Perhaps Henry Ford got it right all the time when he presented his cars in the color of his choice, as long as it was black. Or maybe not.
The lowest point of mass-market customization came with the Vauxhall Adam, a bodybuilding attempt on the Fiat 500 and Mini’s hegemony in the world of cute superminis.
Incredibly, the Adam was presented with 61,000 external color combinations and 82,000 internal options. As one executive commented shortly after the car was withdrawn from sale due to low sales, it creates the complexity it brought, for the visitor and the factory.
It wasn’t just the other people in the line who had to stay awake, but the other people delivered the item to the line, managed the storage, and stayed in the warehouse long enough to meet demand, without overdoing or tying up capital. spare parts.
The Adam lasted a generation. Small cars have notoriously small margins at best, but in trying to fight that by inflating the list of options, Vauxhall (Opel, actually) had higher prices with the list of off-scale options, the vast majority of which were superfluous.
“I came up with 8 other wheel options, but one of them accounted for 75% of orders and five of them less than 1% each,” said one disappointed executive. “However, we had to negotiate origin contracts for each of them, manage the logistics for each of them, have them all on site in a storage location in one position. . . It was an organizational and economic nightmare. “
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Is the Vauxhall Adam supermini special enough to fit the Fiat 500 and Mini, or is it simply an exercise in taste and marketing?
From the moment Carlos Tavares got his hands on Opel in 2017, this kind of thinking is borrowed time. No one is more pragmatic in reducing complexity than the ultra-successful boss of Stellantis (born Groupe PSA), and his control team follows in his wake. Oh, to have noticed that their eyes turn when told about the millions of other combinations with which a customer’s order for an Adam can happen.
Since then, the need to certify the emissions of each and every physical variation of a car, and then the pandemic, which has led all car manufacturers to especially optimize their offers, have underlined this. Aside from supercars and luxury cars, plus a few scratches. in a Mini and 500, you have to go back decades to locate a time when car buyers had fewer possible options, or car manufacturing was more profitable.
So, does simplicity win? Not necessarily. Looking to the horizon, it’s not feeling the desire for car brands to monetize small electric cars. As always, some will opt for economies of scale, some will opt for capacity and some will fight for value, but certainly. , some will also take the dangerous direction of customization in an effort to give their levels must-have products (and maybe, just maybe, it’s a hint here about the direction it might come from) va-va-voom.
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