Saturday, July 9, 2011

The EASt may be the solution

In the last four days I have visited no less than TWO of the three cities rated as the top on the scale of unemployment in Ontario if not CANADA as a whole. The three cities are Peterborough, Oshawa, and Windsor. It strikes me that the auto crisis in North America is hitting some people really hard. All that infrastructure that goes into an auto plant, all those highly skilled people and all of that support structure from the towns and provinces going to waste hit me hard. I began to think "What can I do?". It would have been easy for me to dismiss this thought and just forget about it. After all I am a mere CHEMIST. I have never been involved with the auto sector professionally except VERY recently and that too in only a peripheral way. But the thought kept nagging at me.

It was a long drive back from Windsor and this gave me time to rethink a conversation I had had there and to refine it. Somewhere we were discussing developments in India in the auto sector and how they are producing now (after the success of the Tata Nano)a car that will run 300 miles on a tank of... (wait for the drum roll) COMPRESSED AIR! They are setting about solving THEIR problems and addressing THEIR needs. It struck me that we in Canada are actually NOT doing that. Rather, we are allowing ourselves to be absorbed by a marketing campaign that is suited for the US and generated by the US and that actually doesn't suit our needs in Canada in this sector in some key ways.

I recalled that almost a half century ago some bright mind in India had thought about the needs of the middle class. They had decided that a STABLE manufacture of a relatively good but not "fancy" or "stylish" car at a reasonable price was the MAIN need. They went to the Austin company (in the UK) and bought the details for the manufacture of the model of the Ambassador car for the year just completed. They then made a commitment to make this SAME EXACT car for the next decade, year after year. Think what that did for the price. Think what that did for the "after market" industry for this particular make and model. Think what that did for the RELIABILITY of service - literally every auto-mechanic in the COUNTRY would eventually know this car like the back of their hands. Almost fifty years later in 2005 I stepped off a plane from Canada to India. There, to greet me was a brand new company car from the host company. Guess which one it was??? YES the SAME one that had been made there year after year for that long. The so-called Hindustan (the name given by these astute folks to the Austin Ambassador). I got into a conversation with the driver and he said that the after-market industry in this car had flourished to such a point that it was unthinkable that anyone would be able to stop its manufacture. You could quite literally do almost ANYTHING with these cars now.

I wonder if the Canadian minivan is not that sort of a car for Mums all across Canada. Think what they want: Reliable, easily serviced, reasonably priced, roomy enough for the 2.5 kids and high enough to be safe in the traffic. Of course reasonable on gas would be a plus but really that is getting much better these days for even the minivan. And there is no end to what one can think of to do in this category in after market add-ons.

What if some enterprising moneyed person were to buy this years minivan details and take one of the minivan factories that is now being abandoned and commit to make the SAME minivan for the next decade. Would that turn our auto sector around? Could it make jobs where today there is despair? Could its inevitable success spill over to say... the Pickup Truck sector? Who knows. But it is an experiment that has succeeded somewhere else in the world. And lest you are thinking "That could work in a DEVELOPING country but not in a DEVELOPED country like Canada."; that same experiment worked with taxis in London some years before the Indian experiment.

I think I can venture a guess as to where your mind is going at this time. You are probably thinking "Yeah but I like the fact that I get "new features" with each new model. That after all is the thrill of getting a new car." Let me point out that this is a marketing ploy invented by big companies with the PRIMARY aim of squeezing out the after-market industry so that those dollars spent there are funneled back to the big companies in the first place. Every one of us doesn't get a new car each year. And when we do we like some of the new features but I can't think of anyone who likes ALL of the ones they got and NONE of the ones offered by the competition. With the purchase of a simple relatively cheap "standard" model and a thriving after-market industry (need I point out that this could be UNIQUELY Canadianif such a canadian minivan were to be manufactured!) we could all get the features we WANTED - and only those - and we could get them as we could afford them not being forced into buying them all of them at the same time. Think of the eco-friendliness where car parts that have NOT outlived their useful lifetimes can be simply reused and the parts that have come to their useful limits could be simply replaced. We do some of this tese days but the used parts industry is very redundant. Look at the scrap yards in the country if you have any doubts.

Who knew that sometimes old and foreign is a possible solution to today's domestic problems. Your thoughts would be most welcome.