Who wants to own a car or anything else when you can pay for things offered as a service that you pay for over and over again? From Eric Rivers at ericriversautos.com:
The car companies plan to stop selling cars in favor of selling “transportation” – as a “service” – instead.
The main reason for this reorientation of their business model is simple: People increasingly cannot afford to buy cars – the average transaction price is now about $35,000 which is a sum roughly equivalent to half the average American family’s annual income and thus, not sustainable as a purely financial matter.
Meanwhile, cars – themselves – are becoming soul-less appliances very much like cell phones in terms of their interchangeable homogeneity and their disposability.
People are for that reason losing interest in them.
But cars are very much unlike cell phones in one critical way: their cost. It’s one thing to throw away a smartphone after a year or two; another to do the same with a $35k car after four or five. This problem is going to get much worse, very soon – for two more reasons.
