I Want a Snap-Together Auto
Growing up, my family had a record player. You could carry it around, as it had a handle on the outside of the case and the arm could be clipped down. Everything was one piece. Then we got a new record-player. It was in a cabinet of something like mahogany. It weighted a ton, but it had better speakers and a better turn-table. It was great until our deaf cleaning-lady turned up the volume so high that she blew out the speakers. If you played it quietly, you never knew it was broken, something that was just fine with my father. When I got my first stereo things were different. I got the speakers from one manufacturer, the amplifier from another, and the turntable from yet another. When I put it all together, it had great fidelity (it was stereo, after all) and it was a lot harder to blow out the speakers (not to worry, we still managed to blow out one of them). It was a modular system in which the pieces added up to a better total unit that a system made all by one manufacturer. My first computer was the same way. I bought an IBM PC (couldn't go wrong, right?) added floppy disk drives, a printer, a memory card, and a graphics card and I was ready to go. That worked pretty well, except it sure cost a lot. My next five or six PCs were off the shelf - the manufacturer put it together and I bought it as I had to keep up with technology. The costs fell with each successive machine. Cars have never really been modular in quite a while. Yes, during the sixties, we added performance parts and stereos all the time, but as I have gotten older, all that just hasn't been important. Too, the manufacturers increased quality significantly, so I went along with whatever they were selling, basically.
Mann's article shook me up a bit because it reminded how much more I like my modular stereo and my modular computer, and, yes, hopefully my modular car. Today you can't really get a modular car, but that may change. Detroit, with the ultimate reorganization that is happening today, won't be able to spend the big dollars to create the cars of the future. Each system - the propulsion system, the breaking system, the batteries, the communication systems, etc. - will need to come from a different manufacturer. They envision just snapping things together, testing it for safety, and delivering it to me. Well, that doesn't go far enough for me. I want to buy the braking system myself, along with the engine, and suspension and windows etc. and have it put together to my specifications. I'll want simple, cheap, and economical. You might want sleek, fast, cool, with money as no object. But we both, I predict, will want to specify what goes into the car - ourselves, just like when we bought our first stereos or our first computers. That's my prediction. Now we get to wait and see how it turns out. Things are going to change, that's for sure. Get ready. Smaller, inventive manufacturers are going to shake things up, and we all should benefit. Some risk will be there as smaller firms are more likely to fail and not support their products, but that is part of the price we will pay for getting the cars that do what each of us wants. That's what I think, anyway. I'm hoping for the time when I can snap together the car I want, maintain and repair it easily, and then rebuild it or recycle it easily. We'll see.
Mann, Charles C. Detroit. The New New Economy. Wired. June 2009. 101.