Your Emails: Do you want a car that lasts a million miles?
Cars
Hey folks, Brian Cooley here with another one of your emails about high tech cars and modern driving.
And this one comes in from James B who says I just got through watching your segment on diesels.
I want to point out they work very well in the truck market.
And they work great in cars as well because they run better, are well built, and can get over a million miles if taken care of.
This is an interesting point, James, diesels are known, the power plant itself For being an exceptionally tough way to generate power to move a car or truck around.
And as you mentioned they are so torquey they have a birthright in heavy duty trucks, and that's not gonna change any time soon.
I've been talking mostly about the passenger car market which is getting dimmer pretty quickly.
The CEO of Volvo just said that the current generation of diesels in their lineup Is probably their last.
And JP Morgan Chase projects that diesels in Europe, a stronghold, will make up only 30% of new car sales there by 2020.
That's a big drop from a high of 56%, as recently as 2011.
Let me address this idea of super long durability.
This struck me as interesting.
Because I can recall when Mercedes used to make that part of their advertising.
They would show you cars that people had owned for like a million miles or so in their print ads.
We're going back a ways.
No one talks about that much anymore, and part of it is a million miles is about or sometimes more than the average person drives in their entire lifetime.
And they're gonna want more than one car in that life.
It's different than our parents' or grandparents' generation that frankly wanted A good, solid car.
And they'd take it to their grave, maybe even get buried in it.
Those days have kind of changed, and part of that is we have a basic heartbeat of a new car, at the most, every eight or nine years.
That's roughly the age of a car on the road in America.
It got a little longer recently because of the recession, but Eight or so probably going to be the standard out there.
And then a car's considered pretty old.
Also leasing has exploded recently.
It's become an enormous part of the automotive market.
16% of cars used to go out on a lease as recently as 2009, but as of end of 2016 that was around 30% and is expected to hover around there going forward.
Another factor is regulators don't really want old cars on the road, as much as they have ways to pull levers on this stuff.
Because old cars mean cars that do not move quickly to embrace new advances in safety, in emissions and fuel economy, and in autonomy.
All of which are coming rapidly, not to mention advances in car to car connectivity.
Which old cars are never really gonna have grafted onto them.
So the kind of technical innovation going on right now has everybody from regulators to carmakers saying, you know what?
Keep getting those cars off the road and junking them.
And let's get the new stuff out there or the fleet is gonna be in the way of new innovations.
So the million mile thing or many hundreds of thousands of miles Is almost kinda quaint, due to the economics and the technical innovation that's going on in the car market these days.
Keep those emails coming.
I'm here to answer your questions about high tech cars and modern driving.
It's cooley@theroadshow.com.
