Hybrid Consumer Vehicles: Where on the S-Curve?
For this case study, I have selected the hybrid car as the technology of interest. Hybrid cars have been a steady presence in the consumer auto market since the early 2000s. Toyota's Prius is the best-known example and has the largest market share, which is set to expand into other market niches with the development of subcompact and hatch/crossover versions of the Prius. Although Toyota has made sweeping claims about the amount of research money they spend (specifically, safety research) they do not report specifically how much of their R&D budget is devoted to innovation and how much to safety and design refinements. A thorough analysis by Booz Allen & Hamilton on the relationship between R&D spending and market performance shows that gross measures of research spending have no predictive power over market share or sales (Jaruzelski, Dehoff, & Bordia, 2004). Especially in the automotive industry, companies who are above the median in sales volume spend close to the same percent of their budget on research as those who are below the median sales volume. So in terms of effort indicators, research dollars or person-hours spent on development seems a poor metric to plot against sales in order to see the customary S-curve of technological performance. Instead, I have plotted hybrid car adoption rates against time - representing the car companies' effort towards "hanging in there" with a good idea even when the market seemed ready to give up on the hybrid vehicle.
Figure 1. Hybrid Car Sales per Year, 1999-2009.
(Numbers from U.S. Department of Energy, 2010)
In the figure above, I have plotted hybrid car sales for the years 1999-2009, per year. For the years 1999-2004, the number of hybrid vehicles barely made a dent in overall volume - public demand had not yet reached a noticeable height, and the popularization of "green living" was still a few years away. Assuming that hybrid car sales will follow the S-curve, I have projected the graph out through 2019, when sales should dwindle owing to the emergence of a new technology.
Figure 2. Projected Figures for Hybrid Sales, 1999-2019.
However, mathematically we are still on the locally linear rise in the middle of the S-curve. This means that the key disruption, or turning point,...
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