Friday, January 8, 2010

Apple Cars...

My friend KstreetKate (http://www.kstreetkate.net/) twittered this morning about this entry on the Huffington Post. What if Apple Designed Cars? I didn't read Bono's Op-Ed in the Times about this but this is an old idea. In many forms it has been floating around the deisgn and progressive business community for years. It probably takes someone like Bono to give the idea the traction it needs but I can tell you we've always thought this was such an obvious fix that it had to just be more retardedness (is that a word?) by the US car industry that kept it from getting done. Say all you want about safety, gas mileage and all the other reasons that people will TELL you that they bought a car. As when we used to do customer value research, there are always two stories; the one that consumers tell you because they think its what they should be saying, and the real story. US cars are simply ugly, not sexy, not interesting; that's why no one buys them. Why wouldn't Detroit just outsource the design work to Ideo or Imagination? It's so obvious that we all just figured they'd thought of it and then convinced themselves it wouldn't work because they had all the talent they needed in-house...(NOT). Anyway, I hope someone with half a brain in Detroit....might be asking a lot...read this and what Bono had to say and does something about it. Jobs are created by smart creative people, not by people who think they know everything and can't possibly learn from someone outside of their organization.

2 comments:

  1. I think the voice of consumers is being heard in MoTown, but there are enough people left who care, or that can do anything about it. I get the sense automobile design is actually divided into various parts. The frame/ chassis, the skin, the electronics and I am sure others. I equate this process to architects who hire envelope or facade specialists to "skin" their projects and interior designers to space plan. It has become fractured and looks it. What about that Dyson chap with his vacuum cleaners, he has some novel ideas, that actually suck.

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  2. "US cars are simply ugly" is an interesting point but it can't just be down to the car makers because most of them (Ford, GM etc) also sell very differently designed cars in Europe. This has always struck me when I visit the US. As with Apple, good design costs more and I suspect that the US public would generally rather not pay the extra for good design unless there is something specifically luxurious they want to buy. This is true across the board in my view (good lord I'm going to get into trouble here!). It's an interesting psychological difference reflected in the advertising industry where most US commercials are created to sell the product whereas a very high number of European commercials have a strong artistic element and you're often left asking "what were they selling"!

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