Common sense when starting a company

As is my usual habit, this is my first posting in quite a while, but the good news is that I should be able to remedy that from now on. You see, my life was recently very, very stressful, but now should get a lot better. Why you ask? Last week, I took the California Bar Exam and now I am in limbo until late November when I find out if I passed. Hopefully I did pass, but now that I've been through the process, going through it again won't be the end of the world. Disappointing, yes, but not the end of the world.

Anyway, since law school and the Bar exam are both over, it's time to comment on the real world again, and specifically jobs and the economy. Looking around, it should be really obvious that American society -- neigh, the world society -- needs job creation badly. By most measures -- availability of health insurance, cost of college education, housing affordability, etc -- the world seems to be moving in the wrong direction and I think all of that has to do with the lack of jobs. At the same time, however, it's also well-documented that many entrepreneurs and new businesses fail. It seems really obvious then that effort should be spent on reducing that failure.

This post is on one reason I think many companies fail: not every idea can serve as the basis of a company. Case in point, Carbon Motors.

For those of you who don't know, Carbon Motors is a company in the Atlanta, Georgia, area that aims to build police cars that are supposedly more high-tech and advanced than the Ford Crown Victoria-based police cars that most departments use. From what I've seen of the prototype, the Carbon Motors police car differs from the Crown Victoria police car in the following major ways:

1. Massive use of LED emergency lights on the Carbon Motors car. The LEDs are not bolted onto the roof like on the Crown Vic, but instead appear to be integrated into the car body. Result? Improved aerodynamics at a minimum along with the cost, reliability, and visibility benefits of using LEDs.
   
2. The Carbon Motors car has a turbo diesel engine which supposedly gets better gas mileage and has a longer service life than the gasoline engine in the Crown Victoria.
3. Suicide-style rear doors on the Carbon Motors car. Supposedly this makes it easier to stuff a handcuffed criminal into the back seat of a police car. I've never done that (stuffed or been stuffed) so I'll assume that's true.
4. Better integration of police equipment. It's no surprise that police cars have tons of extra police gear (radios, shotguns, laptop computer, various cameras, etc) bolted into them in whatever arrangement works. Functionality is very obviously the main concern instead of appearance or ergonomics. I would also guess that in a crash, a lot of this bolted on extra gear can dislodge and the officers involved may end up with a laptop embedded in their thorax. From the pictures I've seen, the Carbon Motors car does a better and neater job packaging all the extra police gear than is currently done on the Crown Vic.
   
5. The seats on the Carbon Motors car are supposedly more comfortable than the Crown Vic's seats (having ridden in several Crown Vic taxis, I can confirm that the Crown Vic's seats are awful). The seats are allegedly also designed for cops who wear lots of gear (gun, taser, etc).

I'm sure there are more differences, but I think the above captures the bulk of it. To be sure, the Carbon Motors prototype is impressive and the company has certainly built a better mousetrap, I doubt it's going to be successful as a company for these reasons that I hope the company has thought of.

• Economics -- Carbon Motors appears not to have any factories yet. The E7 police car also seems to be the company's only product. Car factories are expensive, and I would guess that Carbon Motors won't make any money unless they make more models of vehicles across which they can spread the cost of starting and running their factory.
• Sales volume -- I don't know how many police cars are sold in the US each year, but I would guess that it's a small sliver of the number of cars sold to civilians. Unless Carbon Motors plans to sell a civilian version of the E7 (and deal with the marketing, dealer network, warranty, and service problems), I don't see how Carbon Motors will get sufficient sales volume. Also, I don't see why anyone would buy a civilian E7 since all of the E7's benefits (bigger seats, integrated police gear, etc) are law-enforcement specific.
  
• Cost -- I don't know how much a department pays to get a Crown Victoria police car delivered with all the gear and decals installed, but I would imagine that the E7 will cost more. Even before the economy went to shit in 2008 and municipalities started laying off cops and teachers, I had a hard time believing that departments would spend more for a police car unless that car delivered a substantive benefit. Better equipment integration, more comfortable seats, and a more durable and efficient engine seem more like comfort and convenience features in my book.
• Engine service life -- The E7's motor supposedly will go for 250,000 miles and not the 75,000 or 100,000 miles a gasoline engine will before needing to be replaced. This advantage is only meaningful, however, if the rest of the car at 100,000 miles is still usable. If, for example, the body of the police car has been smashed up by some chases or the interior all messed up with suspect's puking and pooing in the back seat, then perhaps making the engine last twice as long really doesn't solve anything.
  
• Redundancy -- Maybe the Carbon Motors people tried this, but it seems to me that the smarter plan of action here would have been to not start a separate company, but rather to talk to any car company that makes a potential police car. List out the concerns police officers have over seat comfort or equipment integration and see which company would be willing to sell you a car that meets those needs. If, for example, seat comfort was a big deal, I'm sure some company out there could make seats designed to accommodate tasers and pistols. If engine durability and efficiency was a big deal, I know Ford has a stable full of diesel engines that could theoretically be made to fit into the Crown Vic. It further seems possible to me that the center stack of the Crown Vic could be modified in some way to accommodate a policeman's laptop without having to create a separate company to manufacture a whole new type of car.
  

This idea of "not every company that can be started should be started" first dawned on me during the dot-com era of the late 1990s and early 2000s where every idea, no matter how ridicuous, got a corporate entity thrown around it. I certainly hope the Carbon Motors people succeed and I will gladly retract my sentiments if they do, but as of right now, I don't see how they're going to.