If the automobile market is failing, in France but also in Europe, it is not only because the inflation of food and energy prices has reduced purchasing power. Not only because the price of cars, already rising sharply since 2010, has taken a huge hit post-Covid.
No, there’s a little something else that I hear about every time someone talks to me about cars, which is to say quite often.
We lack appetite in front of what is offered to us.
Who wants a car whose steering wheel vibrates as soon as you approach the center line or the shoulder, which beeps, or even brakes, if you exceed the limit indicated by the GPS by 3 km/h and/or or the panel reader, which is often the one on the exit ramp or another “in case of fog” or intended for caravans?
Who sees it as progress to have to, to reduce ventilation or increase heating, enter the menu and submenu of a screen, taking care not to tap the wrong icon because of a bump.
Who can stand having to wander through the twists and turns of this screen to activate a very simple function or deactivate a very boring one? And having to repeat the same operation each time you start?
These advances are more than painful, they are dangerous: barely had the hands-free kit and voice control allowed us to use our phone without taking our hands off the wheel or taking our eyes off the road when, bam, the manufacturers stuck us under the notice the reproduction of this screen five times larger, which must constantly be switched with that of the car.
In short, since the invention of ESP, the reversing camera and cornering lighting more than fifteen years ago, I don’t see what real improvements our cars have undergone. Nor anything that makes them more desirable.
The car lottery
And that’s not all. On the mechanical side, no more beautiful engines, the 4, 5, 6 cylinders, the 1.8 l and the 2 liters, so badly damaged that they disappeared from the market. Who takes pleasure in starting a mini three-cylinder turbo with direct injection which rumbles and vibrates like a diesel and struggles to move the ton and a half that the smallest car weighs with three or four people on board.
And for what economy?
All the former fans of turbo diesel who have converted to these marvels of super fuel engineering have found that their consumption – and therefore their CO2 emissions – has exploded on the motorway, and particularly for those who have opted for an SUV. And compared to old gasoline engines, the progress in sobriety is not always obvious.
Worse, they often had to dig into their pockets for serious pollution control, belt, turbo or valve problems. Diesel wasn’t much more reliable in its later years, but at least it was economical.
Today, driving 300,000 km without the slightest problem, as was commonplace in the 90s and 2000s, is like winning the car lottery – except with a Japanese car, of course.
As if everything was pushing us to convert to electric cars.
In fact, the arguments are piling up: they are much more reliable, cost two to three times less to maintain, not to mention the fuel savings.
900 km with a battery twice as light!
But if the thermal car was better before, the electric car will be better tomorrow.
I’m not talking about thousands of new charging stations; they are already there, in parking lots in commercial areas, in cities, in all motorway service areas and even, increasingly, in rest areas.
But progress to come regarding autonomy.
Not a week goes by without someone announcing a new type of battery that will be cheaper, faster to charge, lighter or have more autonomy or all of this at the same time. With sulfur or sodium or other miraculous mineral or metal, and easy to find as a bonus.
Last week, it was with silicon, a very available mineral since it is obtained from sand. This is a project from the company Paraclete Energy which promises a weight reduction of 73% or in other words 900 km of autonomy with a battery twice as light as the current NMC batteries.
Next week, it will be with potato starch, aluminum or I don’t know what else, but I am certain, batteries will still make enormous progress.
An oil change every 5,000 km
Imagine yourself in 1965, hesitating between a Peugeot 404 and the new Renault 16, two chignoles drinking their 10 or 11 liters per hundred to deliver around sixty horses and whose axle and gearbox had to be drained every 10,000 km and the engine every 5,000 km. One evening, at the hairdresser, while leafing through an automobile magazine you discover that a manufacturer will soon release a 120 horsepower engine consuming 5 liters per hundred with a maintenance interval of 40,000 km.
What are you doing ? It would be reasonable to keep your 403 while waiting for this marvel to arrive at the dealership…
This is exactly what is happening today with the electric car. According to forecasts, within five or ten years, current electric cars will be made has-been by new models with revolutionary batteries, liquid or solid, I don’t know but much more efficient, that’s for sure. While waiting for the next revolution which will further double the autonomy and reduce the price.
This wait-and-see attitude makes me irresistibly think of what the philosopher and political scientist Antonio Gramsci wrote in the 1930s, “The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro monsters emerge ».
In the role of the monster, I leave you the choice: the collapse of the European automobile industry, Chinese manufacturers, Elon Musk…
