I am a huge fan of cars. I love everything about them. It is for this reason that picking a replacement car for me is a six-month-long process. What will the car be used for? Bush or town or both? What kind of mileage will I put on it? If high, what is the fuel consumption on it? What about the safety record of the car? What about the make and the model? The brand? What does this brand stand for?I suspect most others who love cars as much as I do also go through the same steps I do, or at least I hope so. It was while reading a Car Magazine SA that a new level of complexity was brought to my attention, however; one that goes beyond what purpose I’ll be putting my wheels to. In fact, it is one that I had been addressing subconsciously on some level for years. Perhaps I just needed a very observant article to highlight it for me. To elaborate, let me give you some context: when you buy your next car, the salesperson will probably ask what phone you use.As strange as this may sound, this is a legitimate question for the ‘current’ salesperson. A new selling point for cars is how well they can integrate with your smartphone and other handheld devices. As consumers, we want our phone and music to simply just keep working as we step out of our homes and into our cars. We want uninterrupted connectivity and convenience..If you think about it, our devices are very much a part of everything we do today… So important are our phones that, according to Car Magazine, we will be making choices about cars based purely on the phone’s ability to work with a prospective new car. Who would have thought this day would come, right?This got me thinking. Who, or rather what, influences my choice of device? Another chicken or egg situation, and in this case it is a debate on whether it is the car or the phone that comes first.It does not necessarily end there. What about the choice of home? Will location be replaced with bandwidth? I, for one, would live in any house in Botswana that can stream full movies without that incredibly irritating buffering that must occur. I cannot be alone on that one.So what is the takeout here?We as consumers now have both the power and the burden of being influenced by a great many more parameters. There is a whole lot more to what makes us choose the brands we go with, and enough to deter us from others. For instance, the Apple Drive systems for cars now being built into next generation information and entertainment systems. Seamless and simple, and clearly has me, or you, as the end user in mind.There is a whole lot of debate on Android versus Apple and, beyond this, all the collaborations with motor vehicle brands we need not even get into. The simple question is this: how easy and convenient will they make it for us as road users, car aficionados and tech lovers? Let us not forget that awful stage where you would be torn between buying Mac or Windows because of the fear of incompatible software.I do not want an incompatible car or an incompatible phone. I want to step into a new car and enjoy the smell of fresh new leather seats. I want to know that, all the while, my phonecalls are uninterrupted and whichever crooner I have playing off my iPhone isn’t going to have to suffer a rude interruption as I fidget with the buttons in my car.Like I said, I am a lover of cars. I am also a lover of tech, and a lover of (as I imagine we all are) convenience. It is a blessing and a curse, therefore, to have a host of new options and possibilities to guide my decision-making as a consumer of brands.What remains to be seen is how much our brands leverage this to make us all happy shoppers.
I am a huge fan of cars. I love everything about them. It is for this reason that picking a replacement car for me is a six-month-long process. What will the car be used for? Bush or town or both? What kind of mileage will I put on it? If high, what is the fuel consumption on it? What about the safety record of the car? What about the make and the model? The brand? What does this brand stand for?I suspect most others who love cars as much as I do also go through the same steps I do, or at least I hope so. It was while reading a Car Magazine SA that a new level of complexity was brought to my attention, however; one that goes beyond what purpose I’ll be putting my wheels to. In fact, it is one that I had been addressing subconsciously on some level for years. Perhaps I just needed a very observant article to highlight it for me. To elaborate, let me give you some context: when you buy your next car, the salesperson will probably ask what phone you use.As strange as this may sound, this is a legitimate question for the ‘current’ salesperson. A new selling point for cars is how well they can integrate with your smartphone and other handheld devices. As consumers, we want our phone and music to simply just keep working as we step out of our homes and into our cars. We want uninterrupted connectivity and convenience..If you think about it, our devices are very much a part of everything we do today… So important are our phones that, according to Car Magazine, we will be making choices about cars based purely on the phone’s ability to work with a prospective new car. Who would have thought this day would come, right?This got me thinking. Who, or rather what, influences my choice of device? Another chicken or egg situation, and in this case it is a debate on whether it is the car or the phone that comes first.It does not necessarily end there. What about the choice of home? Will location be replaced with bandwidth? I, for one, would live in any house in Botswana that can stream full movies without that incredibly irritating buffering that must occur. I cannot be alone on that one.So what is the takeout here?We as consumers now have both the power and the burden of being influenced by a great many more parameters. There is a whole lot more to what makes us choose the brands we go with, and enough to deter us from others. For instance, the Apple Drive systems for cars now being built into next generation information and entertainment systems. Seamless and simple, and clearly has me, or you, as the end user in mind.There is a whole lot of debate on Android versus Apple and, beyond this, all the collaborations with motor vehicle brands we need not even get into. The simple question is this: how easy and convenient will they make it for us as road users, car aficionados and tech lovers? Let us not forget that awful stage where you would be torn between buying Mac or Windows because of the fear of incompatible software.I do not want an incompatible car or an incompatible phone. I want to step into a new car and enjoy the smell of fresh new leather seats. I want to know that, all the while, my phonecalls are uninterrupted and whichever crooner I have playing off my iPhone isn’t going to have to suffer a rude interruption as I fidget with the buttons in my car.Like I said, I am a lover of cars. I am also a lover of tech, and a lover of (as I imagine we all are) convenience. It is a blessing and a curse, therefore, to have a host of new options and possibilities to guide my decision-making as a consumer of brands.What remains to be seen is how much our brands leverage this to make us all happy shoppers.