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Regular readers may recall a post I made about end of life cars and how best to deal with them. I'm finding it hard to be sympathetic to the "plight" of car manufacturers at this stage with falling sales, because I believe that the need as opposed to the want for new cars is very low indeed; you can see many decade old cars that are in perfectly good cosmetic, operational and even (in my opinion) safe condition.
Encouraging users to maintain their cars correctly and see the embodied energy and value in that existing car is important - as a complex machine, it's ludicrous that it ceases to be worth repairing £20/worth of rubber suspension components or a £200 catalytic convertor when the car is 12 or so years old in many cases. Airbags are supposed to be replaced after 10 years too; anyone done that?
There are now reports that the UK government is looking (again) at paying for cars to be scrapped to stimulate new car sales. Will this save jobs? Only if the cars bought are manufactured here, which means Jaguar or Land Rover (because £900 for a banger is really going to stimulate sales of a premium brand), MINI (that one I can see if they released a stripped out "MINI Basic"; as far as I know MINI's plant hasn't had a stoppage yet though), Honda (maybe has legs, that one, old dears might trade in their aging Corollas and Kias), Toyota (only specific models; do they make the Yaris here? It used to be the Carina-E in Burnaston so it's probably the mogadon-on-wheels Avensis), Ford and Vauxhall.
Unfortunately, this won't make much of a difference. The new car sales in the UK have not been driven by private buyers, but by contract hire and leasing firms; funded by companies providing fleets or individual cars to their workforce, or via corporate personal contract hire packages such as those offered by local authorities.
They don't have an old car to trade in. They already enjoy massive discounts. In fact, all they do is encourage the environmentally unfriendly approach of changing the car every 1-3 years, reducing the value of the car due to oversupply and bringing a social expectation that a 3 year old car is a: cheap, and b: not as respectable.
So the upshot of "scrappage" as it's been termed is a number of older - possibly servicable (the Germans give £2,200 for a 9 year old car! You find me a run of the mill 9 year old car worth that in the UK in fully working order!) cars will be taken off the road well before their useful life is done, and a trickle of sales - few of which will go to support UK manufacturing - may occur. Certainly not enough to kickstart the car industry into the ludicrous level of sales it has been enjoying this past two decades.
New cars are too cheap. The way to save the car industry is for the prices to increase, drastically, to genuinely reflect the cost of materials, development and labour - and then for the associated support network to become a valuable, income generating support network for cars with a much longer projected lifespan. Make electronics upgradeable, Even powertrains. Make a car last 50 years - people don't need to use the same car for 50 years, but make it feasible for people to use and run that car for 50 years.
50 years ago automotive technology was at a stage where you could suggest that and it would be laughable. Now? Other than the safety arms race, show me one car which offers more practical benefits to the user than say, the 1970s equivalent? Take a VW Passat, for example. Both front wheel drive, both typically capable of 0-60 in 9 seconds and 120mph, both seat 5 and carry a lot of luggage. Technology like air conditioning, satellite navigation, better headlights can always be retrofitted. I know people with HID lighting in their 1966 Citroën DSs.
Socially I doubt many people could use the same car for 50 years. There's no reason why that car should not be useful to different people for that 50 year period.
Encouraging users to maintain their cars correctly and see the embodied energy and value in that existing car is important - as a complex machine, it's ludicrous that it ceases to be worth repairing £20/worth of rubber suspension components or a £200 catalytic convertor when the car is 12 or so years old in many cases. Airbags are supposed to be replaced after 10 years too; anyone done that?
There are now reports that the UK government is looking (again) at paying for cars to be scrapped to stimulate new car sales. Will this save jobs? Only if the cars bought are manufactured here, which means Jaguar or Land Rover (because £900 for a banger is really going to stimulate sales of a premium brand), MINI (that one I can see if they released a stripped out "MINI Basic"; as far as I know MINI's plant hasn't had a stoppage yet though), Honda (maybe has legs, that one, old dears might trade in their aging Corollas and Kias), Toyota (only specific models; do they make the Yaris here? It used to be the Carina-E in Burnaston so it's probably the mogadon-on-wheels Avensis), Ford and Vauxhall.
Unfortunately, this won't make much of a difference. The new car sales in the UK have not been driven by private buyers, but by contract hire and leasing firms; funded by companies providing fleets or individual cars to their workforce, or via corporate personal contract hire packages such as those offered by local authorities.
They don't have an old car to trade in. They already enjoy massive discounts. In fact, all they do is encourage the environmentally unfriendly approach of changing the car every 1-3 years, reducing the value of the car due to oversupply and bringing a social expectation that a 3 year old car is a: cheap, and b: not as respectable.
So the upshot of "scrappage" as it's been termed is a number of older - possibly servicable (the Germans give £2,200 for a 9 year old car! You find me a run of the mill 9 year old car worth that in the UK in fully working order!) cars will be taken off the road well before their useful life is done, and a trickle of sales - few of which will go to support UK manufacturing - may occur. Certainly not enough to kickstart the car industry into the ludicrous level of sales it has been enjoying this past two decades.
New cars are too cheap. The way to save the car industry is for the prices to increase, drastically, to genuinely reflect the cost of materials, development and labour - and then for the associated support network to become a valuable, income generating support network for cars with a much longer projected lifespan. Make electronics upgradeable, Even powertrains. Make a car last 50 years - people don't need to use the same car for 50 years, but make it feasible for people to use and run that car for 50 years.
50 years ago automotive technology was at a stage where you could suggest that and it would be laughable. Now? Other than the safety arms race, show me one car which offers more practical benefits to the user than say, the 1970s equivalent? Take a VW Passat, for example. Both front wheel drive, both typically capable of 0-60 in 9 seconds and 120mph, both seat 5 and carry a lot of luggage. Technology like air conditioning, satellite navigation, better headlights can always be retrofitted. I know people with HID lighting in their 1966 Citroën DSs.
Socially I doubt many people could use the same car for 50 years. There's no reason why that car should not be useful to different people for that 50 year period.
