Cringely asks, What would happen if Steve Jobs were put in charge of any of the Big Three car companies? Well, first he’d kill any unprofitable product lines. Then he’d really shake things up:
He’d look at the car market and conclude a number of things: 1) it’s a no-brainer to embrace dramatic design (no boring cars); 2) performance sells, and; 3) safety and fuel economy are co-equal secondary goals. So Steve’s goal for his car company would be to make a limited line of vehicles that were dramatically styled with visibly different technologies from the competitors and were uniformly 20+ percent safer and 20+ percent more fuel-efficient.
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But embracing these ideas requires the companies do something else that Jobs came to embrace with Apple’s products — stop building most of their own cars.
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In this scenario, Chrysler becomes a design, marketing, sales, and service organization. What’s wrong with that? They can change products more often and more completely because of their dramatically lower investment in production capital. They can pit their various suppliers against each other more effectively than could a surviving car manufacturer. It’s what Steve would do.And Steve would also embrace one dramatic new technology, whether it is electric, hydrogen, natural gas, whatever, but he’d do it in a very Steveian fashion, which is to say exactly the way he did the iPod and iTunes. That is, he’d sell you the car and then sell you whatever is required to fill up the car. This has always been a barrier for the car companies because they couldn’t imagine themselves in the business of running electric/hydrogen/LPG stations, while Steve would imagine his company making a profit running just those stations.
Steve would take an existing operation that already had an ideal geographic distribution like McDonald’s restaurants. He buy McDonald’s or seduce the company into a deal. Then he’d embrace a propulsion technology like advanced electric capacitors — batteries that could be recharged in less than a minute — and put charging stations on the drive-through lanes. By the time the electric models were ready for sale he’d have 12,000 charging stations in place to serve them. Would you like fries with that charge?