Does The Automobile Have A Future?

Of course it does. So does the snowmobile. So does the dune buggy. The point is that the automobile's future cannot be allowed to be the same as its past. We are all familiar with the elements of that past which can roughly be divided into two classical periods: (1) the first years started in the age of Fordism and the assemblyline concept of manufacture, and (2) the age of Sloanism, when only 4 manufacturers remained in an industry dominated by GM's concept of large cars in which there was a model change every year. The latter point is especially critical, since it meant in effect that depreciation of the purchased product became by far the highest expense item, in later years followed by insurance.

One result of going from a Model-T or Model-A system, in which the product scacely changed internally or visibly over a decade or so, to a system in which economically if not technically the product every year became a new butterfly making last year's model obsolete, was that depreciation became very high. The standard North American cars have been such notorious gasoline hogs because the owner who could afford the monstrous rate of depreciation could also afford to drive fuel-wasting cars.

The Volkswagen Beetle (which was, in effect, a return to the Model-T concept) owed its popularity, especially among the young, precisely to the fact that it did not follow the dictation of Sloanism; it did not come out with a new model every year, and its depreciation was therefore minimal. North American compacts and subcompacts that sought desperately to take Volkswagen's business away were for the most part failures, not because of inadequate design, but because they could not remove themselves from the absurd Sloanistic annual model-change doctrine.

In order to break this vicious cycle we must develop a new philosophy of life