The car you just bought is the last car you will ever own

How long until it doesn’t make any sense to own a car? What if you considered a car an accessory for your phone, rather the considering a phone something you plug into your car? With decent smart phone integration (via CarPlay from Apple, and Android Auto) and for-profit car clubs (from ZipCar, FlexCar through Daimler’s Car2Go and BMW’s DriveNow to Hertz on Demand and Avis On Location by Avis) allowing you to only pay for the hours you use, that time might not be too far away.

Cars are status symbols. They’re expensive, typically the single most expensive item that most folk will buy other after a house. Since the around the 1930s your car has also been something of a fashion statement.

The car we buy is an extension of our personality. Agreeable individuals seem to prefer brands like Toyota or Nissan while Peugeot owners are extroverts and Volvo is associated with safety.[ref]Press release (2013), What Your Car Says About Your Personality, Veryday.[/ref] Black is the colour of luxury and status, while the owner of a silver or grey car driver doesn’t want to stand out; owner of blue cars want stability, truthfulness and serenity; a brown-car buyer wants value and a long life in their purchase, and doesn’t care about trends or fads; while yellow car owners exude joy and a positive attitude.[ref]Lora Shinn (2014), What Your Car Color Says About You, Fox Business.[/ref]

If a car is a status and fashion symbol then why don’t we change our cars when we change our moods? The zippy little commuter (or perhaps the impressive black executive conveyance) for the commute to the office, something fun and red for the weekend, or reliable blue people-mover for ferrying the kids to weekend sport.

The main problem for many folk is that we can only afford to own one (or perhaps two). Having a car for every occasion is just not financially viable. For-profit car clubs are changing that though. At the moment you can pay by the hour for something reliable but boring to get you from point A to point B and back again. What’s to stop the same services from offering something more exiting, or something with a little more room?

Then there’s the problem of carrying your preferences – the selection of radio stations, GPS settings, seat hight and so on that we’re dialled in – from car-to-car. If, however, we think of cars as smartphone (or even smartwatch) accessories, rather than the other way around, then it’s not hard to imagine hopping into the car club car you’ve just picked up and dropping your phone into the dock, only to find the seat hight adjusted, radio stations tuned and a route to your mother’s house out in the suburbs plotted by the time you mange to get the car started.

At this point the only thing tying you to owning a car is the golf clubs that you store in the boot (trunk), and the strange iconic role that buying your first car has in your formative years.

While the baby boomers have a strong attachment to owning a car, this is not true for Gen Y, who are ambivalent about car ownership. Studies have shown that fewer young adults have driver’s licenses, that they hate the traditional car-buying process, and that they prefer urban living and socialising online and consequentially have less need for cars.

Why invest a large chunk of your personal wealth in a single asset that is worth nothing when you finally sell it, when you can access cars on on-demand, picking the car that fits your mood and needs at that particular time, and have the car magically become “yours” when you drop your smartphone into the dock?

This creates an interesting dilemma for the car manufacturers. On one side that have younger cohorts coming through who don’t automatically assume that they need to own a car, and who are consequentially harder to market to. On another side they have the emergence of fractional car ownership: what’s happened to private jets[ref]NetJets has provided a fractional ownership service for private jets since 1986.[/ref] and handbags[ref]You can fractionally own, or rent, depending on your point of view, a designer handbag from services such as Bag Borrow or Steal.[/ref] is now happening to automobiles. And finally, on the last side, they have new approaches to manufacturing such as iStream[ref]iStream is a new approach to car manufacturing that reducing the cost of tooling by around 80%, enabling new car models to be profitable in much shorter production runs.[/ref] that slash the investment required to design and manufacture a car, potentially making all your expensive factories irrelevant overnight.

It’s not hard to imaging a time in the near future where you can have the car you want, when you want, without owning it. While it’s not an option at the moment, it doesn’t look like it’s to far in the future. The car you just bought could well be the last car you ever own.

Image source: Alden Jewell