Re*Move

Post consumerism? A crisis in design, a crisis of ethics: a time for change

I just got married. Hence have been away for a while, and why the lack of posts. It's not unknown for such activities to cause people to reassess their priorities, and begin to question stuff they previously took for granted. So, this could just be me. Yet I sense something is in the air. Something feels different...

Take the election in the uk right now. The media-spun forgone conclusion we began the campaign with has been thrown open by a number of things, including a TV debate which shook-up the status quo. Every day, social media channels are exposing the bias and vested interests of traditional publications and big business. The entire event feel not only more open, but exciting, and 'different this time'. As Gordon Brown discovered yesterday, you are never 'off record' anymore. And in all of this, among the optimists such as your author, there's a sense that we - the people - can make a difference. Our say somehow feels like it 'matters more' this time.

Then take the auto show in Beijing last week. The western auto companies unveiled products that whispered of a sense of relief. The crisis is over, and now China's growing auto market will allow them to simply continue as they were, thanks very much. Ford, at least, showed a city car. Yet I haven't found many people who are impressed with Mercedes' vulgar - and dubiously dubbed - 'shooting brake concept'. Or anyone who actually needs, or cares about the BMW Gran Coupe concept. And while many were still busy laughing at Chinese 'copies' of western models, those who stood back saw a set of Chinese car designs that had a level of genuine credibility that was unthinkable just two years ago. Some even noticed the Chinese Government initiatives, and the impacts they are having on development of Chinese electric cars, which could have some interesting consequences for the old guard. Better Place gained a foothold in the world's largest country - despite being increasingly poo-pooed by some in the developed world, but Chinese firms are developing similar charging infrastructure plans of their own...

There's a sense that the more switched on people are looking, scrutinising, and questioning the status quo more than ever before. It's apparent in design and design criticism as much as anywhere else. Ultimately, the very role of the designer is being questioned. While this may be somewhat frightening, it at least means we may be moving to the next stage of the debate, beyond dubious tick-box, shiny apple-green sustainability. Rather than become all preachy, the main point of this piece therefore, is to draw your attention to a series of important articles and events reflective of this new, deeper line of questioning. If you're a designer, or design student, I'd argue they're required reading...

The underlying contention they all make, is that many designers are - far from making things in the world better - complicit in simply encouraging people to consume at an ever growing rate - messing up peoples' heads, and screwing the planet in the process. So what role for the designer?

Core 77's Allan Chochinov perhaps framed this most eloquently some time ago, in his 1000 word manifesto for sustainability in design. Now a couple of years old, it nonetheless still resonates and provides a useful starting point. More recently, Munich professor Peter Naumann's "Restarting car design" looks set to become a seminal piece, and is one all students of transport design need to read. Judging by the shock-waves it has generated, and the response to it from those I've spoken to in the auto, design and education sectors, he has hit the nail on the head. Because increasingly, it isn't just industry that's in the firing line, but design education institutions that are being questioned. For its part, the Royal College of Art is currently hosting the "Vehicle Design Sessions". There have been two so far, and both have touched on the areas I'm discussing. As Drew Smith's write-up chronicles, the panelists at the first - sustainability focused - debate, were unanimous in their view that vehicle design students should now look outside of the established industry if they were truly intent on using their design skills to have real impact in the world. Perhaps not what you'd expect from an event held at one of the world's leading vehicle design courses.

For those students of design interested in more than just the design of the next sports car, all of this raises a dilemma. How do you balance the necessity to find employment and money, without simply tramping up a well-trodden path, or falling into big-industry - pandering to whims and being emasculated from affecting meaningful change?

I doubt many will find that quandary any simpler after reading Carl Acampado's piece, but it's a necessary read nonetheless. Entitled  "The product designer's dilemma", it is bound to strike a chord with many of its readers. Acampado touches on the conflicts that the average designer - and indeed typical consumer - today faces in balancing personal desires, ambition and personal success, with the best way not to fuck up the planet. It's an impassioned piece, and just like your author here, Acampado has no real silver bullet solution to many of these problems. Yet his "dog for life/do it with love" message resonates loudly, and without wanting to sound all soppy, could be an interesting mantra to apply both as a consumer and in whatever area of design you practice. Please read the piece to see for yourself what I mean, if you haven't already. It echoes the voice of many of those I have mentioned above, and contrasts starkly with the PR-spun froth that consumers are (hopefully) growing increasingly sick off, yet which nonethelesss still dominates media 'opinion' that we are bombarded with every day. Stuff that I might add, is now the domain of much online green media, not just the likes of auto.

A final point. "Drive less. Save more" proclaims the title of the most recent email to land in my inbox, which is from the Energy Saving Trust - a UK Government sustainability body. In terms of missing the point completely, yet perfectly representing a very particular 'old way' of thinking that I'm taking issue with, I can't help thinking that it sums things up rather neatly. New approaches are needed. Thoughts on a postcard please... or alternately in the comments box below.

Image credit: "Consumption reflected" - Zohar Manor-Abel on flickr

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 29th April 2009. Full disclosure: Joseph Simpson is a visiting lecturer in Vehicle Design at The Royal College of Art. The thoughts expressed here are his own, and in no way necessarily reflect the views of the Vehicle Design Department or the wider College.

The pitfalls of sustainability

 
An image from The Paper City exhibition and Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Miniumum...or Maximum Cities event at the University of Cambridge, which was organised with Blueprint magazine and the Paper Cities exhibition, which moved up to the famous university town having been at the Royal Academy for the past few months.

Tim Abrahams has produced an excellent write-up of the event over on the Blueprint site, which I’d urge you to check out if you’re interested, because I think he raises a series of important points about where we find ourselves in relation to the sustainability debate.

For some time now, Re*Move has proposed an agenda where sustainability was the context rather than an end in itself, and like Tim, alarm bells rang in Cambridge, because we were left with a feeling that the only reason anyone is doing anything today is in an attempt to be “more sustainable”. When it comes to movement and transportation, this approach of sustainability first is clearly causing problems, because it seems to be preventing us from envisioning and demanding the future that we actually want to have, and instead pushing us towards something influenced primarily by guilt over past excess.

For example, a lot of transport debate in the UK today centres around whether or not we should be building a high speed rail line to the north of England. Anyone who suggests this is a daft idea is right now likely to labeled both unprogressive and anti-sustainability . Yet anyone who dares suggest a third runway at Heathrow is a good idea, is obviously hell bent on seeing the planet rapidly burn.

Yet the pitfalls of high-speed 2 are multifold. We can already get from Manchester to London in two hours, so should we really prioritise spending billions on reducing this by half? And while it’s automatically assumed that getting the train is better from a carbon perspective, throw real-world load factors into the bargin, and the reality is that a modern, full Airbus is comparative. Meanwhile, the car (which has apparently lost its number one spot to the airplane, in the planet mauling stakes) has improved so much in the past five years that if you’re driving two-up in a Golf diesel, you’ll definitely produce less carbon than going on the train. For me, the biggest issue with High Speed 2 is that an idea which is fundamentally two-hundred years old seems to be stopping us from pushing the boundaries of imagination about what we might do instead, that would be palpably better.

So some of my talk at Cambridge bemoaned this sense that we’d got stuck with a handful of transport formats, and that – with cars and trains at least, they were monocultural. We’ve sized everything to fit them, and one of the reasons we aren’t all riding round on things like Segways in cities, is that cities are fundamentally designed, and sized, for people to use cars. This might sound like I’m suggesting we simply have to keep using cars – as they are - to get around cities. I’m not, but what I’m pointing out is the need for a systems level approach. Will you enjoy trundling up the A40 in a Renault Twizy? Or would you be altogether more tempted by the idea of La Regie’s concept scooter/car cross if you could zip up and down one of Chris Hardwicke’s Velo-City cycle tubes on your way to the office?

Sustainability is the context we now work in. And we’ve little doubt (and are very happy with the notion) that in 5-10 years time, our cities will all be full of things like electric cars. Which will be great for local emissions, but highlights the problem with today's short-sighted sustainability focus, as it won’t do anything to stop us from spending half of our lives sat in traffic jams.

If we simply focus on sustainability as our end point, we’re likely just to end up with a mildly de-carbonised version of what we have now. And the likelihood is that we won’t even achieve that, because when people know they’re saving carbon, they psychologically feel (and often financially are) able to do more and just end up ‘reusing’ what they’ve saved.

Sustainability has created a psychology of fear, where we fear to dream of real improvement and hesitate to think big. What do we mean by improvement? Things which work more quickly or get us places faster, thus providing us with more free time or time with our families and friends. Things that are measurably more fun, or more exciting to ride in or drive than what we have today. Things which cost us less money to use, own or run. Better means thinking about how we link up travel – so we might spend more time in one place and combine trips – rather than rushing from one short hop flight destination to another. Better might mean finding a way to link leisure and business travel together.

But better also means new. New ideas, new products, services and concepts. In essence, we need to dream, and be allowed to think big. If we think of the figures who created some of our totems of mobility – people like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Andre Citroen, Frank Whittle – we still admire and count on the inventions and contributions they made for our mobility backbone today. On Re*Move, we try to highlight and showcase the work of people we hope or think might become modern day IKBs or Whittles. But there are precious few of them around. I’d go as far to argue that the contributions and inventions made by these famous figures, would never have happened had they been around today, working in this world constrained by the fear of sustainability. We are not simply going to solve the predicament we are in by attempting cut, after cut, after cut. We are going to have to dream, and dream big.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 1st December 2009

Mitch Altman on The Magic of Open Design

We've said before and we'll say again, open, networked forms of design and collaboration are going to change how we solve many problems. They'll also shape the future of our cities, towns and villages, how we work in them, the ways we move and interact in them, the vehicles we design and the way they fit together.

Some of this is about cost - build something once, openly and others can improve it. But much of it is about the culture of open source designers and problem solvers.

Here I talk with San Francisco-based virtual reality and hacker god Mitch Altman, inventor of, amongst other things TV-B-Gone, and Vinay Gupta, open source hardware guru and inventor of the Hexayurt open source refugee shelter.

I ask whether these new networks of designers – often in the form of hackers or open source communities - spend too much time focused on arguing about the need to break down existing structures. Is there more happening beyond that? What can those networks be doing now – to create real value? Do hackers and open source networks have an identity and meaning that can defined by what they are, rather than what they aren't?

I also ask whether the hacker scene has started to build its own financial infrastructure yet?

Design Museum, Butler's Wharf, London. 9 July 2009.

Posted by Mark Charmer.

Joe Simpson's blue sky questions for Detroit

If you want to get to know more about how we work, here's an insight into the questions we're asking as we explore what can happen next in transportation. What are the new business models? How will young people use cars? And more.

Here I talk to Joe Simpson onboard UA949, a 767-300 somewhere over the North Atlantic between London and Chicago on 15 April 2009. Joe sets out the questions he has that he wants to examine while we're in Detroit for a week.

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau.

Jump-starting electric car sales, UK-style

The UK Government’s decision to provide £250M ($360M) of funding, in the form of £5000 grants for customers to buy electric cars looks like big news at first glance. So, is it a really smart move from the UK Government, committed to incentivising change and driving consumer behaviour?

On the face of it, yes, but scratch below the surface and the scheme has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese. First up, there are currently around 33 Million vehicles on the UK’s roads. If you do the maths, then at £5000 per car, £250M of grants gives you 50,000 cars. To me, that looks like a bit of a drop in the ocean. Hardly world-changing is it?

From a wider transportation futures perspective, what’s more worrying is that the Government has decided to delay the introduction of this scheme until 2011. It’s not clear why, but we aren’t the only ones wondering if it’s got something to do with the fact that none of the mainstream manufacturers will sell you an EV now, but by 2011 many of them will.

The problem with this approach is that it could crush a fledgling market, which in the UK has grown slowly but surely with a mix of small city EVs and some clever, quick marketing thinking from the likes of GoinGreen who import the Reva from India and rebadge it Gwiz. Worse than that, these vehicles – which are classed as quadricycles – won’t be eligible for the £5000 incentives. That’s some way to go about building and opening up new markets, Mr Mandelson.

Equally frustrating is that commercial vehicles – like the Smith Edison and Modec trucks, aren’t included. ‘So what?’ you might argue; they’ll be bought by fleets who can afford the extra cost of EVs, or incorporate the savings into a longer-term business plan. But what about the thousands of sole traders and companies with just a couple of vans who make up the lionshare of the delivery vehicles running around cities? They are one of the critical, potentially most beneficial vehicle groups and users to be moving towards EV platforms.

Even the existing vehicle guys are asking questions. We’re currently in Dearborn, Michigan, looking at Ford’s design and sustainability work. Yesterday I asked the company’s director of Hybrid Platforms and Sustainable Mobility Technologies, Nancy Gioia, about the scheme and the affordability of EVs. You can see what she said in the video below, but let’s just say that she didn’t seem to think the £5000 incentive was a particularly sensible long term measure. She’s arguing for upfront investment in R&D. EVs are expensive to develop and build, and car companies are short of cash. There is another angle, of course – vast sums have been poured into car companies for advanced research, especially in hydrogen fuel cells. And we're still talking about that technology being 10, 20, 30 years away from primetime.

Governments have a key role to play in driving mass market adoption of EVs. Incentivising purchase is one thing, but that’s a fairly blunt, token-like stick in helping to cultivate a new market. The big auto guys have never run fast on this stuff, and they don’t really see a world beyond the car as we recognise it today.  Getting electrified versions of the types of vehicles we know and drive now is going to be expensive in the foreseeable future years. The first EVs from recognised manufacturers will be expensive enough to make many still think twice about them, even if there’s a £5000 sweetener on the table.

So if it wants to encourage a sustainable system of mobility, the best role the Government could play is in opening up the data it has on how people move around to allow the innovators to really use it, and by smoothing a path for start-ups, councils, designers and blue-chips to work together, and actually co-create something new. Dare we mention it – providing greater tax breaks and grants for those who are really pushing the boundaries of advanced mobility research and development might be one of the best ways to do this.

The pioneers deserve a break. They were right to invest what they could in EVs and they should not be hung out to dry while the big automakers get breathing space to catch up. The government should be rewarding risk takers who, when others sat on their hands, helped shape a fledgling market. Let the mainstream car companies catch up, but help the small guys find a role in this exciting future.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 21st April 2009.

Disclosure: Ford Motor Company is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's Research work in 2009. We have an independent brief, looking at sustainability and design activities in the company. Ford has no control over what we publish - let us know if you don't see it that way.

Sue Cischke, meet Dan Sturges

On Thursday we interviewed Ford's Sue Cischke about the company's sustainability strategy and put the interview online. Now we're gathering comment from key thinkers we know. Here's Dan Sturges, president of Intrago Mobility. Over to Dan...

I think Ford is a typical company that would communicate sustainability issues to engineering teams, design teams, sourcing people, etc.. I would bet that 85% of Ford's employees do not get a view over the "dashboard" - the view she or Bill Ford see of this complex new emerging mobility + access landscape un-folding. Sure the employees hear they should recycle their paper, fill their tires with air, etc.. But not about bold new vehicle sharing business models - Robin Chase talking about open-source transponders for every car and any car can be a rental car - how iPhones can make any car into a taxi (or so many other developments). Unfortunately for Ford employees they don't get to see all that is possible, but may get laid off because those who see what is ahead too often don't know what to do about it.

I think Ford should have an intranet site for their people that shares these bold new possibilities - to every employee that wants to look + learn. Why not let even a janitor at their St. Louis plant see what's happening. Perhaps he has some cool idea for a business offering seniors rides in mini-ev shuttles around his community. While Ford should really have a VC arm for employees starting new ventures - even if they didn't - it would be an important service to someone you might have to layoff at somepoint - to have a better sense of what the future of transpo might be and opportunities for them beyond Ford. Most likely, this type of creatve collaboration with 100% of your employees would bring amazing ideas to the business as well as a lot more happy excited "employees".

So, no, I think Sue and I have a very different idea as to who should be involved in sustainability at Ford.

Here are some things for me that stood out:

1) Vehicle Microrental.

Sue Cischke seemed to know more about the Zipcar business model than I had expected – about how consumers would have more choice in vehicles by moving past the ownership model, to instead match mode to trip.

This made me think that a Ford announcement in car-sharing might not be too far away. Perhaps they'll make an investment into Zipcar, or help a few Ford dealers test a “Flexible Lease” approach where a consumer’s car can be exchanged on the fly for another type of Ford car or truck at the nearby Dealer's lot. If this is true, and Ford will put their foot in the car-share pond, how odd it will be that they sold Hertz only 4 years ago. So much for the “vision thing”!

2) Mega City Mobility HUBS.

Sue said their work in the mega cities was not their core competency, but they were bringing IT to consumers in cities regarding transpo choices. Oddly, with 80% of Americans not able to get to or from public transit with ease, why not bring the Hub Concept to USA? Allow communities that need to match personal mobility with existing and new transit options to meet at the Community Mobility Hub? Why study Hubs with no connection to personal mobility in South America or India?

3) Small Car Safety.

Why do we never hear about how car companies are working with communities and cities to leverage IT to really reduce the chance of big and large vehicles hitting each other? Making travel in local communities like traveling in a boat is a Safe Harbor. Most of the tech she talks about is for freeway travel. But why not make it so small vehicles for community or urban travel are less likely to hit? We don’t design planes with bumpers, we make it so they won't hit.

4) Custom Solutions.

She said they make a car different for the Europe from the USA. But why not make these "local cars" I've mentioned - in a shape that's right for the Midwest or the Southwest? We tooled up the first Neighborhood Electric Vehicle for $1M. Now that fleet (of 50,000 NEVs) generates around 80 million one-way zero-emission trips a year in the USA! The digital revolution is poised to change the way we travel, as well as how we DESIGN, MAKE, and SELL this future. Ford just doesn’t think all that differently.

5) Working with others.

Yes they do, but the right groups? I don’t see any intent to really find the true disruptive thinkers in the space. I lived in Ann Arbor and heard all of the intent, but never saw it lead to the right folks.

I guess this last point relates to one of the first thing Sue said - that her job was to get the sustainability message to the right people in the company. I think there is likely a big difference between who she and I think are the "right" people.

Dan is based in Boulder, Colorado and designed the G.E.M, still to date the world's best selling EV. He is widely recognised as one of the world's leading evangelists for new vehicle and mobility concepts.

Ford and Sustainability - the view from the top

On Thursday, Joe and I spent an hour talking with Ford's Sue Cischke. She's basically Ford's chief sustainability officer - right up at the top of the company's uber 60s World Headquarters building in Dearborn, Michigan.

We filmed the whole thing, and you can see it below.

I'm asking our network to share their views on the content - those we've met over the years who stand out as visionary thinkers on the changes going on in the economics and nature of how we move. The first of these is Dan Sturges, and you can see what he has to say shortly.

But we meet new thinkers every day and I'd love to hear from you - and share your comments - if you've got something to add. Feel free to feature this on your own sites and embed our interview (click the 2 prong button in the blip control bar). Email me if you want access to the video file. It's Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0.

If you want to join in, comment below, or get in touch via Twitter @charmermark or @joesimpson.

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau.

Disclosure: Ford's sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's research in 2009. But our brief is to be critical and independent. We take that seriously. If you think we're not, I want to know.

The party's over

Above: The Ford and Firestone families taking tea - see the full table plan here (Henry Ford Museum)

If it gets much worse, the birds will probably stop tweeting.

Yesterday saw an American president take the unprecedented action of (essentially) firing the CEO of one of the country's largest corporations (GM) and giving another (Chrysler) just 30 days to live. He also mooted a ‘scrappage’-type scheme where drivers will trade in decade old (dirty) cars, to receive money off a shiny, (clean) new one. A similar programme has worked wonders for new car sales in Germany. We’re sceptical this is a good idea from an environmental point of view, but no one seems to want to talk about that right now – driving new car sales is paramount.

Today both Ford and GM launched a scheme, similar to Hyundai’s, to cover finance payments on new car purchases should the owner lose their job.  Will all of this be enough to kick start car sales? Possibly. Certainly it may just be enough to help those in better shape to ride out the current crisis.

The problem is that few people connected to the industry seem to want to look much further than the end of their own noses, even in these unprecedented times. All of the above news is intended to help the auto industry in the short term. It doesn’t solve some key long-term problems.

There is oversupply in the industry, on a systemic, worldwide level. Even with fewer factories and laid off workers, healthcare and pensions burdens will remain vast for the auto industry for years to come. The rate of change of digital technology is still progressing at a rate fundamentally out of step with the auto industry’s development processes, which in turn have difficulty mapping and staying congruent with consumer demand. A piece in today’s Guardian aimed at GM and Chrysler is entitled “Create the market you idiots” and doubtless consumers will echo that sentiment. For years the industry has conducted clinics and market research essentially asking consumers ‘what sort of vehicle do you want’. Predictably enough, cars designed by clinics and market research tend not to be winners, because consumers don’t usually know what they want until they’re shown it. The problem for the industry is that right now, nobody in control knows what consumers want, and what they do want changes with the prevailing wind.

Even if everything being done now results in the industry getting back on track, just what constitutes back on track? Is $250 profit from each car, and every consumer tied to a $250-per-month, three-year car loan, back on track? That’s how it’s been for the past five years, so one might speculate that if this qualifies as back on track, then the automotive train will be falling off the rails again within a couple of years.

The industry needs to respond to bigger, critical issues – like that brought up by The Mechanic’s blog on Edmunds today. Young people aren’t interested in cars anymore. That simplifies the situation too far, but it’s a problem that the likes of Nissan have identified, yet done little about. At 27, I see the issue first hand. I can count on one hand the number of my friends who own a car at all, and the only person I know who’s bought a brand new car in the last two years, I’m engaged to. Beyond that, what’s the industry’s answer to the fact that in big cities like Tokyo, Paris and New York – the wealth generating capitals – between 30 and 50 percent of citizens don’t own cars? Don't think this is important? Last year for the first time, more than 50 percent of the world's populations lived in cities. Think about the logic of this - the majority of people who could afford a car, are now city dwellers.

Time was when Honda were promoting themselves as more than just a car company, and as a mobility provider. Likewise, when Jac Nasser embarked on his CEO mission at Ford, he not only bought Land Rover, Volvo and co – but took Kwik Fit (auto spares and repairs) and Hertz (car rental) under Ford’s wing. Car companies were doing more than ‘just’ making cars.

Now, in the desperate rush for survival, cost cutting has come to the fore. All this nice, cuddly, big thinking and advanced stuff is heading for the bin. Car companies – we are told – must focus solely on building the cars that people want. Apparently they’re going to be powered by electric batteries, and look pretty much like the cars we have today. But that many of the car companies already build great vehicles, and that those that don’t probably soon will (or die), seems beyond doubt. The question is whether in focusing solely on making and selling cars, the car companies will fail to provide the real answers to the future of how people need and want to move around.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 31st March 2009

Related reading: Boom, Busy and the Revival of Detroit (Mark Charmer, 5th December 2008)

New Cars vs Old Cars II

Can you help us to get to the bottom of a crucial question? Is it cleaner, greener, and more environmentally friendly to replace your old car (let’s call ‘old’ 10 years+ for the sake of argument), with a new one?

It’s pertinent, because a ‘scrapping’ scheme has just been launched in Germany, and is being considered in the UK. Consumers are offered €2500 off the sticker price of a new car, provided they scrap their old, ‘dirty’ banger. It’s had a big effect in Germany. New car sales, which had fallen ‘off a cliff’ before Christmas, show a massive upswing since the scheme’s introduction.

Unsurprisingly, the world’s ailing auto industry is lobbying for the rollout of the scheme across other countries. Yet writer and campaigner George Monbiot asks serious questions of it today, arguing that from an environmental perspective "we might as well burn ten-pound notes in power stations”.

Monbiot’s chief issues are:

• It’s being dressed up by media and auto as ‘green’ and aiming to reduce CO2, when new cars aren’t actually that much more efficient than they were 10 years ago.
• That there’s no incentive to buy low CO2 cars specifically – consumers need merely buy any new car meeting the Euro4/5 emissions laws (which all do today).
• That (and you need to take his figures with a pinch of salt) essentially, the scheme equates every tonne of CO2 saved to be worth £2525, when existing schemes cost as little as £3.50 per tonne saved.

At this point it would be customary to highlight the flaws in Monbiot’s logic, but that’s very hard to do, because we haven’t yet found anyone in the auto industry who can provide a decent set of facts to back up the environmental argument for scrapping an old car and getting a new one. In Geneva last week, in conversations we’ve had with people in the industry and on this blog, we’ve asked the question but haven't yet found an answer.

Instead we can pick holes in the merit of Monbiot arguing “So £2000 from the government could help you trade in your old Citroen C1 for a new Porsche Cayenne.” First, he must mean a Citroen Saxo, as the C1 is too young, as a model, to qualify for scrapping. But it’s somewhat churlish given the lack of any true counter evidence that his wider argument is wrong.

Working from the way we live now

I do believe he’s missing a trick however. Monbiot’s articles are characterised by an attempt to be factually water-tight and reference-based. But they rarely illustrate new, better visions and often ignore some inconvenient truths about the way people live their lives. He’s still banging on about the frankly bizarre idea of coach-only motorway lanes… and ignores the fact that – in reality – a reasonable portion of people are likely to use a private, rather than shared, vehicle.

Two points then. First, if the auto industry wants governments to implement scrapping-type schemes, it needs to show people why this is a good idea from an environmental perspective. Someone needs to take a lead and attempt to answer the question. Of course it’s hard to answer conclusively – it differs on a case-by-case basis. But so what? Monbiot extrapolates some of his figures, so shouldn’t the car industry where data is hard to come by? Why not take a model of 15 years ago, and compare its CO2, NOx, recycled material content, etc. and compare with the equivalent vehicle today. Explain about pollutants beyond CO2 – which are important. Explain how much energy goes into building new cars – and how that’s being produced. Turn it into an example case study, and create a counter argument to Monbiot. We’ll even come and shoot the video if you want, and shove it on to youtube so consumers can make their own mind up. Simply doing nothing makes the industry look like it has something to hide – when most of those connected to it do believe it is changing – fast.

This leads to my second point – and where I take issue with Monbiot suggesting:

“It is hard to think of a less deserving cause. The motor companies have repeatedly failed to anticipate trends in demand. They have carried on producing thunderous gas guzzlers long after the market collapsed.”

While few could argue with the point that the auto industry’s issues are largely of it’s own making, Monbiot’s argument is lazy and out of date. The gas guzzler argument is questionable – but alludes to a critical point, which the current crisis provides an opportunity to do something about. This is that the trends of car buying consumers, and the design and development of vehicles exist in a relationship that is massively out of step. Five years ago, many consumers – regardless of what Monbiot thinks – did want gas guzzlers. And if you’d have been running an auto company, you’d have made them too – because they’re high profit vehicles. Small eco-boxes aren’t.

Yet when consumer demand suddenly fell away, it wasn’t that the industry carried on churning out thunderous gas guzzlers – it’s that its processes meant it couldn’t react quickly enough. Tens of large, sports and SUV programmes have been abandoned presently. But many of the small, hybrid and electric cars people apparently want are still on the drawing board, because although car companies know demand is there now, it wasn’t four years ago when today’s cars were first being conceived.

Likewise, factory production demands many factories churn out 200,000 models to make sense (see the great Bob Casey talking about this and related auto industry history in the video above). But they don’t make sense when there are no buyers for those vehicles. So the ‘crisis’ needs to be an opportunity – to create shorter development processes, link designers and engineers with consumers (currently, they rarely meet), and attempt to massively reduce lead times. Ultimately, the mass production model may be a busted flush – now is the moment for ideas on how it can be at worst improved, and at best replaced. To radically change the industry will require pain and job losses in the short term. Yet doing nothing – and propping up the industry with schemes such as the car scrappage programme, risks losing this opportunity, and simply postponing dealing with these ongoing issue for another day. Allowing the industry to carry on conducting ‘business as usual’ ultimately risks allowing it to inflict upon itself a slow and painful death.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 10 March 2009.

Photograph: After 3 years on The Movement Design Bureau homepage, Mark retired the lead photo in this piece just this morning. And then we realised it would be perfect for this article. How about that for a retirement moment?