CHRIS HARRIS “MOST CAR COMPANIES ARE NOW TWO COMPANIES. THEY ARE SCHIZOPHRENIC”
Dealing with a petrol past and an electric future may be the undoing of car companies, reckons Chris
Car companies have always been a turbulent mix of opinions and projected messages that’s what makes them such fascinating organisations But I’ve never before seen them in the state of raw confusion they are now attempting to navigate Most car companies are now two companies with one side openly in conflict with the other They are schizophrenic You have no idea which personality you will witness from one day to the next
The two personalities are easily identified One is the old car company It trades in oily bits and its balance sheet is logical and it celebrates fun and is proud of its past The other is the new car company It trades in electricity its balance sheet makes no sense because it loses billions of dollars It doesn’t want to promote concepts of fun It trades in ‘mobility’ and it is ashamed of its past
Pity the poor management team that tries to control these two companies that are perceived as being one organisation Take BMW in the midst of a huge push to convince that electric cars mustn’t just be hideously ugly they will be the only way we will survive the apocalypse At the same time it is posting pictures of its latest M CS eviscerating Michelins And its Classic department is posting endless glorious images of its petrol burning past Which one of these is the real BMW? Do the ‘mobility’ lemmings from the electricity department sit opposite the people posting the pictures of the M CS and drill them with icy disapproving looks? Does the person from BMW Classic who seems to find the best vintage sideways footage on Instagram saunter in an hour after everyone else reeking of booze and fags? I’d like to hope so
Car companies are alongside clothing companies and the broader media world the ultimate social mirror The story of the car is the story of society for the past years and as nations have now begun the arduous process of going back through their actions and codes it’s only natural that carmakers are doing the same thing The problem seems to be that when they trawl the archives they find enormous quantities of really cool stuff that people like watching
The struggles for the electric car are so profound and to me insurmountable that I really can’t see how the new electric company side of each carmaker can be charged with striking out into the future All of them are trying to find a voice to create a new image that in some way incorporates their past without opening themselves to accusations of ruining the planet for a century
And this is perhaps why Tesla is so clean a proposition Unencumbered by any murky past it has a technological advantage and can write its own story as time progresses Volvo appears to have done the clever thing and diverted its future into the Polestar brand It looks as if the big existing brands waste so much time trying to balance notions of the past and the future that they allow smaller faster moving organisations to sneak in and steal market share Not a nice problem to have
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