The automobile industry should be a: "sell car -> build car" business model. Eliminating the vast majority of inventory, and limiting damage from failed products.
It's absurd in premise that you can go to a dealership and look at a hundred vehicles; six of each make, of varying colors - all sitting there, with the dealership and the automaker praying they get sold.
Keep one of each model for viewing and test driving. Take orders and customizations. Pick your vehicle up in a week, save 15% (thanks to vast reduction in waste, and the elimination of the middle-man sales commission).
I had a conversation with the publisher of Forbes almost 20 years ago about this concept. It's sad so little progress has been made in that time.
It's possible to get a custom order car right now, and if you tried buying one, you'd know why it sucks. It takes much longer than a week to get the car, try several months, and that won't magically change, it just can't. Considering that it takes over 45 hours of non-stop driving to go from Orlando to Seattle (chose a southeast point and northwest point to show how long it takes at its worst), you can see how a week might be a stretch. It would take two of those days non-stop in best conditions, leaving you with 5 days to build the car.
Hell, even buying a Tesla means you have to wait a month or two for your new car to arrive.
Teslas take a month or two just because they're backlogged. The actual production time is not that great. The total time between my car entering production in the factory and being available for me to pick up on the east coast was 12 days, of which 6 was the actual building and 6 was transporting it across the country. A week might be a stretch, but two is conceivable, and three should be quite practical. "Several months" certainly could be reduced substantially for cars that don't need to be shipped over an ocean.
I'm not sure how many people would be willing to wait a week, when the competition has cars ready to go on the lot, that you can test before you buy (so you know it's not DOA).
Many car purchases are made when the old car is dead, and it's hard to wait a week in that case. Plus a week is probably optimistic for production, and if assembled overseas, delivery is also going to be lengthy.
If these stupid laws about direct sales weren't in place I could very well imagine someone restarting manufacturing in Detroit or some other fallen place (definitely in the USA!) and doing build-on-demand.
You mean like Tesla restarting production in the fallen Nummi plant, and doing build-on-demand? The plant was cheap because it was basically abandoned.
It's absurd in premise that you can go to a dealership and look at a hundred vehicles; six of each make, of varying colors - all sitting there, with the dealership and the automaker praying they get sold.
Keep one of each model for viewing and test driving. Take orders and customizations. Pick your vehicle up in a week, save 15% (thanks to vast reduction in waste, and the elimination of the middle-man sales commission).
I had a conversation with the publisher of Forbes almost 20 years ago about this concept. It's sad so little progress has been made in that time.