weekend two different articles got my attention, one was in the local Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten and the other was from Umair Haque. Both relating to Detroit and how or if it can be saved/reborn.
In the article Fredrik Arp, the CEO of Volvo Cars says that they loose money on every “small” car (S50/V50) they sell in the US and they don’t even seem to panic. Just stating the obvious.
So why are they not rethinking their business, as in process’, product and market and customer interaction?
The car market seems to be in the same state that newspapers where in but managed to quite rapidly adapt to. However no one has lost quite as much money on this inability as Detroit.
In the comments of Umair’s post the concept of the “Car as a service” is being discussed. Two different directions are being outlined there.
a) Car manufacturers can focus on building a Zipcar-ish program, where they would supply a pool of cars available on a nation/global basis. Where revenue would come from a subscription based price model. Which would provide opportunity to increase the economies of scale regarding repairs/maintenance.
However this model is interesting only from a manufacturer perspective, as a customer there is little value of of signing up with one single car brand, why not just go with Zipcar or anything alike straight away? Not sure I want to drive a Volvo everyday if I can chose from a range of different cars.
b) Building the platform, not every part. Think of a car manufacturer as Amazon web services, where you create an open platform where amateurs/enthusiasts/buyers can build different parts of the car adding/removing value and creating a source of income for the community around the car.
In general, every car manufacturer has a huge following of enthusiast who modify and rebuild their cars to reflect personality, interest, enthusiasm and so on. This would give a possibility to leverage that enthusiasm earlier in the manufacturing process, i.e. not doing it like Volvo just has done with it’s campaign about “Designing your own C30″.
Would love to see a company like Volvo or SAAB, small and with an interesting brand that their parent companies could use as a test lab., do something like this. Which could possibly create real change, accelerate the open source thinking and even supporting a project like the OScar project. Or the industry can continue to basically produce one car and just give each one a different look with little or no value added to each model. Every car is yet another Subaru underneath anyway.
Bloggar.se: Volvo, bilar, open source, alternativ, tillverkning, saab
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