When it comes to creating glamour, some phrases in the English language just aren't up to the job.
Take the three words 'mobility service provider'. Nothing could sound more boring, yet we're talking here about something practically every modern car company wants to turn itself into, because the three words describe a business that understands where future success will come from.
Which leads to a curly question: how do you invest these words with excitement and anticipation? Answer: you get PSA Group boss Carlos Tavares to utter them and explain their significance in his uniquely persuasive way.
Today in a reception at a Peugeot HQ in central Paris, Tavares described his company's ambition to become a mobility service provider using links - both financial and co-operative - with "fresh, talented" specialist companies who had a clear vision of the future. While reacting to their influence, PSA would group its car sharing and transport management activities under a new name, Free 2 Move, and would set about catering in the longer term to much more than just the traditional demands of customers wanting to buy new cars, although these would remain important.
The number of people owning cars was going down, Tavares explained, but the number who wanted to use them was expanding. This greater usage meant car production might even go up, not down, as lower car ownership might imply, because replacement would need to be more frequent. It could eventually add up to "a new phase in our history", he claimed.
Tavares agreed that there were many uncertainties in forecasting car demand beyond 2030, "but it is my job to configure the company so it is ready, whatever comes".
Asked why small technology companies should throw in their lot with PSA rather than other high achievers in the patch such as Daimler or Honda, Tavares said he believed his company - which "suffered a near-death experience" just three years ago - had learned the hard way the value of agility and flexibility, which is what the youthful players needed from a big one.
"Our unique selling point," he concluded, "is that we are the dinosaur that knows best that he is a dinosaur." People clapped at the end, rare at such a conference, and Tavares soon disappeared to his next appointment. But it was a bravura performance that will surely have big repercussions.
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