From AMG to Concorde, People Want Aspirational Transport
This is (the final) part three of a series on the evolution of vehicle design. Read the first part here and the second one here.
In the two prior posts, I’ve discussed the macro trends impacting the future of travel and transportation design — that things and people are becoming digitally networked as never before, customer expectations continue to rise from the brands and companies they interact with, and the obvious forthcoming automation of the vehicles themselves.
We’re starting to see multi-modal solutions that connect the user from point A to B through multiple transport methods and how that will likely evolve into more seamless transport handoffs in the future. In parallel, the vehicles and physical spaces will start to meld into seamless brand experiences as the clear bifurcations between stationary and moving space become less perceptible.
The third (and I think most exciting) signpost signaling a shift in how we design transport vehicles is seeing consumers make decisions about their vehicle purchases that align not just with a brand, but with their lifestyle aspirations.
The number of lifestyle-focused trim lines and vehicles that automakers have rolled out has exploded in the last ten years, mainly in response to customers feeling less loyal to a particular brand and more interested in cultivating the perfect version of themselves — a personal brand. Brands outside of transportation have responded to this shift by tailoring products in the context of certain lifestyle aspirations, and automakers have followed suit.
There are generally three buckets of lifestyle trim lines in the market today: performance-focused, off-road/outdoors-focused, and eco-focused, and automakers cannot rush fast enough to put out product that aligns with these three buckets.
The results coming in are stark — the mix of AMG vehicles (Mercedes’s performance-focused trims) to regular vehicles has consistently grown, TRD Pro (Toyota’s off-road focused trim) has now been rolled out across its entire SUV fleet due to demand, and Tesla has shown that the desire for the eco-status vehicle is there…and then some.
These are all aspirational products that come with enormous additional price tags over the base models. AMG models can be 3–5 times more expensive than the “generic” Mercedes model, TRD Pro commands a hefty price uptick, and the eco people need a lot of money to buy any of the BEVs on the market, especially Tesla.
When we think of an aspirational lifestyle, it’s not something that’s not attainable, it’s just something that we strive to maintain 24/7, rather than sampling every once in a while. Living up to an aspirational life can be exhausting (as we’re all well aware) — a lot of people aspire to be gym rats but only end up going twice a month. A similar pattern exists in all consumer purchases, and I would be willing to bet that the amount of track or dirt road time that any of these special-trim cars get is no greater than 1–2% over the lifetime of ownership. People buy these vehicles because they want to buy into a mindset — I’m an off-road granola camper that loves to escape to the mountains, or I’m a Whole Foods person that has been carbon neutral since 2012, or I’m a performance junkie that appreciates horsepower to torque ratios — and the amount of custom trims and accessories to reinforce this lifestyle is proof enough of how far people will go. In the future, expect to see customers buying lifestyle vehicles become the norm.
Nowhere is the idea of aspirational lifestyle transportation more vividly put on display than in the now-defunct Concorde commercial airliner, where the focus of Concorde was not just on the plane itself, but the brand and the experience that extended far beyond the Mach 2 speeds at which it flew.
Concorde (even lacking a definite article, for effect) was the embodiment of aspiration as Lawrence Azerrad recently wrote in his beautiful history of the brand in “Supersonic: The Design and Lifestyle of Concorde”. Born in the Space/Atomic age, it was the closest thing that “ordinary” consumers had to experiencing the cutting edge of technology and innovation, and people who flew Concorde were a rarefied, sophisticated, jet-setting group. A group that truly valued time more than money.
Without a doubt, Concorde is the closest we’ve ever come to a truly seamless and consistent experience across stationary and moving spaces at a genuinely-commercial scale. The Concorde experience transcended the plane, starting the moment you walked into the airport, until the moment you stepped foot out of the other. It was essentially the Polar Express for grown ups — where the hangover from the magical experience was enough to want another taste.
With the advent of companies like Four Seasons getting into airlines and several other endeavors into cross-stationary and moving spaces, brands and manufacturers are beginning to question the difference between traveling from one destination to another and simply always being “there” — the “there” being the experience that a brand has cultivated, regardless of time or place.
In the future, as the various trends and factors I’ve discussed come into focus, I hope we will eventually take this question for granted, and Concorde will be but a milestone on the path to truly seamless brand experiences rather than a bar that can never again be met.
While vehicles and other transportation methods today pale in comparison to Concorde, the enthusiasm for aspirational transportation is still there. People want their consumer choices to reflect the aspirations that they have for themselves regardless of socioeconomic status, and transportation is a literal and metaphoric manifestation of how they “get there”.
We spend (and waste) too much time moving from place to place for it to not matter how we get there, and I believe that as cities become denser, populations swell, and technology advances, the opportunities as well as the challenges to build new methods and experiences has never been greater.
