Change Happens Quick

In Monday's episode of @dithering.fm entitled "Electric Cars and Meta Subs" John Gruber made some comments about an "alternate universe where cars went electric a long time ago" that I quite enjoyed, quoted here via lightly edited transcription:

There's some other world where cars weren't gas driven for decades, and were driven by [battery technology having made advances decades earlier]. And in that alternate universe where the world was already all electric, or that was the default kind of car, cars would look very different. All vehicles would look very different than the cars we have today.

The cars we have today, and what people think cars are supposed to look like, whatever the type – sports car, family sedan, SUV – is all kind of defined by the fact that they are internal combustion engine cars, and they have drivetrains that take up a thing in the middle.

This reminded me of a satirical 2022 blog post entitled Test Drive of a Petrol Car that was written from a similar perspective. What if we lived in an alternate universe where cars were always electric and internal combustion engines were the newfangled technology?

Automakers do not sell the cars themselves, only through independent car repair shops as middlemen. It may sound like a bad omen to buy the car from a car repair shop that you want to visit as seldom as possible. But you apparently can’t buy the car directly from the manufacturer but must go through such intermediaries. The seller was very “pushy” and tried to convince us to buy the car very forcibly, but the experience is perhaps better elsewhere.

So we sat in the car and pressed the START button. The car’s gasoline engine coughed to life and started to operate. One could hear the engine’s sound and the car’s whole body vibrated as if something was broken, but the seller assured us that everything was as it should. The car actually has an electric motor and a microscopically small battery, but they are only used to start the petrol engine – the electric motor does not drive the wheels. The petrol engine then uses a tank full of gasoline, a fossil liquid, to propel the car by exploding small drops of it. It is apparently the small explosions that you hear and feel when the engine is running.

It's a humorous post that well illustrates how much human bias is built up around the familiar, and how hard it is think objectively. Understanding this innate human bias can work in your advantage when developing new products. The common refrain amongst product managers is that they are meeting people where they are. The best products give people enough of what they're used to while also introducing something genuinely new. This is a lot harder than it sounds though.

Gruber continued:

And now that the world is inexorably moving towards an electric future, [sooner rather than later], all cars are going to be electric. They're lurching in awkward steps towards the shapes and form factors that electric cars should be, while trying to be appealing to people's sensibilities that were forged by a different universe.

They're just so different at a fundamental technology level that, that there's no real way to launch something that is truly native electric.

Then he compared the ongoing shift from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles with the shift from wired to wireless ear buds.

Very similar to AirPods when they came out and everybody said they look stupid. Everybody wearing AirPods looks stupid. But you look exactly like you did with the [wired ones] everybody had been wearing since 2001, except you cut the wires off. And it's like, I don't know, it still looks stupid.

And now, of course, you look a little bit more distinctive and noticeable if you have wired earbuds. Change happens quick.

I couldn't agree more!