Consumers trust tech companies over carmakers for self-driving cars

Google might want to partner its technology with auto manufacturers rather than making and selling the cars itself.

Almost all the world’s automotive manufacturers are scrambling to develop self-driving cars. But, it appears, the world would rather buy a self-driving car made by a tech company. Consumers are more likely to splurge on a self-driving car made by Mercedes-Benz than Nissan; they’re even likelier to buy one made by the likes of Google and Apple, according to a study released by audit and advisory firm KPMG on Oct. 10.

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Future of the car industry looks surprisingly bright

The motor industry’s fortunes are increasingly divided, but in the right markets and with the right technologies, they look surprisingly bright.

Henry Ford and his engineers perfected the moving assembly line a hundred years ago. They cut the time taken to assemble a Ford Model T from 12 hours and 30 minutes in 1913 to just one hour and 33 minutes the following year. That made the car a lot cheaper to build and opened up a mass market for it. By 1918 its list price was down to $450, or just over 5 months’ pay for the average American worker, against the equivalent of about a year and a half’s pay when the car was launched a decade earlier. Cars became a personal badge of status, and in time carmaking became a badge of national virility.

 

 

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Chinese drivers could influence your next car

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China alone is forecast to see auto sales rise to 30 million units by 2020, 80 percent above the previous U.S. record.

The BMW 3-Series sedan might look like the conventional BMW but a closer inspection reveals it’s been stretched 11 centimeters — about 4 inches for metrically challenged Americans — almost all of that going to rear-seat occupants.

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Inflation hiding in smaller package sizes

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Skippy shrank their 18-ounce container size down to 16.3 ounces.

If you are willing to look close enough, we’re actually being confronted by a serious bout of deflation when it comes to the size of the containers sitting on our supermarket shelves.  Good things may come in small packages but that doesn’t mean they are good deals.  Here’s how your favorite grocery-store items are shrinking before your eyes.

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