Carmakers need to give leave to go of their musty business models and start thinking same 21st hundred years companies—like Google

By Jeff Jarvis

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If Google (GOOG) ran a car company, what would it look like? What lessons of Google’session singular good luck in the Internet age might put to remaking this, among other failing industries? Would the Googlemobile be the product of stealth and secrecy or openness and collaboration? Could Detroit release cars in beta? Could cars be ad-supported and free? Is there any hope on this account that every industry that traffics in atoms in place of digits? Would a Googley car social meeting even make cars?

A few years ago, it might have been absurd to look to Google for ideas about the auto industry. But not now. American automakers are in crisis. General Motors (GM) and Chrysler needed a $13 billion bailout from the founded on government in December to keep them out of bankruptcy, and, with a new Administration in Washington, the Big Three are likely to head back to the well for billions greater degree of. They’re suffering from in greater numbers than the economic juncture. The huge declines in sales reflect a fundamental disconnect betwixt drivers and Detroit. It’s time on account of a radical rethinking of the way U.S. automakers do business.

I sat in Detroit some time ago and suggested heresy: I urged the car people to open up their design process and make it both limpid and collaborative. Car companies have no good highroad to listen to customers’ ideas. If they had opened up, years before, I would have been among the legions who’d own gladly told them to invest 39 cents for a plug-in car radio so we could connect our iPods. Every time I try to give ear to my music or podcasts in the car via various kludges—FM transmitters that be able to’t send on to a radio each twelfth part of a foot away and cassette-tape gizmos—I curse car companies and their suppliers. At smallest let us help design the radios you install, I urged.

My suggestion was sacrilegious because automakers have long been secretive hither and thither design. Design and surprise, they ruminate, are their special relish. That’s why they embroidery new models like classified weapons, setting right hand games of cat-and-car with photographers who put to the test to scoop the secrets. Apart from the most fanatical car fan, do the come to a stand of us still care? The excitement I remember about a new year’s cars—like a new season’s TV shows—is gone. Cars have lost their fit time. They rarely procreate incitement or passion. An Oldsmobile is no Apple (AAPL) iPhone, in relation to every one of. How could a car company again win our affection for its products and brands? By opening up, through dint of. making the process of producing cars transparent so it could involve customers, by meander out cars customers want because they had a hazard to say what they want.

Google listens to us and trusts us when it releases unfinished products as “betas” so we be able to tell them which to do next. That’session the approach behind Google News, Gmail, and the new Chrome browser. The house also lets us maker of men’s clothes searches thus we turn up only images or book excerpts. And Google pays attention to us by using our clicks and links to determine rank in search results. The more men who connect to a blog post on the best receipt for lamb tagine, the more prominent Google will make that Web site when people hunt for dinner ideas.

Google wants us involved in the creative process; Detroit doesn’t. On Peter Day’s BBC program In Business, Richard Florida, author of Who’s Your City?, said Detroit’s car companies were “destroyed” by “a management mind set that reported, ‘We know it all, we don’t need anyone other’session ideas, and we can do anything we want through our companies.’ ”

Car companies have let customers be productive of emblems for cars and create their own ads during certain models, as General Motors did with the Chevy Tahoe in 2006. GM Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz has blogged.