Week 8, 2025 - Europe

Song of the week:

Thoughts

One of my weird passions has been cars. My whole life. I love the culture around them. Even odd subcultures that I'll never tap into, like drifting or ridiculous body kit culture.

I've written on this little blog before about my history with F1 as a young kid, recording Aussie races on VHS LP for the next day. Filling my bedroom wall with cuttings of cars from the Sunday newspapers. And as a 40 year old man, I've had the pleasure of having a lot of decent cars in my life, and renting some mad things while on the road. I also follow a lot of online content around car culture. Particularly photographers in cool places paying attention to car companies, culture and sport.

My kids, now 3 and 4 years of age, both boys, have also gone down the same path with Hot Wheels, Lego car sets and recently Skelextric.

If I had idiot-proof money I would easily set up a garage somewhere outside the city that creates custom car kits. Not the drift stuff, but showpieces, upgrades of old cars and re-imaginings of the past. Hire some talented folks to design and craft the cars and lean into other vendors on the island for paint, decals, etc. Build a brand around it.

But it's too hard. Without somehow self-funding (ha!), no one on earth is investing in such a niche business. And a niche business in Ireland gets even more niche when the market is limited. Because, and here's where I'm going with this, Europe is less accessible than it should be.

Because Europe doesn't operate as an EU27 business environment, you wind up paying import and export duties, even between EU countries. A market of 500 million odd people untapped because everyone's a bit punch drunk on taxes that ultimately prohibit market fluidity.

I'm sure I'll wind up doing my thing. Even on a tiny personal scale. I've eyed up 1980s wrecked Porsche 944's, for example. Because they're not that great, not loved, but have amazing space in the chassis for an electric motor and battery pack to balance the car off. And because they're generally a bit wrecked, they're ripe for a gentle custom body kit, new lights, etc. etc.

But in Ireland, a rusted genuinely heap of shite iteration is €3-5k. In the UK it's about half of that. But getting the car from the UK to Ireland is a pain in the arse. Ignore the side of the road, and it's even cheaper from central Europe, but again, getting it here is a pain. Turning that into a more scalable business with 10-20 of those cars, hiring people to do work, sell them, support customers, etc. would be even more difficult. Even building a 5 year plan to hit said scale would be easy. Executing it in the regulatory environment we have would be hard enough to be inefficient from Ireland.

There's a great, niche business that I would predict could easily have 20-30 employees full-time working on interesting projects that investment bodies would be proud to showcase in their slide decks. But instead, I look at any aspect of the detail and realise I would be locked into a small market that would struggle to escape from. Unless the business started in a bigger market like France or Germany. But not being French or German, that's not really what I would want to do.

So for all the bluster of "MEGA" from our cousins across the pond. Long may they stay there with this particular brand of bluster. There is a point to be made within the EU to finish the project started with the currency, and get a much more vibrant investment and business environment. I'm a fan of the "EU Inc" proposal, for what it's worth.

I am not the only one with a weird little niche passion project idea willing to go for it if the environment allowed it.

Photo of the week

(via my flickr)

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Published on: 22nd February, 2025

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