Doesn’t Everyone Already Have One?

Was over a friend’s house watching baseball on TV tonight - prime time commercial TV, something I never see (don’t have a set myself).

The car ads are amazing. A guy walking down the street, notices a car and stops to look it over. Were it a woman he was checking out like that he would have been arrested for stalking, or maybe just lewd and lascivious. A Range Rover driving on a newly formed lava field, I believe this car would make your life exhilarating, some BMW promising that you would be extraordinary should you purchase one.

I felt out of touch. This does not match the reality I see around me day to day. We bog down in traffic, we cannot find a parking space, we drive on asphalt - perhaps fresh paved, perhaps potholed, sometimes out in the country a ways, but always asphalt (I know there are some young bucks out their thinking about the time they drove daddy’s ford off in a field last summer …) I don’t get it.

And I thought … doesn’t everybody already have a one? There seems to be no shortage of cars. So I looked up some numbers.

US Population - roughly 300 million. Between the ages of 18 and 64 - prime ‘need a car’ years, down to 186 million. And, according to a couple of sources (census, NADA) there are about 136 million cars currently “in operation”. That is not quite one for everybody, but pretty close, one for seven out of ten.

And, new car sales (at registered new car dealers only) have exceed new persons added to the US population annually by about a factor of 8 (16m vs roughly 2M annually) for the past several years.

So, it seems to me that pretty much everyone who needs a car most likely already has one. That would explain the commercials. I guess it is no surprise, but they are not selling cars, not selling something that anyone has a real need for.

They are selling sex, excitement, glamour, self-worth.

The illusion is astonishing, the costs real high and … everyone pretty much already has one.