The race to keep driving relevant
Just a decade ago, the biggest problem Toyota Motor Corp. faced in its domestic market of Japan was kuruma banare, or what the company called “demotorization.” Thanks to a fastchanging digital world, the country’s youth had lost the passion to own and drive cars. Rather than spend their wages on automobiles, the Japanese chose to just take the subway and fiddle with their wireless gadgets.
In short, driving had become a chore — particularly in cities where parking was scarce and traffic was hell. Where their parents had used cars to experience freedom, the new generation viewed them as the very symbol of oppressive restraint.
This prompted Toyota to launch its “Fun To Drive” marketing campaign in 2011, with company president Akio Toyoda declaring: “If it is not fun, it is not a car.” And so the one car maker that had made a fortune manufacturing bland but incredibly reliable vehicles set out to introduce fun products. The exciting 86 arrived, and it was just the beginning. This was Toyota telling customers not just in Japan but around the world: “Look, our cars are now sexy, and you’ll want to sleep with them.” Sort of.
But then, it’s one thing to seduce a market that simply wasn’t taking notice, and quite another to keep clients engaged when they no longer have a reason to be. Let me explain.
Before, people were losing interest in cars because, well, the cars had become very boring by nature. That’s what happens when automakers shift the focus on safety and environment protection (never mind making the stick shift obsolete).
Today, people are losing interest in cars because, well, are cars still necessary?
Toyota and its fellow automotive firms must now deal with disruptive innovations that seriously threaten their business: self-driving cars, connected cars and shared mobility. All three are conspiring to eventually rid every single person on this planet of the need to, first, drive a car, and then, second, to own one. That tech brands like Apple, Google and Uber are now positioning themselves for a share of the transportation pie in the near future, is enough to make Toyota shareholders a little more fidgety than usual. Heck, even China’s Baidu is touting the ability to make autonomous vehicles a reality as early as next year.
If you think this tectonic shift in the motoring market will be confined to developed countries like Japan and the US in the foreseeable future, you need to pay attention to what’s happening in Metro Manila, where a number of motorists are starting to give up car ownership entirely and just take advantage of ride-sharing services. A former officemate, who incidentally now works for a tech company, sold his Nissan Almera precisely with this reasoning in mind. “No more stress from traffic,” he told me. “And no more need to search for parking space.”
Anyone who has driven through EDSA at 7 p.m. has surely entertained thoughts of a not-so-distant tomorrow where a car you didn’t purchase is always available on demand to take you anywhere you like, and that said car isn’t piloted by an annoying and accidentprone human being. I know I have. I love driving as much as the next guy, but not at 3 kph under a Daniel Padilla billboard.
Combine this massive inconvenience of dragging a sedan through the rush hour, with all the best unmanned systems the tech giants have to offer, and you’re staring at an epidemic of driving apathy far worse than kuruma banare.
McKinsey & Company, an American management consulting firm, predicts that the annual growth rate of global car sales will dip to just 2% by 2030, a significant drop from the current 3.6%. According to the group’s report, this “will be largely driven by macroeconomic factors and the rise of new mobility services such as car-sharing and e-hailing.”
And then who knows what will happen beyond 2030? Car sales, I imagine, will soon plateau and then decline.
Toyota is not watching all of this helplessly, to be clear. Recent news revealed that the car maker had approached Nvidia Corp., a California-based company specializing in artificial intelligence, to help it roll out autonomous vehicles by 2020.
In the meantime, the mandate is to keep driving not just fun but also relevant. Do not presume that Toyota’s costly one-make racing series, the Vios Cup, is being held just to prop up the image of the subcompact best-seller. Already staged in Thailand, the Philippines and soon Malaysia, the motor sport festival is designed to show customers that driving is still a totally enjoyable human activity — that cars are more than insipid tools to get the job done. It allows spectators to see otherwise ordinary cars diving into corners and grazing fenders with one another, as opposed to crawling miserably past double-parked SUVs in front of the University of Spoiled Brats.
As for me, I wish this whole disruption thing were as simple as this question: Who wants self-driving cars when you can get Aubrey Miles to do the driving?