EuroWire Sept 2015

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Transatlantic cable
September 2015 32
Of course, the automotive industry has long been required by
law to supply data on crashes, accident victims, and internal
defect investigations. Mr Rosekind said: “The GM experience
changed the culture here. What that means is, challenge the
information you’re getting and challenge the assumptions you
are pursuing.”
In response to the new NHTSA chief’s avowal to “trust, but
verify” any safety data provided hereafter by the car companies,
the Times reporters wrote, “That [will be] a seminal shift in how
government regulators have long dealt with automakers.”
The simultaneous upswing in car-sharing
and auto sales allays fears in Detroit that
American millennials reject car ownership
Now the largest demographic block in the USA, millennials
– those who reached young adulthood around the year
2000 – gure prominently among the 1.3 million Americans
belonging to some type of car-sharing network at the end
of 2014. According to the University of California-Berkeley’s
Transportation Sustainability Research Center this represents a
34 per cent increase from 2013.
At the same time, Greg Gardner of the Detroit Free Press
reported, a parallel trend confutes the forecasts of futurists that
millennials are not that interested in owning cars and trucks.
New vehicle sales in the US are running at levels not seen since
the housing bubble of a decade ago. (“Car Sharing Thrives
Despite Torrid New Vehicle Sales,” 13th June)
Yet a third expanding element was noted by Mr Gardner.
Clients of a “newish segment of the car-share industry” rent
out their personal vehicles to strangers in much the same way
that tenants or owners in the programme rent out
their residences to other travellers. This San Francisco-based
vehicle-share programme, which launched in 2009, is called
Getaround and has expanded this year to Washington DC;
Portland, Oregon; and Chicago.
Data from JD Power and Associates con rms that, despite their
rental activity, millennials are not abandoning car ownership.
The auto sales site found that those born after 1980 accounted
for 27 per cent of new vehicle purchases in the USA last year, up
from just 18 per cent in 2010.
A dubious assumption about two other sets of American
drivers was remarked, and controverted, in the Free Press. It
is that Generation Xers (born 1960-1980) and Baby Boomers
(1946-1964) “will be ensconced forever in suburbia, desperately
dependent on their cars.”
In May, Zipcar, which is owned by the Avis Budget Group,
released a study that more Americans between 50 and 69 are
moving to urban cores. Nearly 15 per cent of Zipcar renters are
over 50, according to company president Kaye Ceille.
For now, at least, wrote Mr Gardner, the modest US economic
recovery is strong enough to spur both new vehicle sales and car
sharing, especially in urban areas “where residents of all ages are
looking for ways to reduce the cost of owning multiple vehicles.”
Ford launches car-share pilot
in London and six US cities
Detroit’s Ford Motor Co picked up quickly on a new
willingness of millennials to share rides with others – and
also to supplement their incomes by renting out their cars.
Cristina Maza of the Christian Science Monitor reported that,
applying the ndings of its own recent research, the automaker
announced 23 rd June that Ford Credit is launching a pilot
peer-to-peer car-sharing programme with two partners: the
San Francisco-based start-up Getaround, in the USA; and
easyCar Club, a sister company of the low-cost airline easyJet,
in London, UK.
The programme will allow Ford owners to rent their vehicles to
pre-screened drivers. It will begin in six American cities: Berkeley,
Oakland, and San Francisco in California; Portland, Oregon;
Chicago, andWashington DC.
In the United Kingdom the programme will launch in London.
Getaround will be responsible for managing the app that
customers in the USA use to arrange a ride share.
Initially, the programme will include 14,000 Ford Motor
Credit customers in the USA and 12,000 in Britain. This initial
experiment will last until November.
While Ford already o ered its customers in the UK the
opportunity to rent a car on a pay-as-you-go basis, now the
company will permit customers to o set the expenses of their
car payments by renting out their vehicles.
“A study released in February by the business advisory rm
AlixPartners found that 4.9 million people worldwide now
use car-share memberships,” Ms Maza wrote. “That number is
expected to jump to 26 million by 2020.”
Technology and environmental concerns
have doomed a venerable American
institution: the automobile salvage yard
“Separating themselves from their predecessors, they
computerise inventory, adhere to increasingly strict environ-
mental standards, maintain precise records, and choose not to
keep snarling Doberman pinschers at the entrance gate.”
These enlightened successors to traditional junkyard operators
are automotive recyclers – the preferred term in an industry
whose trade group, the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA),
has more than 3,000 members.
The transition came to the attention of Mike Tierney of the
New York Times when he was researching an article on Old Car
City USA, a tourist attraction in Georgia, about an hour’s drive
north of Atlanta.
Not too long ago, he noted, this repository of thousands
of abandoned autos was a salvage yard for do-it-yourselfers,
like so many others that dotted, or blighted, the American
landscape.
Now, “lovingly neglected” and open to paying visitors – $15 to
browse, $25 to take pictures – it is a relic of an auto industry that
is no more. (“Nature Helps Squeeze Out a Little More Mileage,
14th June)
Mr Tierney could nd no clear statistics on how many old-time
junkyards remain in the USA. “There are junkyards still out there,”
Michael Wilson, executive vice president of the ARA, told him.
“We just don’t represent them.”
The used-parts places were compelled to adapt, wrote
Mr Tierney, in response to tougher environmental and land-use
restrictions and the increasing complexity of vehicles.