#790: (We don’t need no) More Subscription

Posted on July 1, 2026 (Updated July 7, 2026) by ewand

Or do we? Is it just the way everything is going to be paid for?

The business model of computer software used to be that you bought a license to use a piece of software and, as long as you had the disk it could be installed from, you could keep using it for as long as you want. Maybe if you need support, you’ll pay an ongoing fee (“maintenance”) which could be a chunky %age of the initial purchase cost, but that would likely give you access to later upgrades too.

Subscription software has radically changed the market over recent years, just as entertainment streaming services has largely replaced buying stuff on physical media. For business software, 85% of the market is in subscription software/services compared to more traditional licensing, according to some estimates.

Breathy commentators also predict agentic AI to be the death knell of Software-as-a-Service – the SaaS-pocalypse – yet who’s to say that most vibe coding isn’t just trying to make something that looks a lot like an existing SaaS product…? And if people are building software services – AI or not – how are they going to price it for sale?

Article content — lies, damned lies, and statistics

Microsoft recently launched a new Copilot service (another one?) called Copilot Cowork, which muddies the waters a little by being charged on a usage-based model rather than a fixed per-seat/per-month approach, as is the case with most end-user-oriented stuff.

Any developer who’s used AI services in AWS, Google or Microsoft Azure clouds will be familiar with the idea that you pay for what you use, so you’d better be clear on what people are going to do with it before you give them the keys to the shiny SaaS offering you’ve built. Or you might end up like the Mustangs leaving cars & coffee on a Sunday morning.

What do we want? We don’t know

Users of subscription services of any type aren’t always happy – they might feel like they’re tricked into taking out subscriptions that will cost them more in the long run if they forget to cancel.

Also, what’s to stop the provider jacking up the price in subsequent terms, effectively forcing the decision to move to something else? Anyone in the UK who is a Sky TV subscriber will know all about that rodeo. See also #65: Enshittifcation 2025 pt 1 – progressing well

Car companies have also been playing with this idea for a while – BMW, for example, had the idea that some car features could be enabled by an ongoing subscription instead of an upfront-cost like the initial purchase of the car.

And there have been various rental schemes where you pay a monthly fee to have access to a fleet of cars, rather than owning or leasing a specific one. Zipcar closed their scheme last year so maybe the uptake wasn’t good enough to sustain it.

The SKU dilemma and manufacturing complexity

Whenever a product manufacturer gives customers the ability to customize stuff, it can make their lives inordinately complex, unless they are already pretty much bespoke.

Rolls Royce Motor Cars found that if you’re obscenely rich enough to buy one of its vehicles, then you could be persuaded to shell out even more to customize it to your own spec. Since they don’t make very many cars, it doesn’t cost them much more to make each one different, yet they can charge an additional 40% or more on top of the sticker price. And now the sales model is to persuade every buyer to customize, therefore making them piles of extra cash.

Prospective car buyers of more modest means will probably have played around with online configurators, where they choose the numerous model variants, trims, add-ons, colour and wheel options etc.

Part of the problem with building anything complex and with many options is that the number of possible combinations can quickly get very high, and that may make it more complex to manufacture and to support in the long term.

It gets worse if some option requires others, or is blocked by others too; if you want the premium comfort seats, you need to have the multifunction steering wheel, and that’s only available in one colour… and the winter experience pack might give you a heated windscreen but that means you can’t have the head up display… and so on.

Companies who need to have many variables and options when building out a product or service proposal might turn to custom business software like Configure Price Quote (CPQ), to try and manage the complexity – with one provider using a Truck configurator as a demo. This kind of software finds its way into lots of manufacturing processes, but also unusual ones too – like the funeral home which used CPQ to produce a custom quote based on all the types of coffin, flowers, music etc that it might offer.

If car companies could simplify their manufacturing process by essentially building most of the underlying hardware to be the same, then use software to differentiate the versions or models, that would be great, right? Some, like Tesla, offer a few main variants of each model which all come with the same kit installed. The only real variation at a customer level is choosing the colour, and possibly including add-ons like roof racks or floor mats, none of which need to be included at manufacturing time.

Manufacturers have grown to love the option sheet, though. Rinsing your customer for thousands more just so they can have some gizmo has been a high-margin exercise for years. Ferrari used to charge over $4,000 to enable CarPlay on its cars (even on their $500K SF90 of a few years ago) even though all the kit to make it work was already there. If you pointed out that it comes as standard on basic $20K rental car hatchbacks, you’d probably have been met with a shrug and a thousand-yard stare.

Intel’s 1998 hardware dilemma

Manufacturing CPUs like Intel’s Pentium range of the late 1990s used to be structured where they’d try to make the high-spec, top speed processors that sold for the most money. Some of the underlying silicon wouldn’t quite pass the tests to be certified, so they could disable some of the components or run them at a lower speed, and the chips would pass. These were then bundled as cheaper, lower-spec CPUs. Alternatively, they could set out to make slightly lower-spec CPUs and achieve a higher rate of manufacturing success. Everybody’s happy.

Except, as manufacturing processes improved, it became easier to get reliable quality, but there was still high demand for low- and mid-range processors. So, Intel upped the production of its high-end silicon, but started knobbling some of the resulting chips, forcing them to run slower and selling them badged-up as a lower grade CPU for a lower price. Meet the market demand where it’s at, while protecting the higher margin top-end stuff.

Inevitably, hackers found a way around…

BMW felt the wrath of customer feedback

As mentioned earlier, in 2022 BMW had the genius idea of building in heated seats to all their cars in a given range. If you’re making a seat anyway, the extra cost of installing the heating bits and all the supportive wiring is going to be relatively small, compared to the hassle of having bottom warming as an optional extra that needs to be treated differently as each car rolls down the production line.

Heated seats might be standard for the higher-spec, more expensive models, but what if they’re usually optional for the cooking ones? Well, they could be installed but inactive unless the customer decided to pay $18/month to use them…

Customer feedback was very clear that they don’t like to think they’re paying twice for something, and if they’re built in to start with then the customer has already forked out for them, thank you. BMW climbed down.

Other car manufacturers have toyed with having customer subscriptions; some make you pay if you want connected services like controlling your car from an app, though many will bundle them in for free as long as you keep taking your car to one of their authorised service centres.

Volvo even had a subscription service where you basically get the VaaS (Vehicle as a Service) – but that has been rolled back now, presumably through low uptake.

Paying to play is here to stay

Car makers won’t give up easily, though. Especially in electric vehicles, there are many opportunities to limit or expand the functionality based on unlocking things in software, or possibly using hardware control modules to unlock capability that is already installed.

Volkswagen offers a bunch of upgrades to its cars, including a performance boost that can be paid for as a monthly fee or paid all up front (and stays with the car). Other manufacturers – like Polestar and Mercedes – also offer paid-for performance upgrades which just unlock latent capability rather than add anything new to the car.

While this sounds like a bit like a racket, software has always been this way, even in perpetual license times. You could download the trial version of a product and as soon as you put in a license key, it’s fully unlocked. Or there’s the fact that a different license key for Windows Server would unlock higher level capabilities, even though all the actual code is there on every version.

Tip: keep a single list of every subscription

If we accept the inevitability of subscribing to streaming services, Amazon Prime for easy delivery, news sites or other online content as well as security or VPN etc software, it’s worth spending the time making a OneNote or similar table with every single thing you subscribe to, when it’s due to renew and how much it costs.

The act of keeping such a list updated might help to decide if you really do want to keep all these things active, especially when the “for your security, we’ve had to increase the price by only 10%…” renewal email arrives…

#789: Do brands really know who their customers are?

Posted on June 3, 2026 (Updated July 7, 2026) by ewand

Producers of goods and services often re-jig their portfolio, launching new offerings that are quite different or may be very differently priced. You’d like to think the product managers will have a plan for what their thing does, who will be their target customer, how much they’re be prepared to pay for it, where it will be sold and so on. They might even have an Ideal Customer Profile defined, so they can effectively pitch their wares to the right people.

It takes a brave – or even foolish? – company to actively decide their current buyers are not the ones they want in future. Telling someone that your product is not for them might be a good way of ensuring they don’t come back to you; or if you want to win them back, it could take a lot of effort.

There are plenty of times that companies seem to be making crazy decisions that look good on a PowerPoint slide in some internal planning meeting but get a very different reaction when unveiled in the real world. Either they don’t appreciate who their customers are and what they want, or they consciously decide that they need to appeal to a different set. Sometimes, they get it right (see Henry Ford’s misquote about people wanting faster horses) but not always…

“No plan survives first contact with reality”

… could be used to describe some of these. A slight reworking of the famous quotation that has evolved into “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”, or Mike Tyson’s “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. Some brands make what they conclude are stupid mistakes, and they quickly bury the evidence and move on (e.g. New Coke, GAP logo, Windows Vista). Or it might prove in the long run that they really knew what they were doing after all.

Shocking Electric Cars news

As has been mentioned before (#780), there’s a car industry move towards electrification, initially largely driven by government mandate to make manufacturers pivot from selling polluting Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles to initially selling cleaner hybrids and onto full zero-emission Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs). Consumer demand for EVs has been less than enthusiastic, due to high initial costs in comparison with ICE (though that is lessening), charging infrastructure concerns and the doom-mongers of the red-faced press. That said, people who have made the switch love them and the tipping point may be just about here.

Both Mercedes and Ferrari have recently announced high-end, EV-only cars and the reaction has been very mixed.

The Mercedes AMG 4-door GT Coupe might be hugely impressive on paper, with its supercar-humbling performance along with synthesized V8 rumbling soundtrack and a virtual “gear shift”, trying to appeal to enthusiasts of old-school AMG. Its £160k price-tag for the top spec C63 seems hefty, but then it’s got more power than a Bugatti Veyron so could be seen as cheap by comparison.

Mercedes are replacing a petrol-powered mashup of big saloon and 2-door sports car; it was expensive (£100K+) and presumably didn’t sell all that many cars in comparison to the rest of the range. But now the old dinosaur is no more and it’s being replaced with the pure EV that will be some kind of halo car.

But look at it. Online commentators have not been kind to its appearance. Maybe the “never buy an EV” keyboard warriors are the last people Mercedes are trying to woo with this car. Porsche must be looking over their shoulder, but their Taycan model has been around for years and though it might not suit every colour or wheel choice, they are generally thought of as good-looking cars.

Coming a few days after the Merc, Ferrari finally took the covers off their long-awaited first full EV – the Luce (which means “light”, even if it is expected to tip the scales at 2.25tonnes. Yes, a 5,000lb, 5 seat electric Ferrari which might go like a stabbed rat and will cost well over €500,000).

The Luce had input from design agency LoveFrom, featuring Apple design gurus Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson. They got to design the car from a clean sheet, especially the interior, which has been broadly seen as A Good Thing. Unusually, the inside was unveiled ahead of the rest of the car, and now we can probably see why. It is said that particular focus was on tight integration of all the car’s systems: just as Apple strove to make deliberate design decisions to make things simpler and feel better thought out.

Externally, however, car journalists are mostly in “WTAF” mode. But they’re not the target customer, nor perhaps are Ferrari’s regular clientele. Maybe the ultra-rich, modern tech bro type doesn’t want something that’s got lots of fins and wings and shouty exhausts.

Auto blogger Shmee150 (whatever you think of his caricature, he does speak a lot of sense sometimes) commented on the Luce launch as being the most controlled, tied down unveiling he’d ever seen. Some of the more traditional motoring press were not invited, while some more new media tech-forward people were.

It’s almost like Ferrari knew it was going to be hugely controversial, and the people in the room who were classic Ferrari fans were foaming at the mouth while the “new gen” were loving it. Shmee/Tim drew a division – those who wore Apple watches loved it, while those with mechanical watches did not.

It’ll be interesting to see what the Luce does for the rest of the Ferrari line-up – since there’s basically zero familial resemblance, it’s hard to see how some of the innovations in this model will trickle down to the others in the range. Ferrari’s in-house design centre might well be smarting at the fact they had little hand in the whole project, but they might also be smirking at some of the reactions to the way the thing looks.

One critique is that if you took the Ferrari badges off, there’s no way you’d know it was a Ferrari. It has a little bit of Jaguar i-Pace about it (as seen by Waymo users worldwide), and Nissan even poked a bit of fun at Ferrari through (now-deleted) social posts:

There’s even a joke that it could be mistaken for a next-gen Fiat Multipla…

For Mercedes, they’re replacing that previous petrol-driven AMG GT 4-door coupe so their new GT is clearly aimed at converting traditional customers to be EV buyers without wearing a hairshirt or seeming like they need to renounce their previous passion.

Ferrari, on the other hand, seem to be splitting their market – will Ferrari dealers insist that you buy a Luce if you want to be on the waiting list for their next fire-breathing, limited edition hypercar? Maybe, but it does seem like Ferrari is consciously admitting this isn’t the car for you if you’re one of its regular customers.

Backing both horses (to a degree)

Traditional car makers shifted their product lines to initially put in electric drivetrains in place of ICE or hybrid, and some still offer multiple variants of each model. Increasingly, they’re building bespoke EV-first offerings that are more efficient, therefore get longer range from the same-sized battery and (with the right kind of roadside infrastructure) can charge much quicker too.

Some are cheaper, too. Volvo’s forthcoming EX60, nominally the replacement for the XC60 family SUV (which is the Swedish company’s most successful car ever), works out about 7% less expensive (for an equivalent spec) than the top range hybrid. And the new EV is faster yet still has a quoted range of over 400 miles.

Tellingly, Volvo has not said if and when it will kill off the petrol engined forebear, though. As long as enough buyers will fork out for the older car, they’ll going to try to keep making it.

BMW has launched the first of a new generation (“Neue Klasse”, a rethinking of the way the cars look and how they work under the skin), in its iX3, which has been awarded “World Car of the Year 2026”. Not just best EV, but the best car full stop, if you pay attention to awards.

The new i3 saloon, an EV equivalent of the iconic 3-series, is about to enter production; it promises over 550 miles of range on a full charge. Again, BMW hasn’t said it is replacing the 3-series but it feels like a matter of time…

Jaaaaag – the early bird catching the worm?

18 months ago, Jaguar famously burned their entire house down, ceasing production of all ICE cars and saying they were going to build a whole new range of EVs, starting with a huge and expensive car that would be new from the ground up. Trailing this whole reinvention with the bizarre “Copy Nothing” advert. The backlash was loud and immediate, with commentators questioning the sanity of trying to rely on a huge £100K+ pure EV saloon car as the one product to save the company.

As things have developed, Jaguar may have got rid of a few key people, appointed a new CEO and even decided not to retain the agency behind their relaunch ad… but the car’s development is going well, and it’s said to be very good indeed, if you like that kind of thing.

Covered in camouflage, Type 01 prototypes have been driven by a load of car journalists, alongside a fleet of “greatest hits” from Jag’s heritage fleet. It seems they really want to show that what made their cars great in years gone by can still be applied to even the latest tech now.

You wonder if Jag’s designers and marketeers aren’t quietly pouring one out for Ferrari & Mercedes, since they got so much flak for the Type 00 designs a little more than a year ago, but in the meantime, those who have seen the prototypes are saying it’s going to look and go very well. We’ll see later this year.

#788: A 1970s crisis that (almost) killed the industry

Posted on May 6, 2026 (Updated July 7, 2026) by ewand

History shows that many dominant businesses and regimes don’t always survive. It also shares lessons; don’t allow despotic lunatics to seize power, do stay true to your founding principles, try to keep people (your customers especially) happy and don’t make too much of a mess. Oh, and make your bed every morning.

Some industries decline because their time is up – in many parts of the world, the coal mining industry has all but disappeared as demand has shifted. There isn’t much demand for whale oil these days, given superior alternatives and environmental concerns.

The usefulness of a product or technology alters other things in time, too; Jay Leno has commented that the automobile was the saviour of the horse: since they were no longer required for transport and cargo, more horses could live a better life in their fields than being beaten and dragged through stinking cities full of other horses’ effluent.

Christmas Day 1969 – pivotal for Switzerland

They didn’t know it at the time, but the valleys of Switzerland between Geneva and Zurich (the Jura Arc) were about to be shaken to their core on 25th December 1969. Cities and small towns all across the country were known for their production of clocks and particularly watches.

It wasn’t always thus – prior to the Swiss establishing dominance in watchmaking, England was the centre of that world. Even Rolex was founded in London. But when wristwatches really started taking off after the World War I, that strip of northern Switzerland set the pace. Even today, people will comment on a finely tuned machine as being “like a Swiss watch”.

The disruptor technology

Over 90,000 people were employed in the industry across Switzerland in 1970, but that fell to around 1/3 over the next 15 years thanks to a competitive threat which they had not really taken seriously enough: Quartz.

In essence, a traditional mechanical watch measures time and displays it by advancing the hands, using a tightly coiled spring to power the many components within. The spring needs to be kept under some tension – either by hand-winding every day or two, or by an automatic watch converting the wearer’s movements into tightening the spring. Then there’s the balance & escapement which perform the same role as a pendulum swinging back and forth in an old clock – they regulate the timing.

The downsides of all these mechanicals are that they’re relatively expensive to make, and the fine lubrication involved will ultimately dry out, meaning the watch will need servicing every few years. They’re potentially affected by magnetic fields and don’t like sudden shocks (like being dropped) much either.

Advances had been made in coming up with electric clocks and watches since the 1950s, with tuning forks or quartz crystals and powered motors taking the place of the traditional spring/wheels/escapement arrangement. It’s one thing having a wall clock that is powered by mains or even a big battery, but miniaturising the same technology to make a practical pocket watch or wristwatch was proving difficult.

Quartz watches used a small electrical charge to vibrate a crystal in place of the balance/escapement, and using small motors to move the hands instead of a series of wheels. A small battery replaces the whole main spring for powering the lot.

One tell-tale difference between most analogue mechanical and quartz/battery watches is that if there’s a second hand, it’ll move relatively smoothly on a mechanical watch but on a quartz watch, it’ll jump one second at a time. That’s a way of preserving battery life – rather than powering the actuator which moves the hand once every fraction of a second, it’ll be only every second, or even every few seconds when the battery starts to run out.

https://www.linkedin.com/embeds/publishingEmbed.html?articleId=8348052211396942400&li_theme=light

Here’s a slo-mo of a mechanical 1974 Omega Speedmaster and a quartz 1983 Seiko “Speedmaster”, where the chronograph timers on both watches are active. The Seiko’s main hand does move in distinct one-second jumps, but the 1/20th seconds marked out on the subdial at 3 o’clock is hilariously quick.

The seeds of demise for the traditional Swiss watch industry were laid bare when the first quartz watch available world-wide was released on Christmas Day, 1969: Seiko’s Quartz Astron.

Although we later got used to quartz watches being cheap to the point of being disposable, the 35SQ Quartz Astron was not. Described as being around “the price of a small car” (¥450,000– about US $10,500 in today’s money), it was 18ct yellow gold with a distinctive hammered finish and very much pitched as a luxury good.

It’s not about being first

The Swiss has been investing in tuning forks and quartz for years, and by the late 1960s, there were viable quartz movement in Swiss labs. They followed Seiko to market in early 1970, but the watches that used the early movements were chunky and the batteries needed replacing too often. The Swiss industry was seemingly not overly concerned about quartz – although they were far more accurate than mechanical watches, they were initially more expensive and the cost and hassle of getting your old watch serviced every 5 years was still better than having to replace your quartz watch’s battery every few months (or even, weeks).

In hindsight, what followed could have been a case study in The Innovator’s Dilemma: quartz movements, and the watches they were fitted to, became radically simpler, cheaper and more efficient. Batteries lasted longer, and they quickly met the need of the majority of watch wearers worldwide. The bottom fell out of the Swiss watch industry and caused a near-death experience referred to as “The Quartz Crisis”.

Other factors played a part

It wasn’t just arrogance or blind sidedness on the part of the incumbent Swiss manufacturers which created the problem. The fuel crisis of the early 1970s – which also had seismic effects on many other areas like the automobile industry – combined with the Swiss Franc gaining over 50% in value against the US Dollar, meant that there was much less demand for their product anyway. Allied to the sudden availability of cheaper, more reliable watches from Japan, the US and elsewhere, meant the Swiss industry was in freefall.

As time went on, the analogue quartz watch was somewhat displaced by the even simpler digital LCD one; Casio’s F-91W has been in production for more than 35 years, and it’s said to sell 3 million a year because it’s so cheap ($20).

The recovery

To revisit Jay Leno’s earlier comment, when no longer needed for transport, the use for horses morphed into sport or pleasure rather than utility. Maybe that meant there were fewer horses around overall, but it also meant the quality of life for the remaining ones was much better. And for everyone else, too – 1,000 tons of horse 💩 supposedly was dropped in New York City every day.

With ultra-cheap yet reliable and robust watches being available, there’s no need to pay thousands of dollars (millions, even) to have something on your wrist just for telling the time. Many people won’t have the need for any watch, since they have a phone with a clock on it … unless the watch does something more.

Tech firms like Apple, Samsung and Google have redefined the wristwatch for a lot of people by making it smart; by volume, Apple sells more smart watches than the entire Swiss watchmaking industry combined. By value, it’s a very different story.

By focussing on “luxury”, associating with famous brand ambassadors and the like, the Swiss industry has largely reinvented itself as a premium product, made not for the utility of telling the time but for looking and feeling good.

#787: Is Space Exploration worthwhile?

Posted on April 1, 2026 (Updated July 7, 2026) by ewand

The 1950s and 60s were a golden era for “space”, then seen as the cutting edge of technological achievement. While there are arguably many spin-off benefits from the programs that launched people and things into space, how much do we need to keep investing to sustain progress or even increase momentum? Is it all worth it?

In its true heyday, space was a vanguard of the Cold War technology race encompassing communications, rockets, nuclear ambitions and more. When JFK said he wanted to conquer space “because it is there”, the reasons for going to the Moon were arguably more to beat the Ruskies to it, than for any specific technical or other benefit.

NASA has been planning its return to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years, but the Artemis program looks somewhat saddled with missed deadlines and technical bloat. Some new entrants – like SpaceX – have been included in the roster of suppliers who will jointly make the Moon relevant again (better hope they can make their Starship work since that’s a key part of the bit that will actually do the lunar landing). Other more traditional contractors are being supposedly sidelined.

What did the Moon missions ever do for us?

There’s the old saying (debunked) that America spent millions developing a pen for use in space, while the Russians just used pencils. Lots of technologies were directly invented for the Space Race, from digital photography, smoke detectors, memory foam and more. Others that we take for granted, like GPS, could not have been conceived without the progress made in the 1960s, and the subsequent focus on making space more “useful”.

From JFK’s Rice University speech (remember when world leaders could eruditely inspire an audience?) until Gene Cernan left the Moon for the last time, the total cost to the US for the Apollo program and its predecessors would come in about $300-$350Bn in today’s money.

That’s a lot, but less than half the annual bill for serving US government debt. At the peak of the Apollo development program, the total staff of NASA and all the contractors working on technology for it was a staggering 400,000.

Did you know the world’s first portable computer was built by MIT for the Apollo lander? It was also the first computer built using silicon integrated circuits. The latency and fragility of radio comms between a craft trying to land on the Moon and the mainframes in Houston meant that they had to take a computer with them, that could run calculations in real time, so they had to figure out how to build one.

So, maybe we can look back over 50 years and see that technologies were conceived to solve otherwise insurmountable problems, and they are a fundamental part of our everyday lives.

In spring 2015, somewhat fittingly, I was driving to collect my first proper vintage wristwatch from a guy who I didn’t quite realise was one of the world’s most prominent experts in the “Moonwatch”. The radio played a song by nerdy London synth/guitar musicians, Public Service Broadcasting, which was based around recordings of Apollo 11’s conversation with Mission Control as the Eagle lunar module was descending to the surface. Their Race for Space album is really rather good.

Return To the Moon, and beyond

Going back to the Moon has been a dream since 1973, with a view to rekindling that technology spark and possibly being able to build a Moonbase that will take human exploration further, to Mars and …? NASA successfully (albeit 6 years later than originally intended) fired an uncrewed test rocket at the Moon in 2022, called Artemis I.

Artemis II is hoped to be a kind-of equivalent to Apollo 8, where astronauts flew around the Moon for the first time. but didn’t try to land, was planned for early 2026, though a variety of showstoppers delayed the launch. Hopefully that will go ahead before too long.

Apollo 8 itself was pretty remarkable – the first time that any humans saw the entirety of the Earth, and also the first time they experienced the LOS (“loss of signal”) of going around the other side of the Moon (spoiler: it’s not actually dark). During Apollo 8, the famous “Earthrise” photo was captured, almost by accident – the astronauts had been goaled to study the Moon’s surface, but on their 4th orbit, it was the sight of Earth that really wowed them.

Poignantly, Jim Lovell observed that if held his thumb out over the blue marble, all human life that had ever lived was under it (aside from the crew, obvs). Arguably that’s still true, even if the remains of some humans (“ashtronauts”, if you will) have been blasted into space… just not very far, and not for very long.

Post Moon

Since the Apollo missions, most focus has been on stuff which orbits Earth rather than long-range efforts. If the USA vs CCCP rivalry in the 1960s could realistically only have been funded by such large economies in competition with each other, the International Space Station is a triumph of international cooperation despite other political headwinds.

Image: NASA

The ISS has been continuously orbiting since 2000, following a period of joint developments between the US, Russia, EU and others. It couldn’t have been built without the help of the 1981-2011 era Space Shuttle, and NASA takes the biggest role in its operations (and cost).

The ISS is nearing the end of its life and – NASA aims to decommission it in 4 years. It is going to be “de-orbited” (a phrase akin to SpaceX’s “rapid unscheduled disassembly”): what might take its place, with whom, and why?

Estimates vary but it’s reckoned to have cost over $100Bn to build and NASA pays about $3Bn a year to operate, so total costs to date are probably in the $250Bn territory.

Commercialising Space

Meanwhile, there are vanity space tourism projects which do little for the greater good but arguably may help to advance the technology and potentially lower the costs of getting stuff into space. It is still eye-wateringly expensive.

Commercialisation of spaceflight has really gathered pace in the last 20 years, with SpaceX seemingly able to do things that NASA would never have dreamt possible. Lowering the cost of entry to launching a satellite has allowed (figuratively) explosive growth in the satellite industry; there are estimated to be more than 10x as many satellites orbiting now than there were even 10 years ago. Most are in “Low Earth Orbit” meaning they are both relatively close (maybe even visible), but also may have a limited lifespan.

Starlink’s comms satellites, for example, sit at the lower end of LEO and have an expected life expectancy of 5 years. The FCC approved to have 15,000 of them in orbit though they’re not quite there yet, and aspire to launch in excess of 40,000.

Environmental impact of launch

SpaceX aimed to disrupt the space launch industry by making their booster rockets reusable – by as many as 30 launches, to date – instead of the prevailing method of the booster rockets and main stages being effectively disposable. Search YouTube and you’ll find many examples of when things didn’t quite go to plan, but when they managed to land the two Falcon Heavy boosters side-by-side (8 years ago!) it felt like sci-fi made real or CGI.

Starlink’s sats get launched in batches by parent company SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets; though they are more reusable and therefore less environmentally problematic, it also means the launches can be more frequent. SpaceX is planning on having the equivalent of one launch every 3 days.

Firing 17.5 tonnes of payload into orbit sounds like it would be pretty bad from an environmental perspective; it’ll add about 300-400 tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere, but that’s about the same as a full Airbus A380 flying from LAX to LHR, and that happens multiple times every day. If the global aviation industry emits 900 million tonnes of CO2 annually, SpaceX could launch 80 rockets every day and still be 1% of the impact of aviation, at least from a CO2 perspective.

What’s not quite clear, though, is all the other stuff that ends up high in the atmosphere, both from the launch itself but also from the launch vehicles and the satellites eventually re-entering the atmosphere.

Source – NOAA scientists link exotic metal particles in the upper atmosphere to rockets, satellites – NOAA Research

As well as an increasing number of satellites blocking astromers’ view of the cosmos from Earth, it’s possible they’re filling the precious atmosphere with particles of soot and metal that could cause other issues in the long run. The US Space Force recently confirmed that a satellite weighing a half-tonne had entered the atmosphere earlier than expected and posed a greater risk than normally allowed; “NASA expected most of the spacecraft to burn up … but some components may have survived re-entry”.

Imagine what the first war in space, where one aggressor shoots down the satellites belonging to its adversary, will be like? Have you seen Gravity?

So, apart a good deal of the computational and communications technologies we rely on day-to-day, what has space travel really done for us?

#786 – F1 and the British Car Industry

Posted on March 4, 2026 (Updated July 7, 2026) by ewand

Motorsports fans the world over are gearing up for another season of Formula 1, where 11 teams will race round and round for an hour or two, in 24 different weekends from now until December. At least that’s true at time of writing – with quite a few races in areas which might be a bit unsafe given recent events, time will tell.

Formula 1 is having a real purple patch – energised by Drive to Survive and the Pittfest F1 movie, the US market in particular is booming, with 3 races taking place there this year. Contrast that to the Americans’ historically lukewarm reception for F1, and the disastrous low point of the 2005 race where 70% of entrants retired before the start.

Global audience figures are booming, with younger and more diverse fans, and the teams are increasingly valuable – even the backmarkers are worth billions, with valuations growing by 30%+ between 2024 and 2025.

Cadillac have entered the fray, launching their car livery during the Super Bowl with engines from Ferrari, the factory in the UK and drivers from Finland and Mexico. Not exactly the All American team so far, then, but it’s said they have spent over $1B already and the car has yet to race. They have a goal to grow over the next few years, build a GM powertrain and have engineering excellent at Indianapolis and Silverstone.

New rules – new threats/opportunities

2026 marks a new era in other ways – there are a variety of significant technical changes to make the cars smaller, lighter and more racy while also trying to be sustainable. The fuel being used is 100% renewable, though there’s still the small matter of all the kit that needs to be flown around the world to stage the show…

The radical changes to the cars could shake up the order somewhat – will Lando retain the drivers’ championship or could a resurgent Red Bull bring Max back into play? Can Ferrari’s crazy 180 degree rear wing slip Lewis to title #8…? When the rules all change, the genius of designers taking different approaches to beating them sometimes delivers some unlikely winners – as covered previously with Gordon Murray and the Brabham team, in #778 – Out of the box thinking IRL.

It’s said the driving experience is quite different as 50% of the cars’ power will come from batteries, meaning the driver needs to be continuously harvesting and deploying energy rather than pinning the throttle open and going full tilt all the time he can. “Management” might be the word to describe it, and not every driver is thrilled about that.

75+ Years in the making

Formula 1 celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2025, and despite the fact that the French basically started motor racing (that’s why they’re grand prix, after all) and the governing body, the FIA, is based in Paris, the centre of gravity for Formula 1 and associated motorsports technologies is firmly placed in England. The first F1 race was at Silverstone, and many of the teams have significant bases nearby, even those which are nominally based overseas. The talent pool of engineers and component suppliers acts like a gravity well, meaning if you want access to the best talent and technology, that’s the place to be.

See the map on https://gemini.google.com/share/71467fece82c

Teams have come and gone in the past; it’s an expensive exercise to design, build and operate the cars in a global sport, though some of the best-known names have been around for a while.

Source: Formula 1 on X

Cadillac joins as the 11th team, and Sauber is rebranding as Audi and bravely debuting their own engine too. McLaren use Mercedes engines, even though they arguably compete when it comes to road cars, and Williams also uses Merc.

Since Renault decided to ditch its own in-house engine, Alpine, their sporting brand, has also switched to a Mercedes power unit. Red Bull and Racing Bulls have moved from Honda power and are building their own, with some help from Ford.

Aston Martin hired the most successful designer of F1 cars ever, Adrian Newey, and switched to Honda from also being a Mercedes customer (yet remain so elsewhere, as Aston’s road cars have been using AMG/Mercedes engines for a while). Despite Honda winning recently in the back of a Red Bull, they are arguably a year behind everyone else and the pre-season tests don’t show the Aston Martins in good light.

Ferrari engines power the Scuderia’s own team as well as Americans Haas & Cadillac. In fact, Ferrari is the only team whose cars and engines are developed outside of the UK. The Italian car industry has some symmetry with Britain’s – formerly proud brands competing for the soul of the consumers of the 1950s and 60s have either been lost, swept up inside the likes of Stellantis, or they’ve gone even further upmarket. Ferrari’s cheapest road car starts at over £200K.

The current state of the British Car Industry

Sadly, if F1 and the wider motorsport sector is doing great guns, the car manufacturing industry in the UK is not in good health. It’s been on the decline for years, decades even, but a combination of the hokey-cokey of US tariffs, electrified competition from China combined with high energy prices, a near-£2Bn cyber-attack, cost-of-living miasma and Brexit, have all conspired to seemingly make things worse. Is it all too late?

In the 1970s and 80s, the UK was quite proud of cars that were made locally – many families chose either Ford or Vauxhall as their brand, and even if some were assembled in Europe, engines and other ancillaries were often built in England. Vauxhall is now part of Stellantis and has shuttered UK production, while Ford has managed to kill off both the Focus and Fiesta which topped the sales charts for so many years. Despite formerly having the biggest car plant in Europe, Ford of Great Britain hasn’t built any vehicles on shore for well over a decade.

Ford is still managing to shift a good amount of its Romanian-built Puma, and Nissan manages to occupy a couple of places in the top 10 with it’s UK-assembled Quashquai and Juke, so it’s not all bad news.

Niche and luxury don’t always pay

Over the years, several British brands have staked their long-term survival on moving upmarket and selling to a more international, luxury or performance focussed crowd. A new “Full Fat” Range Rover starts at over £100K, more than twice what the venerable L322 cost when it was first launched 24 years ago – even accounting for inflation, that’s still 20%+ more. Land Rover has had some good years with international customers, though the devastating cyber-attack which downed production for weeks and its sister brand Jaguar comprehensively scoring an own-goal hat trick as it stopped making cars entirely, to focus on building a £100K+ electric GT, isn’t putting the Tata-owned JLR in particularly good shape.

Sporting cars, for which Britain is somewhat historically renowned (as Mazda recognized when it built the original MX-5 in homage of the 1960s Lotus Elan), aren’t faring much better. Lotus has lurched from one crisis to another for most of its life, and betting big on 2.5 tonne electric SUVs and grand tourer saloons hasn’t really worked. Its Hethel HQ was rumoured to be closing until HM Govt seemingly got involved, but the UK-built Emira sports car that was conceived to take the fight to Porsche is now knocking on the door of a Hundred Grand if you want one that sounds as well as it goes.

While other venerable British sporting brands like Bentley seem to be doing OK by selling luxury barges and Chelsea Tractors, other well-known names are fighting for their lives.

The road car division of Aston Martin is shedding 20% of its workforce in an effort to stop losing money – it’s quite sobering to think they shipped 5,500 vehicles last year but lost £364M – in other words, managed to lose nearly £67K on every car it sold, and that’s on cars that increasingly cost the thick end of £200K.

Ultra-luxury brands like Rolls Royce seem to manage to weather the storm by selling outrageously expensive vehicles to discerning/tasteless & mostly overseas buyers, with profitability increased by heavy focus on pricey and bespoke customization of the cars. Whether the situation in the Middle East puts a long-term dent in their growth remains to be seen.

Clearly, COVID hurt UK manufacturing and it started to rebound but any recovery looks pretty shaky.

Let’s hope that a declining and more specialist manufacturing industry doesn’t inversely follow F1’s gravity effect, by having a brain drain away to the regions who continue to do it well.

#785: Enshittification (Part II) – snapping & mapping fails

Posted on February 4, 2026 (Updated February 10, 2026) by ewand

Around a year ago, old-school Tip of the Week had a “2025 Enshittification: part 1” post which looked at how online services routinely drop features that people like because it suits the provider to not sustain them. It’s high time to revisit the topic, specifically looking at changes being made to online mapping services and one popular document scanning app.

In truth, if you’re going to rely on a free service, be ready to expect the provider to muck it up for you. If you like to look at your old house on Google Street View, best head over there now and screengrab it as some day they may decide to stop storing previous captures or something.

It feels like it’s only a matter of time before Amazon starts making Alexa a paid-for service, or subsidises free use for telling you the weather or play the radio by playing “would you like to buy a new Carlos Fandango umbrella to protect you from tomorrow’s rain?” inline ads.

Microsoft Shutters Lens

A bit niche, maybe, but Microsoft has been offering a scanning app for smartphones for years. Originally called Office Lens and available for Windows Phone since 2014, later rebranded (of course) Microsoft Lens and even gaining “PDF Scanner” to tell you what it’s primarily for. It was previously discussed in old ToW #682. There used to be a PC app as well as iOS and Android ones, but that has gone already.

Despite nearly 1M ratings of average 4.8 and over 50M downloads on Android, its days are numbered. Rather than keep Lens alive, Redmond has decided to build some of its functionality into other apps, like OneDrive and/or OneNote. Sadly, neither is as simple, fast or fully-featured as Lens is/was. RIP.

Of course, there are plenty of other alternative scanning apps, including the built-in one for Android users, where you just point the camera at something which looks like a document and it’ll give you a shortcut to Google’s own scanning software which can detect page edges, bundle multiple scans into a PDF and so on. Since the scan feature is part of the Files app, you can go there and start a scan directly too.

At least Lens had a fulfilling life in the sun, unlike Viva Goals, a product of acquisition which likely cost Microsoft $200M+, and was deep-sixed after only 2 years.

Google “Privacy” copout

How many times have you seen a statement like “for your safety and security”, and realized that its primary goal is actually to make somebody else’s life easier?

Google had a neat feature, if you chose to turn it on, where Maps on your phone would keep a record of where you’ve been and upload to your Google account, so you could view your travels within Google Maps on your computer. Called Timeline, it was briefly covered in previous ToWs including the trend for apps to be replacing websites and not always to the users’ benefit.

Timeline was discontinued so you could no longer go to Maps and see where you’d been in the past. It’s tantalizingly still there in the menu today, but all it does is tell you to use the mobile app and offer more help on the activity controls.

The reason? For privacy’s sake, Google was no longer going to store all that info on its servers, rather the tracking data would only live exclusively on your primary phone. Sounds fine, unless you lose the phone and don’t have it backed up, or some other calamity occurs and deletes all the data.

Is this to protect the user? Or is it to protect Google from liability in case its service was somehow compromised, and the whereabouts of millions of people over time had been made available?

The DIY Alternative

If you like the ability to track where you’ve been, whether that’s to make your mileage claims easier or just to provide yourself an alibi when accused of being somewhere else, there are alternatives to Google Maps / Timeline though none are quite so easy to use. Self-hosting – as in running a server on your own network rather than relying on a cloud provider who might vanish tomorrow and/or start monetizing your data – is a favoured option for tin-hat wearers and honest folk concerned with privacy and/or who prefer to make their own lives difficult.

The leading alternative to Timeline is probably an open source project called Dawarich, available either as a subscription cloud service or software you can run on your own. If you have a Synology NAS device with enough oomph to run Docker, there’s an easy to follow* guide, How to Install Dawarich on Your Synology NAS.

*easy to follow may be relative to your exposure to config files, IP address mapping etc

Dawarich lets you import location history from Google Maps or you can have apps on your phone regularly tracking and reporting your location history directly to your Dawarich server.

Is Bing Maps really a Zombie?

Sticking on the theme of making mapping stuff worse, Microsoft has been busy “evolving” Bing Maps.

Launched as “Virtual Earth” over 20 years ago, it morphed into numerously named Windows Live, MSN and eventually Bing Maps for consumers as an alternative to Google Earth and Google Maps, and also aimed at enterprises in the hope that they would build mapping services into other applications and pay for the privilege. There had been a previous set of software and services called MapPoint dating back to the Y2K, now superseded.

There were some cool features that differentiated Bing from Google when it came to maps – things like high-resolution “Birds Eye” images taken from spotter ‘planes…

… to free use (for UK users) of the Government’s Ordnance Survey mapping data. At one point, Bing even licensed the old A-Z maps for London, as “London Street Maps”.

Bing also offered drive-by imagery akin to Google Street View called Streetside. It was never quite as good as Google’s service and it took years to become available internationally, but there were places where it would have more up-to-date pictures compared to Google’s own Street View pictures and data.

As you can see from the view above, the images were taken by cars operated by veteran satnav provider, TomTom. Similarly, the Ordnance Survey maps and Birds Eye images were licensed from other 3rd parties.

Unfortunately, when a licensing agreement exists then it also means at some point, one or both parties might decide to not continue it. Such has happened with Bing Maps, the consumer offering – it has dropped pretty much everything of interest beyond basic map and satellite views. A 3D option does offer some cartoonish generated models of some areas, though it’s a long way from being universal.

Microsoft also had a Maps app for Windows, which was a wrapper for the Bing Maps service but could also deal with offline data. Presumably due to lack of use, the Maps app has now been taken out behind the bike shed and given a good knobbling:

On the plus side, one useful feature which wasn’t present previously, the latest Bing Maps will show the exact address (including Post Code or Zip Code) of any point you right-click on, also displaying the lat/long coordinates and even the height above sea level.

It was announced that Microsoft is shutting down Bing Maps for Enterprise and migrating everything at the back end to using Azure Maps, which has a different set of functionality primarily aimed at developers looking at embedding maps into other sites and overlaying other data onto a map. It’s easy to wonder at what point Redmond will pull the plug from Bing Maps altogether.

Accessing Missing data from Bing

Sadly, there’s nowhere else providing the TomTom Streetside views, nor the Birds Eye images, other than going to Google Maps and seeing what they have.

If you miss the OS Maps feature from Bing Maps, there are few alternatives – the best is probably OSMaps.com, which still offers (for a subscription) what they call topographical maps (i.e. OS LandRanger or Explorer). It’s a little clunky but has a reasonable mobile app too, so you can plan trips and take them offline with you.

#784: Automatic for the People

Posted on January 7, 2026 (Updated February 10, 2026) by ewand

Following on from last month’s missive (#783) on internal competition, we’re going to look at a case where it may have successfully spurred a company, and an example of surprising collaboration between erstwhile competitors.

Also, how is it 33 years since R.E.M. released AFTP?

The world’s first automatic chronograph watch

In the 1950s and 60s, clock and watch making was a hotbed of innovation just like the automobile industry and the race for space. New designs and technologies were coming thick and fast. Quartz crystals and batteries were still way out on the horizon, so the Swiss-dominated mechanical watch industry took great pride in building very precise instruments.

Open the back of a mechanical wristwatch and you’ll see many tiny components meshed together to make a little engine that measures out time and moves the hands on the dial appropriately.

Everything is generally driven by a coiled spring which is tightened and powers the whole “movement” as it unwinds in a controlled fashion. Manually-wound watches usually need a few turns of the “crown” on the side, perhaps every day or two. Many clocks work the same way, but with a larger spring might only need a few minutes of winding with a key every month or so.

Though pioneered in the late 18th century, automatic watches (which wind the spring through harvesting energy from the movement of the watch on the wrist) really took off in the early part of the 20th century. If you can see the movement of an automatic watch – either through the see-through “exhibition case” sometimes fitted, or by taking the back off it – it will often have a large “rotor” which swings back and forth as you move the watch on your wrist. You might feel or even hear it moving.

*An automatic Rolex 1560 movement from the early 1960s*

The rotor signifies that the dreadfully tiresome task of winding your watch every day was dispensed with. But some fancier watches with additional “complications” still had to be manually-wound; perhaps most notably chronographs, watches equipped with a stopwatch function.

Early “chronograph” clocks and watches were so called because they recorded the time using ink on the actual dial – making an ink mark or arc to record how long an event (like a horse race) lasted.

Necessity is the mother of invention

Wrist-worn chronographs (which only show the time, not write it) were popular in the 50s and 60s, especially amongst sporting types, perhaps inspired by famous racing drivers like Stirling Moss, Jim Clark or Dan Gurney.

Go-faster watch companies even named their products like Speedmaster, Daytona (after the Floridian racing circuit) or Carrera (after the Carrera Panamericana race).

But all of these famous chronographs were manually-wound. There was clear demand for the thrusting racy gentleman to have a stopwatch on his wrist that wound itself. Unfortunately, the technical challenge of building such a complicated mechanism that was small and robust enough to wear comfortably was tough.

It was common for watch makers to buy-in the movement they fitted to their watch, just as they’d have the dial made by a specialist, the case fabricated by another and so on. Think of it like a boutique car maker producing a vehicle using an off-the-shelf engine from an external manufacturer. Even major watch producers at the time, bought watch movements from “ébauche manufactures” like Valjoux, Lemania or Venus, none of whom had the resources to dedicate to producing an automatic chronograph. The famous Paul Newman Daytona – auctioned for $15M+ – had a manual-wind Valjoux 72 movement.

So began a famous collaboration between companies that might otherwise be seen as competitors – the watchmakers Breitling, Buren, Hamilton and Heuer got together with Dépraz, who made components for movements, to form what is now known as the Chronomatic Consortium.

Buren had pioneered their own automatic movements which had a “micro-rotor” rather than a big plate half the diameter of the watch. Dépraz had a chronograph module which they figured could be adapted to essentially bolt on to a variant of Buren’s base movement, thus giving them essentially two mechanisms powered by the same spring. In order for them all to fit together, the crown for setting the time had to be on the opposite side to the pushers that worked the chronograph.

In 1969, Breitling, Heuer and Hamilton (who absorbed Buren during the years of development in the late 1960s) went on to launch ostensibly similar watches with the same basic “Caliber 11” movement within. Heuer’s are arguably most iconic, with the square-cased Monaco appearing on the wrist of the King of Cool, Steve McQueen, in the 1971 film, Le Mans.

The story behind McQueen’s watch is quite fortuitous; Heuer had a name for sports timekeeping and sponsored various cars and race teams. When McQueen was preparing for the Le Mans film, he said he wanted to look exactly like pro driver Jo Siffert, so donned the same overalls with the big Heuer logo. They also supplied props for the filming including watches.

Heuer and the rest of the “Project 99” / Chronomatic group touted their watches as the world’s first automatic chronographs, though competitor Zenith had been working on their own in-house movement and were so confident they would be first, they launched it in a watch brazenly called “El Primero”.

Even though they’d been working on it for 8 years, and announced it in January 1969, it took Zenith until September ‘69 to start selling their watch, by which time they were more like “El Tercero”, as the Chronomatics’ Caliber 11 was already being sold under several brands, and unseen but coming up the inside on the rails was a company very far from the Swiss cartels, who had designed and built an automatic chronograph and started manufacturing AND selling it in early 1969: Seiko.

Taking on the Swiss

Founded in late 1800s, “Seiko” was in fact several companies under the family of its founder, K Hattori. As Japan opened up to outside trade and competition, Hattori-san started by importing and selling western clocks, jewellery and watches, before starting to develop its own in-house offerings.

After WWII, Seiko developed a diverse range of horological kit – the official timekeeper of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Japan’s first Automatic watch, its first Chronograph, first diving watch, even getting into high-end accuracy in watches such that they took the fight to the Swiss on their own turf. There were watch “trials” in Neuchâtel and Geneva in the early 60s, to showcase how manufacturers could produce watches of incredible accuracy. After a few misses, Seiko showed up and started wiping the floor – to the point where the highest profile trials were cancelled the year after. Maybe the Swiss didn’t like getting beaten so took their ball away and went home.

Seiko’s “warring factories”

Revisiting the theme of internal competition, one unusual aspect of Seiko’s approach was to have two completely separate factories, separate companies even, operating to win the same customer. Daini Seikosha, in Ginza, downtown Tokyo, and rural Suwa Seikosha, near Nagano, shared hardly any technical know-how and yet were seemingly pitching similar watches to the same customers. The short version of history is that they were out and out competitors, but a subtler take is that both Daini and Suwa were children of the parent, and expected to treat each other with familial respect, even splitting some tasks occasionally.

A somewhat unlikely source, tech company Atlassian hosts a great series of podcasts on telling stories of team working, and they had a really good 30 minute one from the depths of COVID time, on Seiko’s “Duelling Factories”.

It’s never really been satisfactorily explained why Seiko had two factories that shared so little. There are some examples where a watch developed in one was manufactured – perhaps only for a short while – in the other as well (maybe a capacity issue?), but allowing two separate R&D outfits to develop products that directly compete for the same customer seems like madness to most of us. Then again, look at vintage catalogs, and there are hundreds of pages of barely distinguishable watches, so maybe they just threw everything they could at the wall to see what stuck.

The race for space

The Suwa factory arguably won the race to make the first automatic chronograph; they had 6139-6010 model watches in production from January 1969. When Jack Heuer, CEO of the eponymous company, was exhibiting their first Caliber 11 watches at the Baselworld show in the spring of 1969, Seiko’s president congratulated him on their achievement, electing not to mention that Seiko had built their own, integrated, in-house automatic chronograph and had been already selling it for months, at a fraction of the price of the Heuers, et al.

The 6139 chronograph went into numerous shaped watches over the decade or so of production, famously adorning the wrists of Bruce Lee, Flash Gordon, even making it as the first automatic chronograph in space via the pocket of Col William Pogue. What later transpired is that Pogue’s mission Commander, Jerry Carr, was sneaking aboard a Movado chronograph too. Movado was a sister brand to Zenith, and its watch ran on Zenith’s 3019 PHC “El Primero” movement. So a dead heat to be the first in zero gravity, then.

In the meantime, the Daini Seikosha factory had been working on its own, thinner and slightly more exotic, automatic chronograph movement – the 7016. Sharing no components whatsoever and being of quite different architecture to the 6139, the 7016 was a few years later to market and arguably missed the buzz of its sibling. As such, 701x watches are a good bit rarer.

Both movements were integrated, i.e. designed from the outset as automatic chronographs, rather than bolted together such as the Chronomatic Cal 11. The 6139 was the first chronograph to use a vertical clutch, an advanced coupling mechanism now the norm for high-end watches from Rolex, Patek Phillippe and so on. The 7016 has a sub-dial register which counts both hours and minutes, has a horizontal clutch but features a flyback mechanism and was the thinnest automatic chronograph movement for 15 years. The more popular square-ish case shape also leads to its nickname, “Monaco”, after the Heuer model.

Maybe they were aimed at the same customer, though the 7016 was around 38% more expensive than an equivalent 6139. Presumably available side-by-side from the same retailer. What were they thinking?

#783: Is competition innovative or distracting?

Posted on December 3, 2025 (Updated February 10, 2026) by ewand

Anyone who has worked in technology has probably dealt with a competitive situation.

Maybe it’s trying to position your solution against all the others companies’ products, perhaps it’s the annual performance review tussle with your so-called “co-workers” or you’re just trying to get funding or investment from the higher-ups to get something done (when they might prefer to spend the money elsewhere). It can be exhilarating and exhausting.

Competing with other external parties to deliver a service or a product probably sharpens the minds of the people developing it, so in theory having strong competitors should make you stronger too (or you don’t survive). But does internal competition improve offerings, make the organisation more efficient, or is just a giant distraction? If “leaders” spend time fighting with each other instead of focussing on the end goal, maybe they’ll eventually lose out to more agile or innovative competitors [See IBM, HP, Digital, Intel…]

Some companies have consciously fostered internal competition or even conflict to accelerate their own developments. Occasionally, companies will pool resources with erstwhile competitors to help them innovate more quickly or to gang up against even stronger companies.

Microsoft and Apple

Both Microsoft and Apple have evolved through several phases from the mid-1970s until now. For Apple, there was the first era of founding Steves Jobs & Woz, then Jobs booted out and Apple nearly going bust, Jobs coming back and saving the world, before Tim Apple took the company to be the biggest in the world.

Microsoft had a parallel of Bill & Paul founding and expanding in the early days of microcomputing, to Windows dominating the OS landscape, Steve Ballmer taking over and laying some of the groundwork for the transformation to being a cloud company that Satya has driven.

Not many companies get to pivot so many times and still be not just relevant but at the front of their field. They’re still 2 of the most valuable companies ever, by market cap, at time of writing, stocks can fall as well as rise etc etc. Somewhat ironically, since starting to write this piece, Google has overtaken Microsoft for the first time, their value more than doubling in less than 8 months.

A bubble, you say? Shurely shome mishtake.

Maybe the presence of a talismanic founder or two can help companies in their early stages – in Robert X Cringely’s excellent historical guide to the early days of the microcomputer industry, Accidental Empires (1992), he addresses both Jobs and Gates. Chapter 10, “The Prophet”, starts by calling Steve “The most dangerous man in Silicon Valley”. Bill, in “Chairman Bill Leads the Workers in Song” is characterised as the Henry Ford of the microcomputer industry.

Sometimes, Bill is said to have actively fostered internal competition between different groups rather than imposing a way of doing things – the thinking being that if two or three groups each try to solve a problem then the best solution will win.

This old joke org chart comparison illustrates a few truisms – at Google, Larry & Sergei might have had the ideas, but Eric Schmidt ran everything. Oracle perhaps spent more on enforcing licensing than on engineering, and at Apple (post 1996), everything revolved around Steve and all decisions went back to him.

But if you were at Microsoft in the early 2000s, you’d smirk with recognition at the warring nature of how their product groups sometimes behaved.

MS: Not just about Windows

For many years, Microsoft had the two cash cows of Windows and Office. The Operating system was licensed to PC manufacturers and sold to enthusiasts and businesses who upgrade every few years. People even queued at midnight on August 24th 1995 to buy a copy of Windows 95; apocryphal stories did the rounds of some shoppers not even owning a computer but they got caught up in the hype for fear of missing something.

Internal influence was rather staked on which part of the division you worked in – Windows, especially under BillG’s tenure when everything else pretty much had to support the Windows business, was the big dog. Office was somewhat secondary but also made Mac versions and was bought by people devolved from whatever cycle they replaced their PC or upgraded its operating system. Server products which ran on Windows NT Server but were tied into usage of Office somewhat straddled the two.

It wasn’t uncommon for Microsoft to have multiple products which overlapped yet were built by different teams – Windows 3.x vs OS/2, Windows 95/98 vs Windows NT, Office vs MS Works, Internet Explorer vs MSN. Even within product groups, there were often numerous bits of technology being developed which had already been built by another team (at one point there were 3 or 4 different and incompatible ways of doing “workflow” processes).

There’s no doubt that there was wasted effort – products would go through long development cycles only to be canned before release (or like KIN, shortly after). In a remarkably honest interview to coincide with Microsoft’s 50 years anniversary, Steve Ballmer admitted there were silos between productivity and systems divisions. A very in-depth interview with Steve on the Acquired Podcast delves deeper into his regrets around the “Longhorn” development that cost the company years.

Show me the money!

Between 1997 and 2000, the company’s revenue grew from $12Bn to $23Bn but net income nearly tripled from $3.5 to $9.5Bn. What was behind the success? Enterprise software sales. The steady growth of Windows NT and the associated client licenses for running back-office servers, along with SQL Server database and Exchange Server for email was really paying off.

By comparison, Microsoft’s FY25 numbers came out at $281.7Bn with a net income of $101.8Bn – even adjusting the FY2000 numbers using the Bank of England Inflation calculator, the latest figures are remarkable. 2025 revenue is 641% of 2000’s and net income is 561%.

Over time, Microsoft shifted away from just being dependent on Windows & Office, by adding numerous other successful businesses, focusing on Enterprise then the cloud and latterly bunging AI into every offering.

Every quarter when they release fiscal results, Jack Rowbotham posts on LinkedIn summarising where the money flows – and using visuals produced by App Economy Insights it’s quite clear where the power lies now.

Whatever you think of Microsoft, if you cut the company, they bleed software (and services).

Hardware has always been a means to an end – to sell and use the software. The original Microsoft Mouse was just a way to get people used to the graphical interface that would eventually be the key UX of Windows. Today, Surface devices aim to show how a great PC can be and, for now at least, Xbox continues to be the means to sell more games (and Game Pass subscriptions).

Apple – the Return of the King

Microsoft and Apple have had a “complicated” relationship since the early days.

Bill and Steve had a degree of respect and even friendship for each other, but as both companies became successful there were clearly times when they were at loggerheads.

In that seminal interview, Steve lays out his vision for humanity of taking the very best of things to improve itself, casting Apple as true innovators and Microsoft as pedestrian followers.

Jobs famously went to visit Xerox PARC and took inspiration from what they were doing with graphics, mouse, printers and networking as the genesis of the Apple Lisa and later Macintosh products. The Mac has always been a niche offering – arguably beautiful, proprietary and expensive, it could never really compete for the mainstream in the same way that Mercedes or Jaguar or BMW were always going to be in a different league to Ford and Toyota.

The PC and DOS had become hugely successful and when Microsoft debuted Windows, Apple was clearly not happy. Lower-cost, more diverse PCs with many peripheral and software companies building on top of them competed against the Macs with relatively few software packages being developed. Jobs was fired by Apple in 1985. There were attempts to create other products, like the Newton, but they proved unsuccessful and perhaps a costly distraction.

Apple was circling the drain, and at the time of Jobs’ return in 1997, it was said that Microsoft made more money selling Office to Mac users than Apple did selling Macs to Mac users.

Quoting Bob Cringely again, whose book was published before Steve Jobs came back to save Apple from itself:

Steve Jobs holds an idea that keeps some grown men and women of the Valley awake at night. Unlike these insomniacs, Jobs isn’t in this business for the money, and that’s what makes him dangerous.

Jobs came back and brought in some help from outside – including Larry Ellison from Oracle, despite the boos from the faithful. Steve began admitting that Apple would like to do some software and having software industry expertise on the board might be a good idea.

He also suggested that Apple and Microsoft were going to partner more closely – as a way of resolving some long-time disputes relating to look and feel of Windows and Mac, and Microsoft agreeing to keep supporting the Mac platform with releases of Office at the same cadence of the ones for Windows.

Microsoft was also going to pump some cash in to make sure Apple was kept alive (a useful bet against the Department of Justice, who were breathing down Redmond’s neck at the time). The $150M of non-voting stock that Microsoft bought was sold 6 years later for $550M, so that worked out well.

The jeers from the Apple fans at Macworld 97 were not just reserved for Larry from Redwood: Bill from Redmond got even more.

Jobs made a hugely important point to the Macworld congregation at the time: they need to let go of the idea that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. This idea that competitors can sometimes work together for mutual benefit or even survival is clearly valid.

Apple makes Things

Meanwhile, Apple has gone from near death to world dominance. Jobs led an obsessive focus on customer experience, which made sure they built products that people loved. The iMac injected some pizazz into the ageing Mac product lineup, launched a hugely successful laptop line in PowerBook and MacBook, and came up with a variety of ancillary products like the iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. By Q1 2007, the iPod on its own was responsible for almost half of Apple’s revenue.

The iPhone was the true saviour of Apple. For the first time, it attracted new customers to the brand, and they’d go on to buy Macs because they liked the experience (and the integration was well thought out). But it had a difficult gestation: Jobs deliberately kept the development of iPhone separate from the Mac, with direct oversight and freedom for that design team. He fostered direct – sometimes hostile – competition for the software platform to be used in the phone. Either the iPod would grow to become a phone, or the Mac OS X would be shrunk to form a new OS. The latter prevailed.

Looking at Apple’s fiscal makeup today, you can see that the majority of its revenue comes from products like iPhone, but services like iCloud, Apple TV, iTunes etc make up 28% of its revenue but 45% of its gross profit.

If you cut Apple, it bleeds devices and the related experience. They make great hardware which people love because the design and the software that drives it is well thought out. But the profitability growth is really behind the subscription services that provide that experience: nearly 45% of Apple’s gross profit comes from that services line, even though it accounts for only around one quarter of its revenue.

Are they still competitors?

Having been frenemies for some time and outright competitors for years (remember the I’m a Mac adverts? … not sure some of them would make the cut these days), do Apple and Microsoft still see each other as even relevant let alone a threat or opportunity?

Well, Windows still has the lion’s share of the desktop OS, though it’s fallen from around 85% to 65% over the last decade. The key thing is, the desktop has lost its dominance with more people using phones and tablets, and since Microsoft failed to compete in the phone OS and never really built a compelling tablet, it’s even stevens.

In its early days, Apple’s iCloud storage was partly on Amazon’s AWS and partly on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service – in fact, Apple was among the largest 3rd party users of Azure at the time. Reportedly, iCloud moved to Google Cloud and kept on using AWS for some too, alongside massive investments in their own datacenters.

Nowadays, Microsoft pretty much bundles Office in with a subscription so Mac users might not be counted a significant revenue stream on their own. M365 doesn’t care what device you’re using to access its services, as long as you are.

Very significantly, when Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft CEO, Office for iPad and iPhone were quickly released. Some commentators incorrectly attributed Satya’s new openness (Linux on Azure and all that) to account for the release of Office for iDevices, but the development had been underway for years. Steve Ballmer – who famously faux-smashed an employee’s iPhone – had given it the green light.

So, is internal competition really a good thing?

We can never really be sure.

Having several groups pursuing the same goal is inevitably “wasting” resource, but it may be that without that competitive tension they’d miss key breakthroughs, or fail to challenge long-held assumptions. Recognising and capitalising on opportunity, regardless of how difficult its gestation, that’s what marks out success in the long run.

What Apple and Microsoft have both done is to evolve their missions over time; freed the dependence on one cash cow in order to cultivate others. Just as old dogs lose out to young pups and newly-dominant lions kill the cubs of their predecessors for the survival of their pride, maybe the only way for some companies to survive is to encourage and embrace the “overhead” of internal competition in order to find new business.

#782: What IS the time, Mr Wolf?

Posted on November 5, 2025 (Updated February 10, 2026) by ewand

Time is relative, man. In practice, since most of us are not rushing about at or near to the speed of light, it feels pretty much a constant, and is something we all too easily take for granted.

The relative importance of the time of day to a caveman would be what time the sun rises and sets, and he wouldn’t really need to define it empirically since all the other things he interacted with would be driven by the same schedule. He wouldn’t care how many hours there were in the day, only that seasons might change and the days would be longer and shorter.

Measuring time accurately and consistently became a challenge throughout human development, particularly once we started to travel around. Manufacturing, commerce, communications and more all depend on knowing what the time is, sometimes to an extremely accurate degree. Even kiddies’ games too.

Where am I?

In the 17th Century, King Charles II* of England, Scotland and Ireland saw fit to create a Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, in order to keep up with advances in astrology that rivals (especially the French) were making.

Back in 1676, the first “Astronomer Royal”, John Flamsteed, was tasked with finding a way to more accurately navigate at sea. In essence, he began working on the base for subdivision of time zones and for calculating longitude (i.e. how far east or west they are) and therefore help ships not get lost at sea.

The Prime Meridian was defined quite some years later – 1851 – and was chosen (in 1884) as the basis for most navigation systems and the means by which the globe is split up into time zones. East and West is measured in degrees of longitude with the Meridian (and associated Greenwich Mean Time) at point zero.

You can visit the Greenwich Observatory and stand with one foot in the western hemisphere and the other in the eastern hemisphere.

*Interestingly, while Chaz II was profligate in producing illegitimate children – Irvine Welsh might even describe him as a “flamboyant shagger” – he had no direct heirs. All things being as they are, when current King Charles III’s son, Prince William, ascends to the throne, he’ll be the first monarch descended from Charles II due to his mother’s ancestry.

When is it?

Observing the celestial bodies can help narrow down where you are but to be precise, you need instrumentation which can accurately measure time. In principle, a navigator out at sea could figure out what the time is where s/he was (based on placement of the sun and possibly using stars at night) and could calculate latitude (i.e. how far north or south he or she was).

If there was a way of knowing what the time was at a fixed point, then they could figure out longitude as well, by comparing the current location’s time and the what the time was at, say, Greenwich. Imagine a sailor halfway across the Atlantic – if they know it’s noon by observing the sun but they had a clock set to GMT which said it was 3pm, they could calculate the number of degrees of longitude difference and therefore pinpoint where they are, with at least a degree of certainty.

Unfortunately, accuracy of clocks and watches in the 17th century was pretty woeful – many early timepieces only had a single hand, as they weren’t really accurate enough to measure minutes. Sundials remained the most accurate way of measuring time.

The only clocks which could keep good time needed pendulums to swing and that doesn’t really work when the clock is pitching up and down on the waves, so once a sailor had left port there was no way of them keeping track of time at a known point, only the time where they were now.

Following repeated tragic shipwrecks due to vessels being off course to where they expected, the Board of Longitude was established in 1714, with a generous bounty (several £M in today’s money) promised to anyone could solve the problem.

Clockmaker John Harrison devoted much of his life to building clocks and “marine chronometers” which could prove remarkably accurate, enough to measure longitude over a long sea voyage. One test, by King George III no less, measured accuracy within 1/3 of a second per day over a 10-week period, and Captain Cook took a replica of Harrison’s H4 clock to his second voyage down under. They were expensive – about a third the cost of the ship – but if they helped avoid catastrophe, they were worth it. After much shenanigans, Harrison finally received the Board of Longitude’s payout when George III* personally intervened.

*It’s said that when the film version of “The Madness of George III” was released, it was re-titled The Madness of King George, so American audiences wouldn’t think it was a sequel and that they’d missed parts 1 and 2.

You can take a guided tour of the Observatory, seeing some of Harrison’s clocks and telling the story of what a massive impact solving that tricky problem had, seemingly trivial in today’s world: how knowing the time can help to pinpoint where you are.

You might even be lucky to be guided by former Master Mariner, John Noakes, who now volunteers at the Observatory. A life spent selling strategic software solutions has not dulled his enthusiasm for the subjects of seafaring, navigation and time.

The Royal Observatory played an important part in setting the time for ships, too – at exactly 1pm every day, the brightly-coloured Time Ball drops and any ships within sight of the Observatory could adjust their own clocks to make sure they remained accurate.

There was even a family – culminating in spinster Ruth Bellville – who “sold time” by taking a 1794 chronometer pocket watch and regularly setting it correctly from Greenwich. First her parents and then Ruth would journey around London, showing the watch to their clients (clock and watch makers, or other businesses) so they could accurately synchronise their own clocks to be within a few seconds of Greenwich Mean Time.

Despite availability of radio technology and even the Pips, it’s pretty remarkable that as late as the 1940s, people were still giving money to an old lady toting around a 130+ year old pocket watch, just to have a look at it.

19th and 20th Century Time

By the early 1800s, it was common for towns in the UK to have clocks in their church or town hall, and that was the reference for things of local importance, like what time the marketplace opened. Those clocks would be set by the midday sun so they would be more-or-less correct.

The problem is, noon in (say) Bristol might be 6 or 7 minutes later by celestial time than it is in London, and that made things difficult when trying to operate between the two, such as making a railway journey according to a published timetable.

Great Western Railway was the first, in 1840, to adopt a universal time standard set by Greenwich, which meant if you were catching a 2pm train in Bristol, it would be 2pm London Time even if a clock in Brissl said it was still 1:53.

Despite some resistance from red-faced locals complaining of interference from the capital city, it wasn’t long before everything across the country became synchronised to GMT and the idea of locally-defined time went away.

From grandfather clocks and pocket watches, by the mid-1900s, wearing a wristwatch became more the norm for gentlemen. Well-to-do ladies may have had a bracelet watch for some time, but it was during the Boer War that soldiers started routinely strapping a small pocket watch to their wrists so they could easily coordinate actions. It didn’t matter so much what the correct time was, so long as they all had their watches synchronised on the same time.

During the mid to late 20th century, the development of electronic time keeping made it much easier for people to know what the accurate time was. Atomic clocks were developed to measure down to tiny fractions of a second, and even redefined the international standard of “a second” as being based on the vibrations of a particular atom.

Scientists have even proved Einstein’s theory of relativity applies, by raising one of two atomic clocks by 1 foot in height, and seeing how it sped up ever so slightly. It’s only 90 billionths of a second faster over the span of a human lifetime, so tall people really needn’t worry about ageing quicker.

Further Watching and Reading

Futurologist Ray Kurzweil proposed in 1999 that the rate of innovation is itself accelerating, so that the first 30 years of the 21st century would see the same or greater technological change than all of the change from the 20th. Some of Ray’s predictions are a bit whacko, but consider that the 20th century itself gave us flight, adoption of mass transit and telecommunications, the transistor, electronic computers, the internet…

… so how have the first 2.5 decades of 21st C gone so far? Smartphones, social media, online shopping, Google Maps, the human genome… Right enough, by 2030, we may yet be supplicant to fuelling the AI overlords.

What’s the time now?

Using your phone or computer, if it keeps its clock set to the network it’s attached to, is probably the most accurate way of telling the time. Try going to the website https://time.is if you want to check how close you are, really.

If you have Amazon Prime, there’s an interesting documentary, The Watchmaker’s Apprentice, which tells the story of George Daniels, arguably the greatest watchmaker of the 20th century, and his protégé Roger W Smith. Daniels is no longer with us, but Smith still hand-makes watches that will routinely sell for >$1M.

If you can get over the somewhat cloying narration of Gimli/Treebeard, it’s quite an good tale.

Morgan Freeman also narrated a series of science documentaries in 10+ years ago, which touched on time, light and space even posing the question of whether time even exists.

There are many time-related stories in Simon Garfield’s excellent Timekeepers book too.

There’s more horological chuntering to follow on Not Tip of the Week, another time…

#781: The hand of government ne’er runs smooth

Posted on October 22, 2025 (Updated February 10, 2026) by ewand

This is part 3 of the “Is the car industry doomed?” series, following Part 1 and Part 2.

Looking back through history, government involvement in automobile manufacturing and its supporting infrastructure hasn’t always gone well, though examples do exist of dominant authority proving effective.

From the mid-1920s, the German government decided it wanted to build a network of roads – which became known as the Autobahn. When Hitler took power, he enthusiastically progressed the project and had the idea in the late 1930s of a car for the masses to go with their new road networks, commissioning a well-regarded engineer called Ferdinand Porsche, to make it a reality.

By the early 1970s, the Volkswagen Type 1 (aka “Beetle”) went on to overtake Henry Ford’s “Model T” as the most produced car up to that point, eventually tapping out at 21.5M models over an unbelievable 65-year lifespan. It was eventually overtaken by the Toyota Corolla, which remains at the top with over 47.5M produced in nearly 60 years.

The British Leyland experiment

In 1968, numerous established British car brands merged with the goal of being able to take on the globalising American juggernauts like Ford and General Motors, through creating efficiencies, economy of scale and all that kind of stuff.

Sadly, it didn’t go too well and the UK Government had to step in and nationalise the whole thing in 1975, under the “British Leyland” name.

There followed years of industrial turmoil, cars that were less well built or less well received than expected, and eventual dismemberment and sale of key brands like Jaguar and Rover. Government interference may have partly caused the merger to happen in the first place. Eventually it had to get involved in running a business it knew nothing about, in order to save face and thousands of jobs.

Zero Emissions Mandates

Coming back to the present day, before Covid, legislators in the EU (and the UK, which was still part of it at the time) decided that in order to reduce emissions and enthusiastically champion the kind of growth that Tesla was starting to experience in the US, they should encourage the car industry to invest in a transformation to electrification.

So, governments started offering incentives to offset the additional costs for end users, through direct subsidy to consumers, grants for installing home-chargers and tax breaks for companies supplying EVs to their staff. They also invested in improving public charging networks and ultimately legislated to force car companies to reduce emissions and speed up the uptake of EVs.

The US government never compelled an EV shift (though the law on trying to reduce pollution from gas guzzling vehicles was often mis-appropriated as an “EV Mandate”).

The European Union, however, did set out rules that meant it would no longer allow the sale of petrol or diesel cars after 2035, with stringent targets to reduce emissions of Internal Combustion Engine cars ahead of then. The EU threatens to penalise car companies based on the average CO2 emissions of their sales – though a reprieve has been granted for now.

Car companies reportedly considered restricting the numbers of its most polluting models, dropping certain ICE configurations altogether to avoid selling too many (and racking up fines by the resultant raising of their average CO2 output). In some ways this is what the legislators want, even if that means the highest performance cars in the range (such as Porsche’s 911 GT3) have to be restricted in numbers, even if the demand is there to sell more of them.

The UK government in 2020 decided that they would accelerate the move to EVs, and ICE vehicles would be phased out by 2030. That has now been relaxed to keep in step with the EU, given than the global car industry would be targeting the 2035 date for compliance anyway.

The current US administration quickly tore up the environmental restrictions due to take effect from 2027, so for now it’s perfectly OK to keep on buying the mix of pickups and SUVs that seem so popular.

The best selling “car” in the US is the Ford F-150, which will do about 14-17mpg in real world driving, emitting around 250 – 350g/km of CO2 (in the European model) depending on engine size.

The top selling car in the EU, by contrast, is the ICE-only Dacia Sandero, which will get 53 miles per UK gallon, emitting only 119g/km of CO2. [Note that the UK gallon is about 20% larger than the US one, so if the F-150 could do 15mpg in the US, it would be more like 18mpg in the UK].

Do Consumers want them, though?

Forecast demand for EVs is picking up but it’s still a long way from being the dominant form of propulsion. They are often more expensive to buy than traditional ICE cars, even if the running costs over time might be lower. Residual values have so far been poor – headlines saying that EVs lose half their value in 2 years could be enough to give buyers the jitters about buying a new, premium electric car.

Analyst Statista provides data with forecasting until 2029; taking a straight-line extrapolation (which is unrealistic but serves a purpose) from 2030 to 2040, would conclude that even by 2035, Petrol shipments would still have the upper hand.

Data Source: Automotive industry worldwide – statistics & facts | Statista up to 2029, then a straight-line extrapolation from 2030 – 2040.

If government mandates and incentives keep being offered or even increased, it’s likely that EV uptake will accelerate. If we assume that pure petrol and diesel will to all intents dry up post-2030, and that there’s at least a bump in hybrids for a while before them being essentially unavailable after 2035, maybe it would look like …

Data Source: Automotive industry worldwide – statistics & facts | Statista up to 2029, then an estimate of decline in petrol/diesel and stronger uptake of EV and (to 2035), hybrid

In truth, it’s unlikely that diesel, petrol or hybrid will completely stop in 2030/35. Even if the EU keeps its restrictions in place, there’s no telling what the US might do, or what will happen outside of these major blocs. We’d assume that pretty much all petrol and diesel will become MHEV or PHEVs, and for a while at least would continue to out-sell EVs.

Some car manufacturers bet the farm on EVs – take, for example, Geely. Amongst various Chinese domestic brands, they own Sweden’s Volvo & Polestar, the London taxi company and former UK sports car maker Lotus. Polestar used to be a sporty sub-brand for Volvos, like Mercedes’ AMG or BMW’s M-division, but it spun out as a separate company initially offering a high spec PHEV before launching a range of BEVs.

Polestar is reportedly circling the drain, with $1Bn losses and middling sales figures, though their boss said they’re going to stick it out. They have launched several new cars in the last couple of years and it’s taking time for them to gain traction while the 5-year old Polestar 2 is looking less competitive.

Volvo’s pure EV sales are down YoY by nearly 25% and sales across the board are falling. Lotus tried to do a Porsche-style pivot (diversifying from just doing sports cars to more lucrative SUVs) by launching massive Chinese-built EV cars, but is both rowing back its pledge to move to EV-only for its UK-built sports cars, and is even looking to add a turbo-petrol “range extender” engine to it EVs to effectively make them EREVs. The Lotus Eletre SUV, designed and built by Geely in Wuhan, is expensive and heavy enough, and not particularly efficient. Wherever they could fit a petrol engine will only make it even more compromised.

Even with government assistance and tax penalties on more polluting cars, it seems people aren’t rushing to spend £100K+ on a 2.5 tonne luxury electric SUV. Lotus also joined the breathless pre-COVID rush for EV hypercars that would produce crazy power and cost millions of pounds. It seems the uber-rich don’t much want them either.

Complexity and Usability

As well as concerns about how they’re powered, consumers might be cooling on buying new cars in general. What with [waves arms around above head] “all of this”, keeping older cars running make more financial sense for many.

For driving enthusiasts, even buying new ICE cars – in Europe at least – also comes with the downside of a variety of mandatory safety features. On the face of it, more safety = better, but the new GSR2 regs require a variety of systems (like speed warnings) to be enabled every time you start the car, which means the car beeps and bongs for a variety of reasons, and can take many menu options to deselect the features.

Ironically, with the trend to replacing physical buttons with screens, the driver-monitoring camera on a modern car will tell you off for not keeping your eyes on the road, just because you’re trying to change the cabin temperature on the big screen whilst moving.

Car journalists talk about “peak car” being 8 – 12 years ago; stuff that has come out since is often more complicated, more expensive and not as nice to drive, even if they’re supposedly safer and better for the environment.

Will legislators blink?

It remains to be seen whether the powers-that-be will continue to try and make the industry switch fully to EVs. The use of tariffs by the Trump administration might stymie imports from overseas, but there’s little incentive for domestic US automakers to fully embrace EVs or even make their existing gas guzzlers super-efficient – Tesla being the notable exception. At least for now, tariffs are also restricting some cars from being sold in the US, as they’d just be too expensive – Volvo’s new Chinese-built ES90 “saloon” being one example.

In the early 2000s, the UK government (among others) incentivised diesel cars as a more efficient and less polluting (from a CO2 perspective) alternative. Fast forward a few years, and diesel particulate and NOx emissions were recognised as being a health danger and the naughty car companies were cooking the books (“Dieselgate”) when it came to emissions testing. It’s just over 10 years since the United States EPA raised its concerns about emissions not being reported correctly.

According to the Consumer Insights Global Survey, when asked in 2024, US buyers were 69% looking at Gasoline/Petrol, 19% Electric and 26% Hybrid, with Diesel accounting for only 8% (clearly, each consumer might be considering multiple options since the numbers don’t add up to 100%…)

Germany looked a little more positive, with 53% evaluating Petrol, 26% Electric and 32% Hybrid (though a stalwart 28% still want Diesel, it seems). The UK was 48% Petrol, 31% Electric, 39% Hybrid and still 23% Diesel.

Even a decade before we’re expected to switch to EVs, with these patterns in consumer demand, it feels like we’re going to get a lot of hybrids before we go fully electric, if that indeed happens.

The threat from China

The Chinese market has evolved over the last 25 years; at one point, it was the new nirvana for Western brands as newly affluent Chinese consumers wanted to snap up luxury products from Europe and the US. Auto makers rushed to set up manufacturing facilities in China to serve the growing local market, even producing specific models (like Audi launching the A6L long wheelbase for people to be driven around in).

That is now changing – the overall luxury goods market in 2025 is estimated to grow less than 1% in China, compared to 1.2% for North America and 2.4% for Northern Europe. While still expanding, the Chinese economy growth rate is slowing and consumers are turning more to cheaper, local brands.

At the same time, the Chinese government’s long-term investment program in the infrastructure and manufacturing capability for electric vehicles started to pay off. Now, the list of best-selling electric cars is dominated by Chinese manufacturers.

If the world’s car market is pivoting to be largely if not entirely electric, then BYD and similar brands could be the dominant maker of EVs, even if they have to spin up factories in other parts of the world to sidestep tariffs and other blockers.

Even though the charging networks are more advanced in China than in many other parts of the world, consumers are still worried about range and charging times. This has led to the development of waves of “NEV” – New Energy Vehicles – which are fundamentally electric but not exclusively so. Petrol-powered EREV – range extender EVs – are gaining ground and may become the default since they appear to offer all the benefits of EVs but can run for hundreds of miles.

If Europe and the US are going to still have an automobile industry in 10 or 20 years, they will need to compete with imports from China that are potentially much cheaper, and due to experience and scale, will probably be better than the ones coming from established western auto makers.

So, is the car industry doomed?

Well, obviously not entirely – but the constituent parts of it in a decade or two might be very different to what we’ve got used to over the last 30 or so years. German hegemony at the premium end of the market is certainly looking under threat.

BMW led with innovative electric offerings in the i3 and i8 of 2013/4 but fairly quickly realised they were not going to have true mass-market appeal. It’s taken them years to evolve the rest of the range to offer competitive BEV offerings, but they are now leading the field in Europe (even before Tesla’s sales were negatively affected by it’s CEO’s behaviour).
VW/Audi have had a difficult time, too – early software problems and a poor UX left mainstream buyers waiting (maybe the old adage of not buying anything from Microsoft until v3 also applies here), and they might have struck the crossbar above the open goal of the appeal of an electric Golf replacement when the ID.3 was first launched.
Mercedes, despite having some remarkable technology, have struggled to build and sell something that buyers want. Their boss has even warned of an existential threat to the entire industry if the lawmakers continue to enforce adoption of EVs too quickly.

So far, the Chinese manufacturers are grabbing market share by selling good-enough BEVs at a price that beats the premium offerings from Germany, and undercuts the alternatives from US, Japan and Korea. Renault has scored a hit with its cutesy R5 so there is hope from within the established industry that they can make a product that buyers want.

Time will tell if that’s enough to save the existing car makers or if they’ll be replaced by a new wave of names from China and elsewhere.