Philip Not-Hard of automotive data mongers Caphpi takes a dim view of Britons’ standards of personal hygiene. According to a press release recently issued by his firm, “consumers change their car more often than they change their bedding.”
Even if – as the Caphpi press release claims – some people now change their car every 18 months, that’s still a pretty skanky thought. At Bankstone news we make a point of changing our sheets and pillowcases at least three or four times a year, whether they need it or not. And so, we’d like to think, do you, Dear Reader.
But impugning our commitment to cleanliness, it turns out, is not the main point of Mr Not-Hard’s press release. This, it seems, is to argue that people nowadays treat their cars a bit like mobile phones. “What we are seeing is the ‘iphonification’ of the car industry,” Phil claims.
Which is not to say, that people try to use their cars (or indeed the car industry as a whole) to make phone calls, snapchat, play Clash of Glans or whatever, but that they change them all the time (especially if they’ve dropped them in water or smashed the screen or something) and are quite happy paying to use them rather than owning them outright.
The whole bedding-iPhone thing appears to stem from advice given by “experts” [cue: hawk-n-spit sound effect] who say that – because adults secrete around 300ml of ‘fluid’ every night and half a kilo of dead skin every year – you should change, not just your bedding, but your actual mattress once every seven years – which, Phil reckons, used to be how long people kept their cars for – but now they don’t – now they keep them for 18 months or so – which is how long people keep their phones – some of which may be iPhones. So, you see, it all makes perfect sense.
Or at least it does in the addled brain of Philip “Phrasemaker” Not-Hard. Never mind that he’s put his name to a press release from self-proclaimed specialists in data that contains not a single scrap of data – unless you count the stuff about fluids and skin flakes, and the observation that “hpi estimates that around 80 per cent of new car sales are on finance” – just a load of extra-broad-brush generalisations.
It’s none too clear either why Phil has decided to discard the conventional understanding of iPhone-ification (i.e. to render the user experience or functionality of something more similar to that of an iPhone or to recreate a game or application for use on iPhones) or, as may have been his intention for all Bankstone News knows, to invent a new word “iphonification” (no ‘e’) meaning to use something under a contract of similar duration to that applicable to an iPhone or other mobile telephone.
Seriously, Phil: assuming charitably that data really is your strong suit, it might be best to stick what you’re good at and lay off the rambling nonsense. You can leave that to people like Bankstone News, who positively excel in this demanding discipline.
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