FUTURE PROOF
Now more than ever, we appreciate experience over product, says Paul
There’s a very high chance you haven’t, like I haven’t, had your vaccine yet. As I write we’re locked down harder than ever, case numbers spiralling higher. We’re a year on from when it felled its first big car-world casualty, the 2020 Geneva Motor Show. All things considered, any talk of a post-corona world rests firmly in the realm of the hypothetical.
Much of that talk pivots around phrases like ‘get back to normal’. Get back? Ah yes, get back to galloping materialism, environmental carnage and brutal political discord.
Allow yourself to peer forward to the summer of 2021, if that’s when we’re to be relieved of the yokes imposed by this evil little spiked sphere. Keeping things to our shared orbit of cars, what’s your most fervent hope? We might all have idled away too much of 2020 sitting on configurator apps, but that doesn’t mean we just want another horsepower, a bigger touchscreen. The priority isn’t a new manufactured object.
It’s fresh experiences and renewed exposure to people. Forget the ‘high-end’: preferable surely over F1 alone on your sofa is club race meeting with your mates, aromas of hot engines and dodgy burgers wafting by. My heart aches simply to pack the car – any car – with people I love and go
“PEOPLE WILL WANT TO SPEND WHAT MONEY THEY HAVE ON EXPERIENCES, NOT PRODUCTS”
somewhere to see other people I love to do stuff that makes us happy and just hang out together.
This crapfest of a twelvemonth has taught us it’s the human things that matter. But it’s not that simple, and easy utopianism hides some uncomfortable realities. If people buy less stuff, there will be fewer jobs in factories making that stuff, and fewer jobs in the dealerships and shops that sell it. History shows us any economic discontinuity – the oil shocks, recessions, the financial crash of 2009 – tends to widen the gap between the rich and the not. But even many of the moderately rich will find money’s tight if they can’t maintain earnings. They’re committed to big mortgages, second homes, school fees. We call it debt, they call it leverage.
Of course in the short-term, new car sales will bounce back strongly as people spend the money they were prevented from spending during the lockdowns, buoyed up by cheap finance. After that, I think car companies, like other manufacturers, will find life hard. People will have less money and will want to spend what they have on experiences, not on products.
Carmakers should find a way to support their staff even while building and selling fewer cars. My guess is it’ll shake down as shorter working weeks. Initially lots of the workers, their budgets previously sustained by overtime, would baulk at the prospect of what’s called stagnant economic growth.
But eventually, people would find ways of adjusting their spending and able to enjoy the new free time, doing stuff that costs little but which, as we think about it from lockdown, rewards muchly. Like a drive to meet mates for a picnic.