Chicken or egg? What comes first, consumer demand or product building intended to create demand? Most media socialists would say the former. I favor the latter. Case in point: For as long as I’ve been blogging I’ve railed about the American car business, its focus on gas guzzlers and how that focus has driven Detroit into the ground. It took a national melt down and a global economic recession for De-twah to find the new smaller car path.
Chrysler has a neat new European-sized car (beep beep) called the Fiat 500 which will be in the States soon. You can see it driven by a professional driver on Owen Mack’s Cobrandit.com site. Owen is a whazoo videographer, by the way. Fiat has been building this type of car for years. Small, economical and with a more reasonable environmental footprint. Short of the VW Beetle and Mini Cooper few companies in the states made an effort to play in this market space. It was a mondo opportunity zone.
Customers weren’t demanding the cars, but automobile makers should have been creating that demand. They didn’t like the margins. The oil companies bought them too many dinners. The designs were funky. May all three. What I do know is this — had a car company gone all egg and seen beyond the dashboard, they would have known small cars were going to be a growth market. That’s why I like the Chrysler-Fiat combination. Fiat will help Chrysler step up to this current market need. A few years too late, but it will happen and off we go. Egg it up. Peace!