Plug-in Vehicles and Driveways

Recently I read an article in the Economist which discussed the differences between how car service stations were considered in America and Europe. According to the article, Americans tend to have a positive attitude towards them, choosing to locate them in prime central urban areas. In contrast, Europeans have a more negative opinion of service stations relegating them to out of town areas such as ring roads and shopping centres. This observation has been backed up by the downward trend in service station numbers in Europe with tens of thousands going out of business in the last decade. Supermarkets have taken up the slack to a certain degree and the combination of doing your shopping and filling up your car seems popular. It isn’t too much of a leap to envisage that Europeans would tend to value the ability to avoid service stations in the future altogether by purchasing a Plug-in vehicle more so than Americans as a result of this embedded attitude.

 

A Selection of my Favourite Car Commercials – Citroen: Alive with technology

The next instalment of my favourite car commercials is another golden oldie from the mid 2000s. To help generate interest in the new Transformer movie being released, Citroen teamed up with their production team to come up with a joint project. The output of this project was a distinctly attention grabbing short commercial where a conventional Citroen C4 transforms into a giant robot we all remember fondly from our youths. The transformer then proceeds to break dance to some catchy music displaying the (at the time) amazing visual effects people could look forward to in the movie. The main draw of this commercial is the graphic analogy of the technology embedded within a Citroen displaying it as being truly advanced whilst also generating interest for the forthcoming movie. I thought it was a truly unique collaboration and a mighty successful piece of advertising, I hope you enjoy it. 

Are we Trying to Force Electric Vehicles to be something they Aren’t?

Conventional vehicles have been with us for over 100 years and have become a cornerstone of our societies. They have been incrementally improved throughout their history and now represent one of the pinnacles of human engineering achievement. Indeed, some commentators have dubbed the car as one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments and they have without doubt assisted in the expansion of human prosperity.

Conventional vehicles are not however without their drawbacks and their benefits are reduced by their associated externalities. Electric Vehicles aim to address a number of these externalities and have regularly been referred to as a Disruptive Technological Innovation. What is a Disruptive Technology? Well, you can envisage the introduction of fuel injection into car engines as being a sustaining technological innovation that improves the performance of a technology without changing its fundamental structure. A Disruptive Technology is the opposite of this and breaks rather than alters the pre-existing mould. Disruptive Technologies push the frontier in nonconventional aspects of the product’s design such as significantly altering its architecture rather than providing incremental improvements on a primary attribute.

Should Plug-in Vehicles be bundled with Other Products and Services?

Some of the recent research emerging in the plug-in vehicle field shows that consumers tend to be the most open to consider a plug-in vehicle during times of instability in their lives. Moving house, changing job, having the first child are transition points when people tend to revaluate how they live their lives and if any fundamental changes are needed. Conversely, when people are “stuck in a grove” and are happy to have everything stay as it is then they’d be much less likely to think about altering their personal travel behaviour. These transition points do not happen very often and so its important to make them count.

Trying to get the most behavioural change for a single intervention would help to maximise the benefit of these transition points. This concept leads us nicely into considering if plug-in vehicles can be combined with other goods and services that may prove complementary. We’ve already alluded to early in this blog how plug-in vehicles can be sold in combination with an electricity tariff that may source its electricity from renewable/green generation or provide much cheaper rates during the night when the EV can be scheduled to recharge. Are there any other goods or services that can be combined with plug-in vehicles that share similar themes? I can think of a whole spectrum including combination boilers, cavity wall insulation and home compositing but there is one that, to me, stands out from the crowd.

A Selection of my Favourite Car Commercials – Golf GTi

Following on from the previous post, the next commercial from my favourites list stars the Volkswagen Golf GTi. This commercial combines the iconic scene from Singing in the Rain where Gene Kelly wanders happy down a street with the introduction of the Golf. The Golf GTi, which is iconic in its own right, was first introduced in the late 1970s and, on the surface, hasn’t changed a great deal. Indeed, there wasn’t too much that needed changing in the original car with the alterations simply bringing mild improvements on an already successful theme.  The commercial illustrates this vividly by demonstrating that small changes are all that is required to bring a time honoured car into the present day. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy the commercial.   

A Selection of my Favourite Car Commercials – Gas Powered Everything

Passenger vehicles are a huge industry across the globe account for near enough a trillion dollars of revenue per year which is set to increase in the future. Not surprisingly this level of economic activity brings with it a hefty level of competition to attract new customers by either bringing them into the market or acquiring them from competitors. Not only must automotive manufacturers make desirable products but they must also market them effectively to potential customers. 

With this level of money at stake, even increasing your market share by 1% can bring in 100s of millions of dollars of additional revenue. With this in mind the automotive industry invests heavily in advertising their products bringing in top marketing talent to come up with attention grabbing commercials. Some of these commercials that have come out over the years have been truly amazing and I’ve started to collect a few of the best on my Youtube account. Over the coming few weeks I’ll be posting my favourites for you to enjoy. Today’s instalment, keeping with the theme of this blog, is a thought provoking piece from Nissan that also pokes some fun at one of their nearest rivals, I hope you enjoy.   

What Will Consumers Think of Vehicle to Grid Technology?

The introduction of plug-in vehicles to the mass automotive market will undoubtedly make a consumer’s purchasing decision more complex. They will have to consider the virtues and vices of these new powertrain technologies and how they will fit in with their lifestyles. As if this was not complicated enough, the future introduction of an additional option related to plug-in vehicles has the possibility of leaving the general driver scratching their heads.

Vehicle-to-Grid technology allows a plug-in vehicle to communicate with the electricity grid and offer responsive services such as storing unused electricity during times of low demand with the option of releasing this stored energy back to the grid should any demand peaks occur. This service would be paid for by the utility companies offering plug-in vehicle drivers with an additional source of revenue to offset their vehicle’s high upfront costs. As more renewable energy is put onto the grid new mechanisms will need to be installed to smooth out supply of energy. Having the capability to drawn down on stored supplies generated from renewable energy would be much more effective than firing up a coal electricity plant every time there is a drop in generation.