Do We Need A New Car Model Every Year?

Friday, 23. September 2011

Isn’t it about time the manufactures started to put their design staff on some internal company awareness courses or set them to work planning the layout of the staff canteen or something? Why should they do this? Because we have far too many cars and variants. Over the years we have seen the manufacturers start to change their cars every year with what is known as a ‘facelift’. This can mean changes to the lights or adding a couple of things that were on the options list previously onto the standard spec list and it will often mean changing the names of black, silver and white from things like the ‘oh so last year’ Midnight black to the new cutting edge Sabre black (it’s still bloody black for gawd’s sake).

Years ago you could buy an E Class Merc and replace it 3 years later with the exact same car in the exact same colour but then the manufacturers were not having to justify 3 or more price increases each year, using such feeble reasons as inflation, exchange rate and new model year.

In those days these excuses were pretty much unheard of except maybe once a year when the new price list was printed. Why am I ranting on? Because I’ve just seen the secret pictures of the new Fiesta SUV. What? Yep, you read it correctly, Ford are bringing out a Fiesta SUV.

What’s the bloody point? Fiestas are little runarounds with either 3 doors or 5 doors and a few different spec levels, why would anyone need an SUV version. But it’s like the Mini, we now have a million variants – why, it’s a Mini, do we really need 2 door coupe versions or SUV versions?

Note to car manufacturers, either get your designers designing cars that look and drive like supercars for a tenth the cost or send them on cookery classes to enable them to cover for lunches in the staff canteen, second thoughts who would want to sit down to lunch in front of a plate of oddly shaped sausages, pink mash and blue peas? By Graham Hill