What with the world ending and all, I thought I’d share my .01¢ on what to do with the failing auto industry before it passes from our memory. I know close to nothing about finance, the merits of bailouts, and who is to blame for this mess. But, it is entirely in keeping with my character to waste time coming up with ideas for things that I will never do anything about. So here are a few big ideas for car companies of the future.

The PC Model

What’s so great about PCs? They’re modular. You can swap out pretty much everything from the enclosure to the motherboard. Now imagine going online to the GM-Ford (a division Toyota-Imperial) website and entering the custom-car wizard. First, select your chassis from one of six sizes. Then the engine, its type (electric, hybrid, combustion), its power. Then the frame, the hood, the lights, the seats, the dashboard, and all the orther design bits. More knowledgeable people could customize virtually every system while people who’d rather not learn the finer details of fuel injection can just choose a standard or deluxe package and be done with that. You submit your order and, somewhere else on the continent, robots pick and assemble the parts for your order before shipping the car off to your nearest dealer. The great thing is that by making every part modular is that when your car breaks down you will be able to repair it quickly by swapping out parts. And if gas prices shoot up again, you can get a hybrid without switching cars. Now I know there are a few difficulties, like finding room to put the batteries for electric and hybrid cars, but they aren’t problems that couldn’t be overcome with desire, a large capable team of car makers, and money.

The CSS Model

I’m going to presume you don’t know what CSS is. If you do skip the next paragraph. In the paleolithic era of the Internet (circa 2000), web designers used HTML for the content (words, images, etc…) and design (layout, colour, font, background images). Then the along came CSS (on a technical note the 1st version of CSS was agreed upon in 1996, but nobody paid any attention then). CSS is used to handle design leaving HTML to handle just the content. What we now have is a separation of content from design. This is good for a lot of reasons. One reason is that it lets designers create the design without touching the content. Instead of having a car company create the systems that drive the car (the content) and design the car (the design, duh) you have a few companies that create the content-bits of the car and a bunch more doing the design. By fragmenting the industry, you create a system where the failure of car companies isn’t such a big deal. If a content-company fails, then designer-companies working on that platform will need to scramble and re-tool to stay in business. But this problem much more manageable than the ones that the auto industry is facing right now. And design companies can come and go with the fashion, but, regardless of the look of the car, it will be easy to find someone who can fix it if there is a problem. Yes, of course there are a few things that need to be worked out. But this is a space for big ideas.

The PC-CSS Model

Just to wrap things up, there’s no reason why these two models couldn’t be combined. All the assembled content-bits are sent to the design company where design-bits are added based on the customer’s specifications.