With the rising average price of a new vehicle steadily shrinking the potential market of buyers, automakers should shift their focus to selling to the wealthiest customers possible: governments. SpaceX has proven that civilian and military officials will trip over themselves to give you a contract if your company can offer launch services at a cheaper price than your competitors. According to the Treasury Department, the federal government has awarded $23.5 billion in contracts to Elon Musk's private space company since 2008.
We asked our readers earlier this week which automakers should start building spaceships. Plenty of the responses were complaints that car companies need to focus on the issues with the ground-based vehicles. They missed the big picture. Automakers could use their space revenue to adequately fund the development of their lunar rovers so they're never recalled. Do you know how expensive it would be to establish a service center on the Moon? How would you even train a technician to fix a faulty liftgate in one-sixth gravity? We'll cross that bridge when we get there. Without further ado, here are the car manufacturers that should enter the commercial space industry:
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"Chrysler Corporation's Space Division developed and built the first stage of the Saturn 1B rocket that was used in the early Apollo missions." They then designed the SERV. Then they laid that entire division off over time. So wherever those employees went, hire them.
Submitted by: potbellyjoe
They did get hired, to Rockwell, Rocketdyne, TRW, Northrup, Lockheed and other companies from that era back in the day. Today, like +50 years later, they're most likely dead.
Submitted by: Rick C.
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Rolls-Royce. If I'm going to space I want to do it ensconced in walnut and burnished nickel, with mother-of-pearl mechanical gauges and seats that remember my lumbar settings after 200 years in cryo-sleep.
Submitted by: Rayce Archer
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General Motors: They will have multiple brand offerings at multiple price points but they will all be about the same size and shape across the brands with the exact same engines carrying the exact same payloads but with mildly different nose cones, colors, and stripes to differentiate the brands.
I would have said Ford but they would all be recalled before they got into orbit...
Submitted by: Old_SAAB_Guy
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Jaguar/Land Rover.
The production line will be down multiple times due to strikes and parts shortages. The final product will be late with technology seriously behind-the-times. It will have on-going electrical problems which no one can diagnose. The engines will not keep running. It will leak fluids all over the launch pad. Independent technicians refuse to work on it.
Submitted by: Haysis
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Honda. They already have been working on aircraft, so they probably have a large lead in terms of "getting there". Plus, they have one of the better reputations on making things that "just work". Also, spacecraft usually is a mess of cramped space that needs to do a lot of things, and Honda are masters of maximizing interior spaces.
Submitted by: Nathaniel Kuhn
Honda is already working on rockets! They did a hopper test a few months ago, just 200 meters up and back down, single-stage, nailed the landing. That puts them ahead of a lot of newspace startups, and working on reuse at all puts them ahead of all the oldspace companies. They haven't announced an actual orbital rocket, which would be years out anyway, but it's clearly the goal.
Submitted by: GMan003
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The only brand I'd trust for a trip into space would be Lexus. And on top of the reliability, it'd probably be a pretty quiet and comfortable ride, too.
Submitted by: BuddyS
Considering how many LS400s on the road today have already been to the moon and back several times over, they kind'a do already.
Submitted by: David Flores
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It's not so much which automakers should be building spacecraft. It's which current CEOs (there are many) that we should be putting on those rockets and sending them into space. Permanently.
Submitted by: Former Autoblog
