13th June 2007

Remember the dark ages when we used to pay a fortune to get our faulty domestic electronic appliances fixed, our shoes re-soled and our lawn mowers serviced and repaired? Rightly or wrongly, those days are mostly over. The cost of an hour or two of TV repair man time can be as high as the asking price for a new telly. Employing a professional high street cobbler and commissioning him to fit tailor-made replacement soles and heels could be more expensive than the original cost of the shoes. And when my three-year-old petrol lawn mower finally submits to the abuse I’ve inflicted on it, am I going to spend money dragging it to a repair shop, or am I going to spend £99 on a new grass cutter?

	Does a car really need to be so well built that it will be able to cover 100,000 miles decade after decade? I'm not so sure.

It hurts me to say it, but the fact is that at a time when words such as recycling, environmentalism and green (a discredited and over-used word if ever there was one) have moved to the top of the political agenda, the manufacturing and retailing worlds are designing, making and selling more throwaway goods than ever.
For years, if not decades, some ahead-of-their-time auto engineers have known how to design and build sealed engines that need no routine servicing and can easily and cost-effectively be replaced when they go wrong. The creator of the Orbital engine in Australia told me 20 years ago that he and his colleagues had the ability to build a new breed of replacement engines that would simply sit on auto supermarket shelves and be lifted off and placed in a shopping trolley as and when needed. Small and light enough to pay for at the checkout and take home, they’d easily slot into the space where the expired engine was once housed. And why not? As long as the old lump is disposed of responsibly, what’s wrong with replacing a tired power pack with a new one bought at Halfords or Asda?

And after we’ve got used to disposing of sealed, unrepairable engines that have died in the same way that we dispose of expired batteries, who’s to say that some people won’t be using cheap throwaway cars with expected lifespans of say, two or three years and 20-30,000 miles? Does a vehicle really need to be designed, engineered and built so well that it will cover at least 100,000 or more miles decade after decade? In the past, yes. Today, I’m not so sure.

Just as manufacturing processes are changing and the repair and service industries are in many cases disappearing, so too are customers’ needs and expectations. I suspect that many consumers now don’t want or expect cheapo products, cars included, to last that long.

And that’s why Tata has very cleverly recently announced that it’s entering the throwaway car market by putting a modest machine on sale in some parts of the world for £1,200. Don’t get too excited – it won’t be coming to Britain, at least not at that price. But why don’t you do what I plan and bring one in as a personal import? If I get a year or two out of it, I’ll be happy. Any more than that will be a bonus. An inevitably low-quality new car costing about the
same as a high-quality mountain bike is a delicious prospect. Tata looks like being the first in the market with this cheap-as-chips motor.

But it won’t be the last, because £1,200 Tatas will, I’m certain, be a roaring success, regardless of how good or bad they are. The Chinese will follow the bargain basement tactics of the Indians and all hell will break out in the car retailing industry. I can’t wait.

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