I’d spend a billion dollars to make the creation of a car company turnkey. Make it easy to get all the safety and regulatory approvals… as easy to start a car company as it is to start a web company. Use the bankruptcy to wipe out the hated, legacy marketing portion of the industry: the dealers.

We’d end up with a rational number of “car stores” in every city that sold lots of brands. We’d have super cheap cars and super efficient cars and super weird cars. There’d be an orgy of innovation, and from that, a whole new energy and approach would evolve. Betcha.

The vision is nice – a thriving multiplex of weird and wacky automotive innovation. But this is one of those times when I’m not sure
if it can really work. The economies of scale would appear to be so massive, the initial capital expenditures so huge, that a massive
consolidation seems the inevitable response. It will never, ever, be as easy to start a car company as a web company because in one
you’re dealing with a “product” that is perfectly plastic, perfectly malleable, has no shipping costs, and where only two scarcities figure:
creativity in developers, and human attention in users. None of these are true of physical manufacturing.

Still, as usual, something worth thinking about.