Jeff Jarvis Is Spinning His Wheels

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At his BuzzMachine blog, media provocateur Jeff Jarvis has this to say about the General Motors bankruptcy and the future of the auto industry:

“GM says it is reinventing itself. And what makes them or the government think they can do that on top of old infrastructure and old ways even with our billions? Good fucking luck.

“Last week, I met the man who is really reinventing the car industry, Jay Rogers, founder of Local Motors. He is creating the platform and API for new cars that are designed collaboratively by communities and built in microfactories across the country by staffs of only 41 using almost entirely off-the-shelf parts. He says he will be profitable selling only 500 cars. He plans to build 3-5,000 of each model and he’s months away from delivering his first.

“When I first looked at Local-Motors, I didn’t think it was for me. Its first model is a muscle car being built in and for the Arizona market. In a video, Rogers talks about being able to come into the microfactory to help build your own car. I try everything I can to avoid ever opening a hood or picking up a wrench. That’s why I buy Toyota.”

First off, I hope Jarvis doesn’t frequent self-serve gas stations, otherwise he’s going to find himself with under-inflated tires or a fluids crisis. One of the biggest problems in automotive culture right now is that fewer and fewer people know how to handle a dipstick (and the OEMs aren’t helping by insisting that everyone rely on neurotic onboard diagnostic systems).

But I digress. What’s really of concern here, besides the needless profanity (I know this is Jarvis’ thing, but it doesn’t help his case), is that he’s touted as a radical new approach to carmaking something that’s been going on pretty much since the automobile was created. True, Local Motors has codified a process and developed a business model, but in practice it’s not that different from what hot-rodders, kit-builders, and customizers have been doing forever. Ergo, the muscle car, a natural outlet for this sensibility.

What’s different is the degree to which this familiar small industry has been Jarvisized. It’s Tom Freidman plus showy confrontationalism, slathered with the sort of Web 2.0 memes that have lately begun to befoul the discourse about where our manufacturing culture is headed. The car of the future will not be made thing—it will instead be the fulfillment of an idea about how things should be made.

You encounter this stuff all the time in the design world, where designers increasingly reverse-engineer products from assorted trendy ideologies rather than from more practical economic and behavioral data (they receive no education in economics at design schools, so it’s no surprise). For Jarvis, the imperative is to recast the car of the future as an open-source automotive Kumbaya, governed by the same allegedly egalitarian principles that motivate Google. Local Motors, naturally, does no evil. GM on the other hand, is assumed to have done nothing but.

There’s a reason why the kit market for cars remains tiny relative to giant global automakers, and why the auto industry has historical favored macro over micro: you get a better product in the end. If Local Motors ever tried to scale to the point where is cars would replace even a fraction of the market, its business model would be exposed to well-understood economic phenomena. Their product now costs $50,000. Without standardization of components and semi-automated assembly lines, not to mention substantial design revision, it would never be able to enter the realm of affordability for most people. Contrast this with the conventionally produced Tata Nano, now scheduled to arrive in the U.S. in a few years, at a cost of (possibly) less than $3,000. Now decide what’s really the car of the future.

And just for the record, Henry Ford figured this out almost 100 years ago.