The push for posh and a driverless future
STATISTICS are guaranteed to be 100 per cent correct nearly all of the time. In the case of new vehicle sales in Australia, the sales data for 2015 doesn’t lie, and gives an insight into the psyche of the buying public. One hundred and sixty seven new Ferraris were purchased last year, up 47.8 per cent from 113 in 2014. Bentley sold 158 vehicles, up 17 per cent. Lamborghini sold 84, up 211 per cent. These are high-end aspirational vehicles, often built to order. Sixty per cent of those Ferrari sales were to first time Ferrari buyers, and the waiting list for the recently introduced 488 model is now past two years. Porsche sold 4,090 vehicles, up 45 per cent from 2014. Renowned for its sports cars, the vast majority of Porsche sales now are for SUVS (all-wheel drive wagons) which Australians have embraced with open cheque books. My friend the Porsche salesman tells me he had a “phenomenal” year, with huge demand and limited stock meaning it was a case of “this is the price of the car; please leave your deposit and we will let you know when your car arrives”. On the whole, sales of luxury brands were up and locally made cars were down. Remember the days when the Ford Falcon being was the top selling car in Australia? More than 70,000 per year were sold at its peak, but last year a mere 5938 were sold. It didn’t help that Ford is now less than a year away from ceasing manufacture in Australia, but for Ford to be relegated to sixth position overall is a telling sign of the shift in buyers’ tastes. Need further proof? Mercedes Benz sold more passenger cars than Ford. Last year, 22,817 Australians purchased a Mercedes car. Combined with their commercial vehicles, Mercedes Benz came close to selling more vehicles than Honda. Buyer loyalty ebbed away from Holden too. Ford and Holden were the only brands in the Top 10 whose sales figures went down last year. The once mighty Holden dropped to third place, having been outsold by Mazda and less than 1000 cars ahead of Hyundai. This is the first time a full importer has ever made the Top 2, with several in demand SUV models. Perennial leader Toyota was again Number One, selling 206,236 vehicles out of a total market of 1,155,408. That’s just over 56 per cent of the market, helped in no small way by the sale of over 35,000 Hilux utes. So what can we learn from these numbers? The economy must be doing okay, and the doom and gloom mongers are wrong. Low interest rates and the strong property market – teamed with Australian’s love of a posh brand to impress the neighbours – meant luxury car and high-end brands prospered. Buyer loyalty towards Australian made cars continues to fade, as we fall out of love with large cars and move towards lifestyle SUV type cars and dual cab utilities. And don’t expect to get a discount on your new Porsche. Several things scare me about what lies ahead in the future.
High on the list is the minute possibility of the new Australian Ambassador to the USA Joe Hockey meeting President Trump at the White House. What a meeting of minds. Much more tangible is the headlong rush by car companies to develop autonomous driverless cars. These are cars that will drive themselves; leaving the internet connected occupants to surf the net, send emails, stream movies and instagram their meals. Some of the basic technology already exists, with features such as lane warning departure, forward collision warning and blind spot detection available on several brands of car. The push is on to make cars truly selfdriving. Systems under development use multiple cameras, lasers and ultrasonic sensors to gather data about the environment around the vehicle and control the vehicles’ steering, acceleration and braking. Companies including Ford, Kia and Nissan have all promised autonomous cars will be on the road within the next decade. Tech Giants Apple and Google have seen the potential and are both working on their own driverless cars. While this sounds great in theory, there are many issues. The response of the car is only as good as the data read by the sensors. The autonomous car would rely on scanning the line markings on the road to determine where the edge of the road is. In our part of the world, the state of the roads makes this hard for a human driver, let alone a computer. Can an autonomous car tell if a kangaroo has jumped in front of the car, and how quickly can the car take safe evasive action? How would the car cope with roundabouts or a school zone? Who is at fault if the autonomous car causes an accident? The owner? Or the manufacturer? The carmakers say the systems will be safe and foolproof. I’m not so sure. If a computer ensconced safely in a temperature controlled office can’t be trusted not to breakdown, how trusting can I be of the reliability of high tech gadgetry in the vibrating, hot, cold environment of a motor vehicle?
Not at all.
Low interest rates and the strong property market – teamed with Australian’s love of a posh brand to impress the neighbours – meant luxury car and high-end brands prospered.