I fully expect to get a lot of abuse for this, but I must admit, I don't get why some cars have such short production lives. For me personally, if it ain't broke, don't fix it yet. Me and my parents own relatively old cars, and I really don't see any useful improvement with the latest models.
Because there are different people in the world to you and your parents.
Most people these days buying a new car do so on a PCP deal for 3-4 years.
At the end of 3-4 years the option is give the car back, buy another new car for the same money as they are already paying or pay off the PCP balloon payment which usually means refinancing the car and paying the same amount for 4 year old car as they would for a new car.
Unsurprisingly most opt to buy a new car for the same money. This is where Fiat fall down, you see brand loyalty is everything with cars and for many once hooked on a brand they will stick with what they know. If you get to the end of your 3 year deal, and the option is to pay off the rest of the finance deal for another 3 years, at the end of which you’ll have a nearly worthless 6-8 year old car... or buy a brand new car for the exact same monthly payment, and you toddle along to the dealer to look for a “new car” but the “new car” is the exact same car you already have, then most will start looking else where, when people want a new car they want something new, something different with new features a new look, if you’re paying all that money out for a new car you want something new.
For year fiat have been neglecting those customers, so someone loyal to owning a 500 could well be on their 3rd or 4th essentially identical car now, the punto has gone largely unchanged since 2005 other than a few cons metric changes so if you had a punto every 3years since 2005 you’d be on your 5th one this year in the mean time there have 4 models of golf in that same period of time.
They don’t do it for the sake of change, they do it because it sells cars.
If there is no reason to update people will carry on and not buy new cars, to a car manufacturer, people not buying new cars is not exactly good business sense.
It’s the same model that phone companies use to sell new phones, bring a new model out each year, tweet it just enough to be better than the previous model and sell all the virtues and extras of the new model and people will ditch their old phone/car to have the newest models.
Now you might not be one of these people, you might not see any sense in such a wasteful society or think these people are idiots, however if people weren’t buying a million new cars every year then they wouldn’t be selling their old cars, there fore older cars would become hugely expensive and you’d be driving something from the 80s welded together 500times just to keep it going because of its relative value. The way things are done currently, it gets rid of older, unsafe, broken, polluting cars every few years, and society keeps moving forward rather than living in the past.
