Auto Industry Drives Toward Sustainable Profits
Smart Moves
The Smart EV is blazing a new trail in making an electric car affordable. I was all over this little urban commuter at the auto show because of its low price. For less than $20,000, Smart is selling an all-electric two-seat car with approximately 60 to 90 miles of range on a full charge. More than 70 percent of us of drive less than 40 miles per day, most of it with a single occupant in the car. The Smart EV is the cost-effective solution for urban commuting that reduces smog and climate changing emissions.
Driving the Future
The auto industry is proving that sustainability is the 21st-century path to winning customers. It’s listened to customer concerns over pump-price pains and air pollution. Taking action, auto companies are spending billions on technologies that deliver answers. The industry’s payback for this initiative is record sales and profits.
One best-practice transferable to every business leader is the need for a strategic technology plan. Ford’s pioneering product designs are shaped by their strategic goals for reducing emissions, and its strategic plan is singularly focused on winning customers and growing profits. What Ford has proven is that a company can achieve ambitious customer-acquisition and profit goals by placing sustainability at the core of its strategy.
Honda is proving that sustainable best practices can be applied incrementally to better engineer 20th-century technologies. Most businesses aren’t in a position to take “bet the company” risks being assumed by Ford Chairman of the Board Bill Ford and CEO Alan Mulally. What Honda is proving is that sustainable engineering delivers customers, environmental solutions and profits. Honda’s Civic, CR-V and Accord combined to achieve sales of more than a million new retail customers in 2013.
This sales success is built on continuous incremental improvement in energy efficiency, quality and production. Each new model is a step forward in reducing emissions. Honda is demonstrating that sustainability is a best practice that absolutely supports sales growth.
Offering a low price is the ultimate commercial path for sustainable products. These solutions are now shifting from a niche opportunity limited by high prices to a mainstream product competitive on price. The Smart EV is a low-price leader for all urban vehicles. It’s a lower-cost operating solution to gasoline-powered urban commuter cars.
Products That Deliver
This push toward achieving price competitiveness by offering sustainable goods and services will be the major economic trend in the 21st century. It’s also a sustainable best practice every business must embrace to win customers that increasingly see they can have it all in the form of competitively priced products that deliver “in me, on me and around me” solutions.
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