Robert Q. Riley Enterprises: Product Design & Development
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Lifestyle Vehicles
"Design" Alone Can Affect Energy Intensity

Lifestyle Vehicles
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We’ve seen how lifestyle vehicles can increase energy use. The popularity of SUVs is a good example of how a sort of "image" can influence choices, and those choices lead to significantly higher fuel consumption.  But nobody buys an SUV to go trailblazing.  Consumers are turned on to the personality of SUVs, the vehicle theme, and they buy these four-wheel-drive trucks to drive around the city. Well this same type of dynamic can work in reverse.

The real reason we buy a particular car is for the effect it has on our brain chemistry.  What most of us are really paying for is that wonderful endorphin rush.

People buy SUVs because they feel good wearing them.  They buy new VW Beetles because they strike an emotional cord.  And they don’t buy Smart Cars because no one feels very hot driving one.  But if they bought Smart Cars like they buy SUVs, if Smart Cars turned them on like SUV do, then energy demand would drop - and it would drop by a lot - and it would have little or nothing to with technology and everything to do with design.

One of the most difficult things for us humans to do is to step outside our own mindset and see things from a different perspective. So I’ll tell you a story about in-line skates before I go on.

Before in-line skates were invented, if you did a market study to find out what consumers wanted in their skates, you would have found that they wanted quieter wheels, better bearings, a more comfortable fit - but the study would have never told you that consumers wanted skates with the wheels in line, instead of side-by-side. And if you had asked consumers what they thought of the idea of skates having in-line wheels, I’m sure they would have told you that they wouldn’t be interested - that it was a lousy product idea.  Today, in-line skates are a global business of half a billion dollars - and they came from a vision rendered in superior design, rather than an analysis of the market.  I noticed a blurb in this morning's newspaper that they are considering the idea of making in-line skates an Olympic event.   "Design" can be a very powerful tool for slashing energy intensity.

 

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