Why everyone in one country drives the same car

Spend three days on the roads around La Paz and you start counting. One model, in every color, in every condition, parked outside every market. It is not the cheapest car you can buy there, and it is not the best.

It is the one everybody can fix.

I went to Bolivia for a wedding and came back with a notebook full of license plates. By the second afternoon I had stopped looking at the mountains and started asking drivers why they bought what they bought. The answers were almost word for word the same.

The mechanic is the market

When parts, know-how and resale value all point at the same car, choosing anything else becomes a private bet against the whole town. A different model might be more comfortable or use less fuel. But if it breaks down on the road to Oruro, nobody nearby has the part, and nobody wants to buy it from you when you are done with it.

Most people, sensibly, decline the bet. Each new buyer makes the popular choice a little safer for the next one, and the gap keeps growing.

The best product rarely wins a market like this. The most repairable one does.

You are probably in one of these markets

Plenty of markets work this way, they just hide it better. The software your team picks, the bank your suppliers use, the file format your clients expect: each one is cheaper because everyone else already chose it.

You can spot these markets by the questions buyers ask. They rarely ask what a product does best. They ask who else uses it, who supports it, and how hard it would be to leave. Those are repair questions, not feature questions.

A few signs you are selling into one:

• Buyers ask for references before they ask for a demo.

• Your best deals come from customers who hired someone who used you before.

• Losing deals rarely comes down to price. It comes down to “we already know the other one.”

What to do about it

If you are trying to sell into a market like that, the question is not “are we better?” It is “who will fix us at eleven at night, and how far away are they?”

The companies that break in usually do it by building the mechanics first. They train partners, publish everything, make leaving easy, and make sure there is a person within reach when something goes wrong. Only then does being better start to matter.

The driver who explained this to me best had owned the same model for nineteen years. When I asked whether he would ever switch, he laughed and pointed at the three garages on his street. That was the whole answer.