Car Industry Needs Cheap Steel
A very conservative bunch of businessmen keep lobbying
David Johansson, an almost ordinary man in Sweden, found a way to change the paradigm – that cars are built from steel: He built one from Lego. Full scale!
It has an electric motor and actually works – it is possible to drive the construction, made of 426,000 Lego bricks, weighing 1.5 tons.
Read more about his creation (in Swedish) in this article: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/norrbotten/david-byggde-en-legobil-med-over-400-000-bitar
Now, this may not be a feasible way of producing cars for all of us, for a number of reason, but 4,000 hours spent is at least one factor. No matter how hard the car industry is pushing the minimum wages down, this would still make the vehicle too expensive to sell. Also, I could imagine that a crash test would go terribly wrong. The repair costs, however, should be low – just go to any toy shop to buy the needed spare parts ;-)
Of course, I am joking a bit with this car. It is fun to see, and the guy is seeing a business from it, touring shows and exhibitions where his car is catching the attention of people and, hence, acts as an advertising magnet.
But logically speaking, the car industry, as well as all other industries, should become more flexible with materials. They seem to paint themselves into a corner every now and then, producing things that rely on a steady stream of materials that vary in both price and availability.
As long as the lobbying works, they can get their raw materials and make their products, but whenever there is a shift in politics, or a war in the area where some needed minerals are usually mined, or something happens to, say, the tariffs, they suddenly find themselves in big trouble.
While some attempts have been made over time to produce cars from fiberglass, wood, aluminum, carbon fibers, or even plastic (though not necessarily from Lego bricks), these attempts, how successful they may have been, tend to become unicorns in the otherwise very conservative car industry.
Mobile phones and laptop computers did show some flexibility in the plastic days, but when everything began to be made from Gorilla glass and aluminum, or even titanium or other exotic materials, these industries painted themselves up in a corner where they cannot survive without the participations of very few parts manufacturers who can produce such things.
Historically, industries have seen a sequence of developments, often starting with a good idea that is then being carefully made, using solid craftsmanship, and sold at high prices – after which step by step efforts appear to make the production costs lower and lower. In parallel, competitors step in on the scene, and they also produce exactly the same things from the same materials, also as cheaply as they can.
The end of the game appears when all the needed materials have been used up or the products have reached a so low quality, that nobody want to buy them anymore. Or, indeed, when the market has been flooded with identical products, making the consumers tired of them. And if a consumer by them want such a product, there will be plenty of second-hand options to have.
A word like “innovation” has been innovated, but it is being used by most industries as something in the business bullshit range, something they talk about on the management floor, but which rarely enters to product design and production processed in reality – or not to a very big extent, at least.
More flexibility with the designs, choice of materials, etc., could probably make the individual business more robust and resilient against changes in the market (as they always call it, when they have exhausted a resource or treated their employees so badly that nobody wants to work for them anymore).
In fact, a more diverse assortment of products would not only help the companies to sell something even if a raw material became effectively unavailable, and as a much wanted bonus for us all, there would not be as many examples of exhausting natural resources, as we have seen until now – mining wouldn’t need to be made in sensitive nature areas, ancient forests wouldn’t need to be cut down, and, with a bit of additional creativity involved, that would mainly utilize local resources, a lot of transportation of everything from raw materials over parts to finished products could be avoided.
As products would be more diverse, consumers wouldn’t get nearly as tired of them nearly as fast, so they would keep them for longer, which would both mean a smaller toll taken on nature, and a possibility for businesses to increase the prices a bit, and there by also salaries for their workers.
This would probably benefit all of us.
So, the car industry doesn’t need cheap steel. It needs to think in new ways and develop their businesses into something that fits the world, rather than requiring the world to fit their antique production and sales ideals.
Factoids
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