Make my new car with a little old and a little new so I can cruise Wichita in style
Posted by Dave Mace at 6:49 pm
I’m going to miss my old-fashioned, 2002 digital console when it’s gone. But that’s OK. It could be another 10 years. As long as my Honda keeps running and the pace of automotive innovation remains fairly slow. Where’s my freakin’ flying car, Detroit? Heck, the phone company (sort of) came through with the picture phone. Come to think of it, all I want from my car is 40 mpg highway, zero to 60 in five seconds or less and a great stereo. There’s just nothing like watching that needle climb from left to right.
It’s easy to criticize a seeming lack or slowness of innovation—particularly of the much-maligned auto industry. But if you believe in market dynamics, things are happening just as they should. Sure, there may be a few people with an axe to grind who are holding things up, but trying to hold back the market from giving consumers what they want is ultimately as fruitless as trying to keep Eastern Europeans from tearing down the wall. It is inevitable.
Maybe that makes cars—for the time-being, at least—a high-involvement commodity purchase. In the case of most features, we take what the manufacturers give us, in Druckeresque fashion. Or perhaps they are giving us exactly what we want. If that’s the case, then could it be that consumers, themselves, are hindering innovation in automobile manufacturing?
After all, Toyota and Nissan make huge trucks, and Chevy has small electrics and hybrids. What gives? If Honda starts making full-sized trucks I might jump off the bandwagon.
In any case, it would seem the auto industry is in an undisrupted equilibrium that the consumer electronics industry has not seen for decades. Maybe that’s why we get what we get when it comes to cars.
So, Honda, if you’re listening over there in Japan, all I want is fuel economy. And acceleration. And a great stereo. Oh, and give me an iPhone interface, but let me keep my analog speedometer. 
