If you had to come up with a tabloid headline for your article, what would it be?
Farewell car dealerships. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Do you have something against car dealerships?
Doesn't everyone have something against car dealerships?
The alternative has never really existed before but in the future, it will be car subscriptions.
Cars are getting more expensive in part, just because consumers are expecting more of their
cars, right?
We want electric engines, we want SUVs and we want all the latest infotainment systems,
which means leases are getting fatter.
But we don’t want the monthly premium to actually have to go up, so we’re seeing
the rise of seven year loans and the problem with that is how do you plan your life around
that vehicle? If you’re 28 years old and you want a cool, sporty car.
Like this one?
Like this one.
That’s great when you’re 28 years old you can maybe pick up hot dates and what have
you, but what if you then get married and you have a kid? You need a totally different
car. Subscriptions would allow you to trade the
car maybe every four months, maybe every year. So it’s not even like you are subscribing
to a car, you’re subscribing to a fleet of cars.
I think a lot of us don’t buy used cars because we’re concerned that we might get
a lemon. What is interesting about car subscription is because you don’t own it, it’s up to
the company, subscription company to make sure it’s not a lemon.
There could be environmental benefits. When you combine it with 3D-printed cars using
recyclable materials, the rise of electric vehicles, ride-hailing, you begin to see the
building blocks of how we actually create a circular economy for the car industry and
that’s no small feat.
Who are the winners for the car subscription model?
Consumers.
And who are the losers?
Dealerships.
When I asked McKinsey just how big this is going to be, their projection is by 2025 between
six and 11 million cars just in America are going to be subscription only.
There are a lot of ‘ifs’. I don’t know that it’s going to roll out immediately.
Again, it is already out there but in the tens of thousands, but electric vehicles are
basically doubling each year. Autonomous vehicles: a lot of research into development and capital
costs are going into that. Ride-hailing is just becoming more and more ubiquitous. You
put those trends together; I don’t know why anyone owns a car in 2030.