Introduction
What happens when a moonshot product ages into a used car?
The subject vehicle was purchased by the author in July 2024 as an automotive project with no prior mechanical experience and the goal of turning it into a daily driver. The experience brought about a desire to understand how design decisions affect long-term ownership viability.
Over 18 months and almost 8,000 miles, numerous repair and maintenance procedures were performed, documenting component failures, costs, and serviceability challenges. This analysis draws directly from that hands-on experience, supplemented by manufacturer documentation, regulatory archives, and industry research.
This white paper focusing on serviceability and the software-defined vehicle seeks to answer that question using a 21-year-old first generation Porsche Cayenne and the design empathy framework — examining the pattern of industrial design neglect they show historically and concurrently, as well as proposing solutions to build better vehicles for the future.
"You can't understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people." —Dieter Rams
The Framework
Design empathy is the practice of anticipating a product's complete impact on users across its entire lifecycle — from acquisition through daily use, failure, repair, and end-of-life.
Empathetic design assumes products will be used in unforeseen ways, outlive their warranty periods, change hands, and eventually fail. It minimizes harm, cost, and complexity when those inevitable events occur, rather than externalizing these consequences to users. This keeps products in use longer, reducing environmental impact and maintaining the brand's reputation across ownership cycles.
As the automotive industry enters the digital age, the pattern of neglect has evolved in scope, scale, and execution. Components that used to be difficult to service a decade ago are becoming impossible to address independently — software locked, built into larger assemblies that have to be replaced in full, and externally dependent on the companies that made them.
Conclusion
In addition to this paper's industrial critique, it also functions as a defense of curiosity and awe held by a younger version of myself. Growing up in the rapidly evolving 2000s, this machine of seemingly infinite capability and wonder left a lasting impression that shaped my design ideals.
I wonder about not the future of that outlook, but the ability to act on it. Lately, it seems that outlook is becoming walled off, monetized, and taken for granted by companies willing to bolster their bottom line at a collective spiritual cost that will only become detrimental to them in the long term. This is not a new phenomenon, but the rapid proliferation of it is.
The relationship between us and our tools is changing. We are currently at a crossroads that will define the next generation of ownership beyond just the car, and whether these industrial experiments become pervasive norms at our expense.
Bearing Studio's first publication. More to come.