A painful car: Customization in the automotive industry
The original article by Morinosuke Kawaguchi appeared on February 3, 2009 in DIME magazine:
“カスタム化を日本のモノづくりの復活に生かせ“
On Japan’s roads you can find a very special kind of car everyone will know to belong to an otaku. Deeply submerged into the world of manga, anime and video gaming, for designing their cars with huge stickers of cute anime girls gave them confidence and allowed them to take their private world and lifestyle feeling onto the street.
These cars are called Itasha, which means “painful car”, basically because the car owners have altered the original, “perfect” design of the car as it was intended by the engineer. The image of a perfectly designed automobile disparaged by geeky subculture must indeed be painful to car designers.
Source: Wikipedia
To Morinosuke Kawaguchi however, the Itasha stands for a very different product conception than that of a perfect, finished product that must not be altered. In the traditional sense, it would almost be a sin to put stickers on a Ferrari since it is engineered and sold as a completely final, it-does-not-get-better-than-this automobile.
A totally opposed concept in the car industry is customization and modularity. Changing the skin of the car as the Itasha owners do is but a first step. But for truly long tail design, Kawaguchi predicts, this is but a beginning.
Engineers need to think of ways to develop cars that cater to a growing demand for customization and individuality. Their customers are allowed and encouraged to design their very personal car to a much more farfetching extent than is possible today.
What makes the Itasha so special is that its owners feel emotionally connected to it. Their very own idea of the ideal car they want to drive has also resulted in the creation of a small industry and new service ideas around the Itasha, such as printing shops able to provide poster size stickers.
Customization and modularity will but increase possibilities in the supplier industry, this time directly in touch with the end consumer. As for ideas, Kawaguchi points out that subculture is already taking the concept further: the anime series “Mezzo forte” integrated the Itasha in the storyline. Here, the Itasha was already a completely modular designable, and very prestigious, car.
- First attempts « On Japanese Geeky Girly Engineering and Design – concepts and visions by Morinosuke Kawaguchi pingbacked on 2 years ago
