Cars are there. Cars are cleaned, new, safe. So people sell their cars, and they trust that STATTAUTO works. You need all this to get people from the private car to STATTAUTO. With old, junky cars you won't. Because people have enough money to buy nice private cars. They just don't like the idea of having to service a private car. Every 6 months they go to the emissions test or to the inspection at the garage, all this stuff. The gasoline price goes up, they get in a bad mood. With STATTAUTO, they just drive less. Insurance went up like hell in Germany, 50% in the last two years because of cars being stolen. So people don't worry anymore, and they just know they drive less with STATTAUTO. What they like is the service. Some people say when you buy.new cars that is bad because the production of new cars is greater. That is just wrong because it depends on how many cars you buy, what you do, and how long you keep them. We keep them two years. Normal car rental firms keep them 6 months. Why do they do that? Because they get a 30-40% discount on the new cars. Say the cars are very new, like if you keep them only one day theoretically: then you see it. You buy it with a 40% discount, you sell it with only a 30% discount, so you make 10%. That is how normal rental firms live. Normal rental firms are car dealers. The production does not go up because somebody buys a new car. When you have a hundred Americans, and I think it is the case you have 100 cars. Well, everybody buys one car, obviously. Say person #1 buys all of these 100 cars because he has such a wonderful discount and sells them to the other 99, one day later. Car buyers will obviously buy it from the first person because they don't want to pay the full price from the manufacturer. They want the discount, so the production does not go up. But we take people away from the car market. If ten people use one car, you remove demand for 10 cars. You need new cars to attract more people to this system, then many less cars are made. When car-sharing firms are big, they can say to the manufacturer, "well, we don't like," for example, "this metallic paint. It is an ecological waste." And also they will say we want cars that go 1 million kilometers instead of the current 100,000 kilometers until they break down. When you have marketpower, you will change the car. You will say we want a good car, not a throw-away car. We want cars to last for 50 years, saving resources. It is possible. No problem for engineers. It is just the market that wants every year a new model, and everything is thrown away. We should buy all cars and be the biggest car dealer, because then we can say which cars are on the market. That's how it works. Not people thinking, "we buy new cars and the production goes up." That is not true. VW or Opal... They probably produce in one minute what we need in a year... GB: How did you make the relationship for buying cars at a discount? MP: Well, we were pretty stupid actually. The first thing you do is go to all the dealers in town. You write them a letter and say I want to buy two cars and who wants to give me a discount? And so most of them, they don't even answer, but now there is a big recession in Germany and so all of them answer you back. They will say, I will give X discount. Soon you will find out that the maximum is about 20% in Germany, and that is really the maximum using this method. It depends on the car: cheap cars get more discount and cars like Mercedes get less. Because you sell it after some time and the difference between the buy and sell price is the amount you have to pay. We said we have two cars to buy and ended up with.Opal/GM. Actually, they gave the best discount. The car was ok for our purposes. And so we did not have a liaison with GM. It just gave the best discount. So then with all the media coverage the cars were getting, we told Opal, you need to give us an extra discount, because we are improving you image. Because STATTAUTO is concerned with being an intelligent and ecological product, and it is connected to Opal only because you gave us this discount. Any day we could go to VW, no problem, so they gave us an extra press/media discount. And then it turned out that I should have done that in advance! But you never know. Now, we are serious so they talk to us. Five years ago, nobody talked to us. Recently some people came that were part of a group of firms buying cars together. It's like a buying cooperative for cars. They get huge discounts. And they said when we become a member we can have them too. So I said, wonderful, no problem, because I don't have a problem with getting a discount from the manufacturer. The manuf~cturers didn't like that very much because now we can buy all cars with these wonderful discounts. So that shouldn't be a problem. I am sure that these buying cooperatives exist in the States. Because all firms that buy 50 cars a year, which is nothing for a big firm, they have that problerp.. They want to buy at a discount, so they have these groups. These interviews were edited for grammatical correctness and reading ease. Great care was taken not to delete any important information. The full interview on VHS videotape contains more questions and answers. It will be available from RAIN in Septem,ber 1996. (Order form is on page 57). RAIN Summer 1996 Volume XV, Number 1 Page 55
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz