> ...dragging 2 tons of car along with you just to go get groceries is a little bit like paying $5 for single day of cable TV even though all you watched that day was two minutes of the weather channel...<p>If only humanity would start to realize this, that would alone help to save us from the coming climate catastrophe.<p>By the way the article does a nice job at describing why this is so hard for hundreds of millions of people, especially without help from the government in the form of nudging and infrastructure development.
The “cloud car” that Waymo and Uber promise is really cool... until you have kids. I think it will be big business for singles but as a parent I can’t imagine not owning a car. The car has the car seats, books, toys, snacks, diapers, etc in it at all times. I can’t imagine Ubering around schlepping all that shit.
<i>If you’re a car OEM, I think there’s an incredible opportunity over the next decade to build a new bundle around recreational travel and leisure, where you can put together a really compelling bundle offering full of products from other companies that are complementary but not competitive: hotel and resort chains, cruise lines, kids programs, maybe even airlines.</i><p>Thomas Cook travel - 1841-2019. "All inclusive". They got so all inclusive they had their own hotels and airline at the end. But the trend is away from all-inclusive vacations.<p>This is an <i>old</i> idea.
There is probably room for specialization in the car industry:<p>- small, light, efficient, cheap 1 or 2 seater for commuting<p>- 5 or 6 seater with cargo for holidays: little automation and noisy but only used 1 month in a year<p>The cost for both may be still lower than a luxury "bundle" and more energy efficient overall.<p>But I think the main problem with the car industry, is that if they start making aerodynamically efficient cars, they will all look the same, and nobody will by them. And if they make efficient, low power and cheap cars nobody will buy the powerful and expensive ones.<p>So marketing dictates: make distinctive and inefficient cars, make cheap and low power models stunningly inefficient.
> Everyone ends up paying an approximately fair price for the one product that they were going to buy no matter what, and then gets a very good deal on everything else. [...] If you’ve ever bought a new car, you’ve probably faced down the endless lists of extra add-on features in cars (bigger rims, heated seats, LED lights, whatever) are always, always sold in these “packs” where 5 or 6 totally unrelated things are offered together in a bundle. Now you know why.<p>Those 'packs' always seemed like a rip-off even if you wanted all of the items. I can't imagine people think they're a fair price for just one of the items.<p>Then again, the manufacturer of my car only seems to offer individual items today, not package upgrades. They did have a "cold weather package" when I bought my car, which is obviously a set of related features.<p>> There’s a good reason why SUVs have become so popular: they’re the everything bundle.<p>One of the two components of the bundle, mentioned above, is a Miata for driving, and an SUV is not at all good at driving like a Miata.<p>> Unless you can replace all of the important jobs that a car does for you, all at once, then competing against the car means competing against free.<p>He's right about this. This is why I keep hearing the bus advocates say it's cheaper than owning a car, which is true but irrelevant. They're not going to win over most drivers until they make it cheaper than driving a car you already own.
All that and not one word about the price of fuel. Going with the all-in bundle only makes sense when the price of hauling around all those extras is cheap. If gas went to $8/gal you'd see people change in a real hurry. If people are buying SUVs it's because they're making a bet that fuel is inexpensive now and will continue to be for the life of the vehicle. They're taking a risk. Just ask someone who owned an F-250 SuperDuty what happened last time gas prices spiked. They got lucky that it didn't last to long.<p>People aren't stupid. They're balancing a lot of variables with a log of unknowns. What's the depreciation on my car going to be? What are fuel costs going to be? Can I afford the payments? How is this going to effect my insurance rates? Do I plan on moving a long distance in the time I'm going to own the vehicle and will I have to sell it early? Do you have kids? Do you plan on having kids?<p>Biking to work is great. Inexpensive, good for the environment, and you get plenty of exercise but it comes with lots of downsides. What do you do when it rains? Snows? Is 10deg F outside? 100deg F?<p>Commuting is nice but there are trade offs as well. What is my employer going to say when I tell them I can't make a meeting or work late because I carpool? What do I do if the person I'm carpooling with has an emergency? What if I have an emergency? If you have a kid in daycare it's not happening because they might call at any moment and tell you your kid has a fever or puked and you need to come and pick them up. Just the logistics of keeping track of who is driving is going to be a pain. "Sorry I'm late today but I thought I was driving but my carpool buddy had a doctors appointment that got rescheduled at the last minute and forgot to let me know"<p>Life is complicated and there are no easy answers.
I highly doubt it would be a vacation bundle. Younger people who will be car buyers in the future aren't traveling via tour companies, they are buying low cost tickets and airbnb/booking aparts. Their lifestyle won't change that much soon. Bundling heavily overprised comfortable hotels or cruises won't help with advertising much.<p>Personally I think that good potential may be in renting bundles, or more general transportation bundles - for example a package which costs as much a as a new car which provides for example leased car for X days or kilometers per year, in any city, possibly in multiple countries, plus maybe some airline miles, car rental things etc. Included with all car service, maybe fuel/charging, tow services, etc. Basically car-as-a-service, for people who need good personal (this is a key, as opposed to public options) transport often enough but not every work day. But all this is just a hypothesis.
There is a huge difference between the TV bundle and car as a bundle - the marginal cost of serving one customer for the TV bundle is near zero, for the car bundle it is not. When someone buys a TV bundle just for news it does not cost anything more to offer him also sports, but offering a SUV for the price of a cheap car to drive to work would cost the seller a lot.<p>The car as a bundle is maybe interesting thing to think about - but it is an order of magnitude less important than when thinking about bundling zero marginal cost goods.
There is a pretty big logical fallacy in this article. Bundling intellectual property goods makes sense because the marginal cost is virtually zero. Automobiles cost real money to build.<p>The notion that an SUV is the whole package seems weird, as the base idea of those models is off-road ability, which virtually nobody needs.<p>The idea that driving is free once you own the car doesn't make a lot of sense either. Wear and tear is expensive.