If we can buy a computer made exactly to our needs, why can't we do the same with our cars, argues John Gapper, who believes the industry has some questions to answer.
Many of us drive cars we did not want to buy. Not really. We would have liked a new one, but a second-hand model cost less. Even if we bought a new car, it was not the colour we wanted, or the specification, but a dealer offered such a good deal on one he had in stock it was hard to resist.
Compare that with buying a Dell computer. Online, you click through various options for the central processor, the internal memory, the drives. You specify what you want, you pay for it, they build it for you, and Dell delivers it 10 days later. The exception is the box, of which Henry Ford would have approved: any colour, as long as it is dark grey.
Why is the motor industry not more like Dell? After all, we pay a lot more for cars than computers. Why must we put up with one that is hanging around rather than one we want? There are many answers to that question, but none of them quite holds water.
Despite the industry's ingrained habits, a different approach is overdue. Cars should be built to order. To witness how far the industry is from that, visit a car dealership in the US. Under a giant American flag, hundreds of cars in different colours and models are lined up in ranks. Customers can walk around the lot, and pick out the car that they want to drive away.
Meanwhile, the dealer is expert at pushing stock by discounting the slow-moving models. That enables manufacturers to keep factories running, covering the capital costs of developing new models by maintaining production at a high level. Companies such as General Motors believe the devil they know - excess inventory and discounting - is better than volatility. They fear having to ramp production up and down to match customers' whims.
As a result, car distribution in America is little changed from Henry Ford's day. While manufacturers have made wrenching changes in the past decade to match Japanese lean-production techniques - keeping plant inventory down, and raising quality - the world outside is as flabby as ever.
In the 1920s, Ford aimed at having 60 days of finished cars in the market; the current average is 65. In one way, customers do well out of this way of operating. The bigger the stock of finished cars sitting in dealers and distribution centres, the greater the need to cut prices to shift them.
A buyer who haggles down the price with a dealer also feels he has got a bargain. The industry's thin margins - 5 per cent is an achievement - testify to the level of price competition. But a bargain does not always mean a satisfied purchaser. "If a dealer gives you $500 off to take a red car, rather than a blue one, all you remember six months later is that your car is the wrong colour," says Steve Young of AT Kearney, the consultants.
That occurs a lot: one-fifth of European car buyers take an alternative specification, the International Car Distribution Programme has found.This encourages bad habits. When dealers routinely push cars that are not selling well, a manufacturer can fool itself that there is nothing wrong.
One of the weaknesses of the US car industry is that it has relied too much on marketing and distribution to shift cars, while European and Asian manufacturers have put more focus on design and engineering.
The system also has financial drawbacks. By encouraging over-production, it leads to constant discounting: the average incentive offered on a new vehicle in the US in May was $2,880, according to the Power Information Network.
This has knock-on effects throughout the market. The bigger the discounts on new cars, the greater the impact on residual values of older models. Given all this, why do more manufacturers not build cars to order? The idea has been around for more than a decade, but many pilot projects have remained just that.
One reason is that US accounting rules allow makers to book revenues as soon as cars are allocated to dealers. That means the inventory that sits around on dealers' lots can be treated as if it has been been sold to customers.
Vested interests also get in the way. Build-to-order need not imply the end of dealers. People want to test a model before they buy one, and dealers will always have trade-in cars to sell. But dealers are used to trading stock rather than keying in customer orders for new cars over the internet.
It is hard to imagine US dealers embracing the new world enthusiastically. Above all, cars are more complex to build than computers. They contain between 2,000 and 4,000 components, according to The Second Century (MIT Press), a new book on build-to-order by Matthias Holweg and Frits Pil. So it requires an enormous amount of effort, and co-ordination of suppliers and distributors, to be able to build and deliver a car fast enough.
Still, it can be done. The US is an extreme case of recalcitrance: only 6 per cent of cars are built to order in the US, but 48 per cent are in Europe. More than half of Renaults are built to order, as are BMW 7 Series cars. By limiting the number of variations, BMW has reduced the time it needs to deliver a custom-built 7-Series in Germany to 12 days from 28 last year.
Build-to-order would not solve all the manufacturers' problems. There would still be over-production and price competition. Some bad cars would still be made. But it would provide a bit of discipline in an industry that is short of mechanisms to filter out its worst ideas. And more of us would end up driving the car we wanted.