Earlier this month I was a guest of the UK’s Department of International Trade on a low-carbon vehicle trade mission to California and Mexico.
With several days in LA to start the trip, the city of dreams inevitably set the tone. It’s hard not be smacked around the face by this extraordinary place. The real positivity, the relentless politeness, the universally terrible coffee, the ubiquitous fast food, the homelessness, the vast wealth spilling over the Hollywood hills. But most of all the traffic. The extraordinary levels of it, spread uniformly across the expanse of this vast urban sprawl.
This is a city with no centre. Arteries don’t run into and out of a metropolitan heart as they do in older cities. LA is a giant grid which people criss-cross 24/7: more than in probably any other western city the population works around the clock, servicing everything from the entertainment business to the fast food industry. Property prices and wealth inequality mean that people often live a very long way from where they work – even for relatively low-paid jobs they commute, say, 30 miles, and they drive it, which can take a couple of hours. Hardly anyone uses what public transport there is. The nearest anyone from the professional classes gets to public transport is Uber. It’s a default option which only adds to the traffic: effectively a single-occupant car, usually with a large internal combustion engine. Uber and Lyft are simply increasing the car dependency.
So in spite of California’s environmental commitments LA is very definitely not the cool low-carbon city of electric vehicle advocates it’s sometimes painted as. Yes, there are plenty of Tesla’s Model S around (although few Model Xs, and I saw just one Model 3) and a good sprinkling of Chevvy Bolts. But pure EVs and hybrids like Toyota’s Prius are vastly outnumbered by giant gasoline-driven SUVs, ancient V8s, V12-touting Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces, let alone the humdrum everyday transport of ordinary folk: if you want to spot Hyundais, this is the place to come. LA is a city in love with the motor car. Any car.
It’s simply not realistic to change this mindset. This isn’t Silicon Valley, where utopian business ideas are dreamt up in people’s garages and grow into multi-billion-dollar global disruptives. Currently LA is really the old model, a glittering outpost of Detroit. We visited the LA motor show and its eco off-shoot, Automobility LA, and they echoed echoed this: the latter was, at best, work in progress, the former much like any other motor show (but with more old-school gas-guzzling models). Where were the disruptors? Lucid? Faraday? Nio? Fisker?
The major car manufacturers don’t want the mindset changed – yet. They know that their existing business model is approaching the end of its life, but it’s fine while it still works and until legislation necessitates the change; mass market demand only ever comes into the equation late on. Meantime the carmakers don’t provide attractive low-carbon options. Why should they? EVs are expensive to engineer, mean disruption to manufacturing and retail processes, and offer reduced margins.
It’s in this context that those involved in the low-carbon trade mission can be a factor – smaller companies and start-ups, technologists and innovators, suppliers and integrators. While the major carmakers have a vested interest in slowing things down, these other businesses can be catalysts, forcing change from the bottom up.
Los Angeles can play a big part in this. It’s a bridge straddling the lets-change-the-world optimism of Silicon Valley, San Diego’s low-carbon commitment and the pragmatic ability of Baja Mexico to productionise low-carbon tech. And it’s got a huge potential customer base, vast wealth and international influence.
LA is also quite possibly the model for a major modern city struggling to eschew old ways and acquire new, more sustainable habits. Yes, it’s more extreme than New York, Paris or London, but most of the problems are the basically the same: too much road traffic, unattractive public transport, very little low-carbon choice. If LA can do it then so can others. We should all keep watching.
The furore over the looks of the BMW X7 concept car revealed at the Frankfurt motor show this month, which triggered criticism of the company’s entire presence at the show, was not, at its heart, about design or product.
The current trajectory can be traced back to the early 2000s when BMW commoditised itself by selling the 3-Series heavily into the world of discounted business fleets and aggressively targeting the less brand-conscious private customer with cheap leasing deals. The 3-Series became the new Ford Mondeo. Its appeal was a prestigious badge but the trigger was affordability. The badge began to stand for driveway bragging rights, not engineering, and the ubiquity made it, well, common. And meantime BMW was becoming more a bank that sells cars than a car company. This was a big cultural shift.
Porsche did the same with the Cayenne of course, but Porsche needed saving; BMW didn’t. Every third car made today by BMW is an SUV, and the production X7 will book-end the line-up with an X2 model to be launched in early 2018, both additions to the range. With the lust for SUV volumes came a dip in quality. And the compulsion to proliferate, to find niches nobody has asked for, led to cars like the dumpy and universally disliked 5-Series GT and, more recently, the X4 – a visibly confused creation which is neither fish nor fowl. Or perhaps it’s both.
This is why BMW shifted its emphasis away from ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’ to ‘Joy’ a few years ago. Joy was still the core theme in a presentation given this summer at the Automotive News Congress in by BMW’s brand boss Hildegaard Wortmann. But it means nothing. It’s feel-good lifestyle marketing-speak which could be applied equally to SEAT. It’s not a principle or a solution.
BMW doesn’t appear to be doing so. To see how to use existing brand values to reinvent a brand for the age of EVs, automation and sharing, it need only look at Volvo. If safety, practicality and family-friendliness can become cool, what can the can The Ultimate Driving Machine become?
But that, as the LYNK & CO website says, is “Almost beside the point.” The service is the product.
The likely takeover of GM’s European unit Opel by PSA isn’t all to do with economics. It’s also about changing attitudes to mobility and transportation.
Effectively Tesla wants to join the establishment but doing it with a bit of chutzpah; it’s not establishing a new paradigm. But that’s what new entrants should be doing and existing players need to move towards. The likes of Google and Apple have wisely stepped out of the shadows to think very carefully about what their place in the mobility landscape should be. In a decade or less the power may well be at the other end of the value chain from the traditional business model, with Uber-type autonomous taxi brands and ultra-short-term leasing.
Some of the other major OEMs are showing evidence that they’re beginning to think about how they can fit into a world of disruptive change – Volvo for example has established a new shared mobility unit and its parent Geely has recently launched the Lynk and Co brand, founded on the trend towards ad hoc usership.
Mark Carbery 