Maybe Henry Ford had it right all along when he famously offered his cars in any colour you wanted, so long as it was black. Or maybe not.
The nadir of mass-market personalisation surely came with the Vauxhall Adam, an attempt at muscling in on the Fiat 500 and Mini’s hegemony in the world of cutesy superminis.
Somewhat unbelievably, the Adam was offered with 61,000 exterior colour combinations and 82,000 interior options. As one executive remarked soon after the car was withdrawn from sale following poor sales, just imagine the complexity that induced – for the customer and factory.
It wasn’t just the people on the line who had to keep up, either, but the folk delivering each element to the line, managing the storage and keeping the warehouse in just enough stock to meet demand, without overdoing it and tying up capital in spare parts.
The Adam lasted one generation. Small cars make famously small margins at the best of times, but by trying to combat that by bulking out the options list, Vauxhall (Opel, really) had actually racked up costs with the off-the-scale options list, the vast majority of which were superfluous.
“I remember offering eight different wheel options, yet one of them accounted for 75% of orders, and five of them for less than 1% each,” one rueful exec recounted. “Yet we had to negotiate supply contracts for all of them, manage the logistics for all of them, have all of them on site in storage ready… It was an organisational and economical nightmare.”
From the moment Carlos Tavares got his hands on Opel in 2017, this kind of thinking was on borrowed time. Nobody is more pragmatic about reducing complexity than the ultra-successful Stellantis (née PSA Group) chief, and his leadership team follow in his wake. Oh to have seen their eyes spin when told about the millions of different combinations that a customer’s order for an Adam could arrive with.
Add your comment