With the announcements of possible closures of Volkswagen plants in Germany, given the crisis in sales of new cars and the collapse of preferences for electric vehicles, instead of considering further government interventions necessary to support the sector with new incentives, we launch a semi-serious provocation: what if we asked manufacturers to make cars as we really need them? Because the paradox is that European politics, which should be an expression of popular will, therefore to have less polluting cars at acceptable costs, has instead forced manufacturers to make models that nobody wants. And since nothing is thrown away in the industry, here is the festival of recycling of platforms but also of engines and many components, now identical on too many models. Result: cars that are too similar, boring to drive and very expensive.
They call it optimization, but those who work in the metalworking sector have long noticed that figures such as “casual managers” have multiplied in every sector. Once upon a time, to found a company you needed an idea, a warehouse, an accountant and a secretary. Today, however, you need a “program manager”, a “project manager”, a “product engineer”, a “financial manager”, a “marketing manager” and we still haven’t drawn a line on the monitor or tightened a screw. Far from increasing costs, as a university professor said: “it’s impossible to make a profit if the number of people working in companies is less than the number of those who matter”. As for marketing, it decides practically everything, from the colors available to the smell of the interior fabrics, as long as it “stays within the budget”. The result is cars designed by stylists who inside must “make you perceive” an idea that is not reality. There is the “family feeling”, common to several models from the same company, there is the “home feeling”, which should make us think we are in our living room, there is the “sport feeling”, which with an adhesive film printed with a carbon texture makes you feel like you are in a serious sports car, instead, the dashboard is made of plastic even if it costs as much as three new cars in the previous decade.
Putting the word “cross” in front of or behind a name isn’t enough to make a car an off-roader, and believe me, not everyone likes having a TV screen in front of their eyes without ever asking for it. But who said that infotainment has to be so invasive and that children have to watch movies while traveling. Let’s teach them to look outside, open the windows and feel the air! Give us back the spare tire and, above all, the mechanical handbrake because the electric one is a real perversion.
Let’s be clear, we are happy for the greater safety of vehicles, but no “adas” system will ever prevent the unfortunate and irresponsible use of the car, autonomous driving will come but all this rush to abandon the steering wheel is not there. Because driving is still beautiful despite the speed bumps, the speed cameras, the cyclists connected with headphones who pedal the wrong way and the scooters without lights that test our reflexes from behind the curve. After the dashboards, the road itself has become a video game, there are cars that no longer have parking lights but a two-meter wide luminous sign that disorients and excessive daytime lights that annoy, they seem like robots from Japanese cartoons of the seventies.
By now the green ideology has unleashed a war between those who have to use the car and the right-thinking politicians who wonder why people love SUVs with high wheels, but they are the same ones who in the city council voted to raise the sidewalks and built deadly obstacles for motorcyclists. Our historic villages are not Texas or Wyoming, today’s cars may be large hybrids, but they do not pass through the narrow walls of the towns. The small off-road vehicles are extinct, the Panda has become Pandino but without 4×4, and the Suzuki Jimny, which arrived with the least suitable engine for the Italian market that there could be, had to become a two-seater truck in order to be sold without paying fines. But with the Alps and the Apennines they were the only “off road” vehicles we needed.
There were once dozens of models of real small cars on the market, and today there are not even ten; names from the past that have transformed cars into icons continue to be exploited, and no model with an innovative name can be successfully imposed. Not to mention the lack of imagination of those who christen models with letters and numbers. What car do you have? An A3 and you? C4… sunk! Instruction manuals have become guides for morons translated by artificial intelligence into twenty languages; once upon a time you found how to replace a light bulb and adjust the ignition, today the recommendation not to drink the coolant.
Here, then, once the incentives ended, the market fell by 13.4% compared to the same month in 2023 and it is not just a question of holidays, and according to Unrae, compared to 2019 a generous 18% must be recovered. After an increase due to public money of 118%, electric cars plunged by 36.1% marking a percentage on the market that went from 5% to 3.8% in a year. Disaster, even the sales data for methane gas and LPG cars are terrible (almost -96% and -7%). To reverse the trend, it will take time, money but above all a change in mentality regarding the car, which must return to being a concrete good, without fluff, fundamental for the economy.
