Hey Detroit: Wake Up and Innovate
For the first time in 30 years, the automotive market is wide open for innovation and market share gains. So wake up Detroit, and give us a 500,000 mile car that can be easily serviced, and which comes with a warranty linked to a service contract. Once upon a time the most innovative car in the country was the 1967 GTO. Designed by famed cocaine dealer John DeLorean, the GTO was a quantum leap in driving fun delivered by putting a huge engine on a relatively light chassis. I was driving one of these beauties in the 70’s, when along came an “Oil Crisis” and a stock market crash. The fat gasoline prices and skinny paychecks of the 70’s opened the US car market to strange little cars from Japan that were far from perfect, but cost an order of magnitude less to own than their Big 3 competition – they cost less to buy, less fill the tank and less to maintain. They even had slower deprecation rates because their value proposition was durable. Toyota, Honda and Nissan didn’t deliver a quantum leap in technology, but they did deliver a quantum leap in value proposition.
