People who own a standalone GPS

It turns out that as fewer people bought new cars between 2007 and 2022, even fewer of them bothered to own a standalone GPS device, which is rather like watching two passengers simultaneously decide to leave a sinking ship by different exits at precisely the same moment. One might assume these things have nothing to do with each other, which is the sort of assumption that usually turns out to be completely correct, and yet here we are. The universe, apparently, enjoys a good joke about human purchasing habits.

What's actually happening is that smartphones arrived and ate everyone's lunch simultaneously. The smartphone contained a GPS that was free, constantly updated, and lived in your pocket anyway, which meant that between 2007 and 2022 the humble Garmin went from essential gadget to the kind of thing you found in your parents' glove compartment next to expired insurance documents. But here's the clever bit: new car sales collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis, stayed suppressed through the Great Recession, and never quite recovered to pre-crisis levels—because younger people started using ride-sharing apps, living in cities, or simply deciding that a £25,000 asset that sits idle 23 hours a day was not, in fact, worth the trouble. Both trends rode the same economic deflation and technological disruption wave, like two swimmers in a riptide moving away from shore in eerie synchronisation.

The real scandal is that we live in a time when the absence of one consumer product can predict the absence of another with 96% accuracy, which tells you either something profound about economic interconnectedness or something rather embarrassing about how predictable we all are. Perhaps both. The GPS and the new car were always slightly out of time anyway, belongings that assumed a world that was no longer quite forming itself around them. Sometimes things just die together.