“We all hate you… Get off your golf cart and drive a regular car,” said a Florida driver on TikTok, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
Why? Because, says WSJ, “Golf Carts Have Taken Over Suburbia. Cue the Resistance.”
As the article notes:
“Golf carts designed for the road have been around since the early 2000s, but demand has soared in the past five years. Mark Rickell, a sales executive at cart maker Club Car, estimated the total U.S. market for the vehicles at $5 billion, up from $1 billion before the pandemic.”
Perhaps what was most notable for me as I read the article was how unsurprising it all felt. It’s been a long time coming.
Clayton Christensen predicted it—back in 1997 in his groundbreaking first book, The Innovator’s Dilemma.
“Electric-powered vehicles have hovered at the fringe of legitimacy since the early 1900s, when they lost the contest for the dominant vehicle design to gasoline power,” Clay wrote in the book. “Research on these vehicles accelerated during the 1970s, however, as policymakers increasingly looked to them as a way to reduce urban air pollution.”
But as Clay pointed out at the time, that relative to mainstream customer expectations (which you can only understand by watching what people do, not what they say), electric cars greatly underperformed relative to gasoline-powered automobiles:
“Observations indicate that auto users today require a minimum cruising range… of about 125 to 150 miles; most electric vehicles only offer a minimum cruising range of 50 to 80 miles. Similarly, drivers seem to require cars that accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 10 seconds… most electric vehicles take nearly 20 seconds to get there. And, finally, buyers in the mainstream market demand a wide array of options, but it would be impossible for electric vehicle manufacturers to offer a similar variety within the small initial unit volumes that will characterize the business. According to almost any definition of functionality used for the vertical [disruption] axis… the electric vehicle will be deficient compared to a gasoline-powered car.”
Because the performance of electric cars was improving 2% to 4% at the time, Clay concluded that they could be disruptive relative to gasoline-powered cars. And as a result, the most successful path wouldn’t be to start by competing head-on against gasoline-powered cars in the mainstream market (although there are certainly some exciting, strong—but still somewhat niche at a bit less than 10% per year in the US—pure electric plays in that market today). Instead, Clay said he would look for a market where the buyers wanted a vehicle that didn’t accelerate quickly or need to go farther than 100 miles. Beyond that, he said the only way to precisely figure out the right market would be through an emergent strategy—prototyping and learning in the market itself.
Within a few years of writing The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clay believed that the answer would be to market them for senior citizens and teenagers through the neighborhood electric vehicle.
And as the article says, in South Carolina, for example, the “law allows golf carts to travel on public roads with a speed limit of 35 mph or less and within 4 miles of the driver’s home. The vehicles don’t need a license plate but must have a permit.” Perfect for teenagers and senior citizens.
The other thing that didn’t surprise me was that these vehicles are now starting to get a lot of pushback. As the misattributed quote to Gandhi says, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” It perfectly describes Disruptive Innovation.
I also wasn’t surprised because the same fights occurred when automobiles disrupted horse-drawn carriages in the early 1900s.
As Clay’s disciple and professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, Scott Anthony recounts in his fun new book Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations that Shaped Our Modern World that, due to the chaos caused by cars, “newspaper cartoons in the 1920s showed the Grim Reaper driving cars.” And while the motorists branded pedestrians heedlessly crossing the road as “jaywalkers,” pedestrians said the reckless drivers were “flivverboobs.”
Ultimately, the “disruptive” motorists won the battle for public minds and the streets—and flivverboobs didn’t last in our vocabulary.
So while we can make reasonable predictions around which disruptive innovations will occur—as well as some of the sentiments as disruption happens—we should also once again acknowledge that the timelines over which they will occur, as I wrote a couple of posts ago, can be quite long.
As drivers on TikTok yell at the golf cart drivers to get a car, here’s one other apt tale from Anthony’s book:
“When Roy Chapin drove an Oldsmobile runabout from Detroit to New York in late 1901 at the heady speed of ten miles an hour, mule drivers constantly harassed him by yelling, ‘Get a horse.’”
If only they had had TikTok!
