Benz. Ford. Goodyear. Jobs.
If you’re a car guy (or girl), you probably know who Karl Benz, Henry Ford, or Charles Goodyear are: Benz invented the first motorcar, Ford made cars affordable with mass production by moving assembly lines and Goodyear invented vulcanized rubber. These men and others like them have made great strides in making everyday motoring possible.
The man may be known for innovations in IT and consumer electronics, sure, but I think he has made many far reaching contributions to the automobile than many of us realize.
Think about it.
The way cars are designed and engineered today has Steve Jobs all over it. The man pioneered personal computers with a GUI (graphical user interface) and an input device called a mouse. Can you imagine an engineer just working with a pen, paper and calculator nowadays? Of course not; they all use computers with CAD (computer-aided design), CAE (computer-aided engineering) and CAM (computer-aided manufacture).
If engineers and car designers still did it the old way, they could end up taking decades to come up with a new model. Having these digital tools at our disposal significantly reduced development time and costs. Guess what? All these programs owe a lot to the original Apple Lisa and its mouse.
I also get the feeling that many auto manufacturers and their CEOs are trying to launch cars the “Steve Jobs” way. Try watching any product launch with a keynote by Steve Jobs on YouTube (which, incidentally, are colloquially known as “Stevenotes”) and you’ll see what I mean.
There’s a certain charisma about how Steve Jobs introduced a product to the world. Friendly, easy to understand, funny, entertaining and genuine, Steve Jobs made sure the press and the public are not only well and truly introduced to what he and his company have come up with, but are actually excited by it.
If you’ve attended or seen a launch of a new car, ask yourself this: were you actually captivated by how the chief executive or chief engineer introduced the product to you? Chances are you actually got bored mid-speech. Mr. Jobs captivates his crowd, and you can be sure that the next day, newspapers, tech websites and blogs are on fire with his new product, whether it be the latest Macbook, a smaller iPod, a more capable iPhone or the new iPad.
Off the top of my head, there are only two CEO’s that can come close to the Stevenote-way of doing launches: Alan Mullaly of Ford and Carlos Ghosn of Nissan. That’s it.
But there’s one more thing (sorry, I couldn’t help it). I wasn’t old enough when 8-track players were the in-thing in cars, but I do remember the time when cassette tapes were standard, CD players were cool and mp3 players were a luxury. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod, however, little did we know that he practically made all of them obsolete.
Okay, okay, the iPod IS an mp3 player, but Apple really took that concept to a whole new level that today, I would have serious doubts about a car if its audio system does not have either an auxiliary-in socket or a USB port… just so we can hook up our beloved iPods.
In fact, the influence of the iPod on today’s car audio systems that manufacturers design the latter to be fully compatible with or even around what is arguably Apple’s and Steve Jobs’s greatest creation.
That’s why I think his name belongs not just with the greats of technology, but with the leading lights of the automotive world as well.
Think about it.
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Vince Pornelos
Associate Editor
www.autoindustriya.com
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