Looking Out #26
Apple Car Play (twice), the future of Micromobility (also twice), the problem with design language and BMW's designs. Plus, a name you'll have never heard of.
16 June, 2022
Welcome to Looking Out, a newsletter about the auto industry, mobility, design, and the cultures that surround us. Looking Out is brought to you by Joe Simpson and Drew Smith of The Automobility Group. If you like what you see, tell your friends!
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DS
Auto
The future of cars, in two parts | JS
Why it’s interesting: Apple’s iOS 16 Carplay is being heralded as a killer app. It’s the inevitable future of cars, right? Or is there another direction in clear sight?
Yes we’re going to talk about CarPlay. Twice in fact.
Apple Carplay ‘2.0’ was unsurprisingly greeted with tech cheerleading – commentators going as far to suggest that Apple didn’t really need to bring the hardware of an actual Apple Car, this was enough to sew up the automotive experience for years to come.
And on the other side of the coin, dismayed human-factors professionals bemoaned a lack of ergonomic concern, fears around distraction and – in this piece – a view that it shouldn’t be allowed, and was likely to result in more accidents and ultimately deaths.
I rather liked Alex Roy’s juxtaposition: Saab nightpanel / Apple CarPlay – 20 years of automotive ‘progress’ in a nutshell.
Saab’s nightpanel
And it’s this that I want to reflect on. Apple’s latest move was written on the wall years ago. And those tech commentators will likely be right about Apple sewing up the automotive experience. It’s an extension of your iPhone, deeply integrated in your car. Why would you use an OEM’s hotch-potch and often frustrating UI, or learn a new one every time you jump brands?
Once they define the interaction and display experience on their terms, Apple will (likely) have the OEMs locked into their experience paradigm – and where they go with it is something entirely in Apple’s – rather than the OEM’s – control.
To say that the OEMs only have themselves to blame for this situation wouldn’t be unfair - given how overly complex and unfit for purpose some car UIs are. What is more of a surprise is how Apple’s implementation seems to fall into some of the same traps.
But there’s a bigger issue at play here. At its worst, driving has become a combination of drudgery and monotony and for many, autonomous cars - or a scenarios where you can focus on your (phone) screen while moving - simply can’t come soon enough. With that future in mind, it’s little wonder that the tech players want to own the screen real estate in your car. Where there’s eyeballs, there’s money.
Where does this leave OEMs? Most will try to compete and continue to develop experiences that can run in parallel or as an alternative to Apple’s. And when the customer is telling you that more tech is the answer, it’s the obvious way.
But is that what customers are really saying? Or are they just frustrated with a car that seems interminably dumb, and makes easy tasks - like playing a specific song or getting directions to a destination - stupefyingly hard?
In a world where we can see very clear constraints - materially, environmentally and in terms of cost - there is an alternative future path that’s being shown (in extremis) by the unlikely combination of Mini and Paul Smith.
The dashboard of the Paul Smith Mini Recharged
With both the Strip concept and the recently released Recharged, Smith and Mini have shown an automotive future that strips the product down to its core and seems to ask ‘what do you really need?’
It’s interesting because it’s being done in the name of sustainability – and appears to skip much of the tech overload. Perhaps for good reason. Right now, adding more tech and believing it’s sustainable because it removes the need for physical material is a bit simplistic. Tech in cars is becoming a huge contributor to their sustainability footprint. It doesn’t take much digging to uncover the burgeoning sea of e-waste, carbon-intensive server farms or reality of complex tech failures happening early in a car’s life, and rendering it beyond economical repair.
Within Mini and Smith’s approach, not only do they eschew the approach of adding technology because you can, but by stripping away what we don’t need, they remind us of just what a technological marvel the car is. They reconnect us with what lies beneath - what makes it work, how it keeps us safe, and how it is built. In its own way, this creates a very technological expression. And there seems to be potential for this approach to re-invigorate the marvel of just being in a car, and how it feels to be on the move, and really experience – in a positive way – the environment you are travelling through.
I’m not arguing that it’s a northstar for the future of human driving, complete with the “dab of ‘oppo” and smoking tyres that the car magazines are clinging on to. But it is an intriguing and relevant alternative vision of the future of cars.
Just as valid and as interesting in my view, as Apple’s screen-centric road - the one which suggests we will simply cut ourselves off, in ever more bunker-like moving boxes, in which we fixate on screens.
The ICE ban and the small car conundrum | DS
Why it’s interesting: Some European manufacturers seem uniquely ill-prepared for the end of the internal combustion engine, with the low end of the market taking the hit.
A little while back, I was asked to share some thoughts about what the next 12 months and beyond might look like for the automotive industry.
While you can listen to the whole episode of The Next Billion Seconds that resulted here, here’s a summary of my main points:
Fluctuations in the price of car making commodities and supply chain constraints will further complicate car makers’ efforts to get back on an even keel,
Manufacturers will double down on extracting more margin per vehicle to fund the transition from internal combustion to electric vehicles,
As such, we’re likely to see the low end of the market abandoned so that manufacturers can focus on higher-margin vehicles.
In the past week, the pressure on European automakers has ratcheted up another notch or two, with the EU agreeing to phase out the sale of ICE vehicles by 2035.
So yeah, the business case for developing entry-level cars for the European market just got even more difficult. Back in December, Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Stellantis, said:
“What has been decided is to impose on the automotive industry electrification that brings 50% additional costs against a conventional vehicle,”
“There is no way we can transfer 50% of additional costs to the final consumer because most parts of the middle class will not be able to pay.”
The social and brand implications of shutting consumers out of personal automobility are huge, and it will be interesting to see how brands respond.
Will Volkswagen Group, the very definition of the people’s car maker, abandon the folk the company was founded to serve?
Or are the micromobility moves of Porsche, a VW Group brand, a harbinger of what’s to come? Their investments now cover makers of bikes, eBike drivetrains, and micromobility software systems.
My own experiences of discussing micromobility with automakers has been mixed, with reactions ranging between exasperation at failed attempts to enter the market, mild interest and outright cynicism directed towards what senior leaders see as “toys”. It seems telling that at the recent Micromobility Europe conference, only Ford, BMW and Honda had employees in attendance.
Back in 2020, Horace Dediu said that every automaker needs to have a micromobility division. If auto makers want to hold on to their less affluent customers, they might want to get building.
Mobility
Why Micromobility Europe was better than any recent motor show | DS
Why it’s interesting: Micromobility, as a conference and as an emerging industry, presents a compelling counterpoint to pretty much everything that feels wrong with the automotive sector these days.
Two weeks ago, I went to Micromobility Europe, a conference dedicated to sub-500 Kg mobility products and services, held in my home town of Amsterdam.
Given that two and a half years have passed since I attended the first Micromobiltiy Europe in Berlin, it’s been interesting to note how the conference has evolved.
These notes have been compiled from my Twitter thread, which you can find here.
In short, the industry on show in 2022 was:
More diverse
There were far more women at this event! This was a big improvement over Berlin which, if I’m honest, felt like youthful version of pale, male, and stale cohort that plagues the traditional motor shows.
But it wasn’t just women in the audience: women were also representing on stage, as moderators, as panelists, as keynote speakers, and as company founders.
It was a delight to see Whee!, a female-founded start-up, win a pitch competition; they offer the eBike equivalent of SUVs-as-a-service to Norwegian mums. Another winner, Ampersand, presented a compelling case for how their battery-swappable motorbikes are improving mobility equity and business opportunities for small businesses in East Africa.
More mature
In contrast to the hype-driven blitz-scaling of years past, which saw shared scooters and bikes dumped on city streets as start-ups used the public realm as their Petri dish, the leaders of micromobility companies, and their backers, were far more humble in their pronouncements of what it takes to succeed in the sector.
No doubt, the cautionary tale told by the stumbles of the likes of Lime, Bird, and Helbiz, and the shakeout in tech investing generally, are leading folk to be more conservative.
Most importantly, in contrast to the trend within the automotive sector to present “technology” as the silver bullet solution for all that ails it, micromobility providers demonstrated an understanding that it’s just an enabler of change, one which can be deployed for good or bad depending on intent and context.
It was refreshing to hear both founders and backers talk of the need to deeply understand not just the geography, but the mindsets and behaviours of the cities and citizens they want to serve. With this insight, they can much more effectively find the product/service-market fit that’s beneficial for everyone, not just their business.
More collaborative
A big part of this emerging maturity is the recognition that successful micromobility operations depend on deep collaboration with cities and their citizens.
From partnering on tenders to proactively managing and moderating user behaviour, successful micromobility companies are now listening intently to the needs of cities.
In response, they’re better able to proactively propose solutions to transportation challenges, and help educate city authorities about the potential for micromobility to support their quality-of-life and environmental ambitions.
More optimistic
From an investment perspective, the 5-10 year horizon still looks positive, despite the headwinds the industry currently faces.
The electrification of cars alone will not make a sufficient dent in transport-derived emissions, and for cities looking to meet their climate goals, increasing active mobility and micromobility is a cost-effective way forward.
As leaders like Paris and Amsterdam continue to demonstrate the huge quality-of-life gains that come from the shift to micromobility, other cities will come on board.
I was recently in Sydney, a car-addicted city if ever there was, and the state government announced funding for an additional 250 Km of cycle paths.
At the conference, Michael Roth, from Auckland Council in New Zealand, talked through how changes in planning laws will benefit the uptake of micromobility in that city. Both examples show that change is possible, even in places where breaking the addiction to the car has seemed hitherto unimaginable.
More fun
Horace Dediu, tech industry analyst and inventor of the term Micromobility, exhorts industry players to measure their success in smiles per mile.
I imagine the logic runs as follows: if you can get people smiling with a sense of freedom and joy while using these products and services, then adoption will drive the development of sustainable business models.
Judging by the amount of fun attendees were having in the product demo space, hooning around on twin-motor electric bikes, pedal-powered delivery vans, and in shape-shifting pods, it’s hard to deny that Horace is on to something.
The future for E-scooters? | JS
Why it’s interesting: Micromobility Europe painted the sector in a positive light. But out on the streets of European cities, it’s a different picture. How can E-scooters move out of the trough of disillusionment, and onto the slope of enlightenment?
From one home city experience to another. After Christmas, Gothenburg’s previously huge E-scooter ‘park’ appeared to have been cleared away overnight. What was going on?
After 2018, when Bird, Lime and co. crossed the pond, e-Scooter numbers mushroomed as progressive cities – especially here in the Nordics – welcomed tens of thousands of scooters onto their streets. Quickly adopted, especially by younger citizens, in Gothenburg they play a valuable tag-team role, complementing a well developed public transit system. As Drew alludes to above, they offer a double win. Cities get (in theory) a cut in car use and emissions. Urban residents get another transport mode. Here, many now see no reason to drive their private cars into the city. A combo of buses, trams, bikes and scooters are better.
But a deregulated market, patchwork city rules and a fickle public irritated by a combination of factors has tipped the sector into a difficult place. Is news that Bird is laying off 23% of its workforce the canary in the coalmine?
What’s happening? As 18,000 scooters flooded Stockholm, and more than 20,000 landed in Oslo, hospital emergency rooms reported rises in scooter-related injuries (especially at night). In Helsinki, doctors called for a ban as scooter injuries burgeoned, and, for a while, Copenhagen threw its toys out of the pram and banned its free floating network altogether. City residents grew irritated as brightly coloured machines blocked sidewalks and doorways, and the real environmental benefits of the machines were seriously scrutinised.
But back to Gothenburg. Following Stockholm’s lead, Gothenburg restricted each scooter company’s license, halving e-Scooter numbers. Operating hours were curtailed and operating locations both centrally and on the urban fringe were restricted.
As Voi’s Kristina Hunter Nilsson, pointed out:
“cutting the number of scooters in the city so drastically “will not be ideal for the customer experience”.
Walking the five minutes from my home to the tram stop, I used to pass at least half a dozen scooters. Now I often need to open several apps to find one even remotely close by. And my repeat “Sorry, this scooter is temporarily unavailable,” Friday midnight experience was not an ideal way to discover that my previously favoured mode of late-night transport had been stopped by the city. It’s especially inconvenient when you’re miles from home, or the nearest transit stop, and Uber drivers are repeatedly cancelling out your booking.
So often these vehicles are providing the glue that joins transport dots and provide just enough convenience and speed that one avoids hopping into the car. Remove that easy breezy convenience, and we suddenly find ourselves back to driving 1.5km to the supermarket for a bottle of milk at 10pm.
Five years into the e-scooter revolution, European cities and the scooter operators seem to be unhappy bed fellows. But the future must surely not lay in more regulation, and a focus on the vehicle hardware. The scooters design is good enough - Voi’s scooters are now lasting 4-5 years, they claim, as opposed to the 4-5 months of Birds in the early days.
And as Drew articulates above:
It was refreshing to hear both founders and backers talk of the need to deeply understand not just the geography, but the mindsets and behaviours of the cities and citizens they want to serve. With this insight, they can much more effectively find the product/service-market fit that’s beneficial for everyone, not just their business.
I’d say that a combination of better understanding user behaviour, sentiment analysis and usage triggers, along with working together - not just the cities, but between operators – is one clear need.
But more importantly, and this is perhaps the bigger challenge, it’s about infrastructure. How can we ensure these vehicles are driven safely without riders mixing with fast moving car traffic or ploughing through slow moving pedestrianised zones? And how can they be parked – and easily located – in a way which reduces the street clutter and inconvenience to other citizens?
As ever with city infrastructure, the question of who builds it, who pays and who benefits are not the same, and tech unicorns aren’t currently known for an egalitarian approach to building new infrastructure on behalf of cities. But the thorny issue feels critical to the ultimate success of the e-scooter, and putting it on the road to becoming a truly central, permanent fixture in a city’s future mobility mix.
Photo by Ernest Ojeh on Unsplash
Design
The language of design(er) | JS
Why it’s interesting: designer has become a catch-all for many jobs. But in those role, esoteric language is rife. Both are issues when it comes to collaboration and extending the power of design for good.
When I wrote for Car Design News, I spent years learning and then peppering articles with esoteric car design terms – to this day, I’d imagine that plopping DRG, DLO or CSD onto the page would lose over half of our readership.
Yet they’re still phrases I use every day at work – a consistent and specific language of car design that makes communication with my peers both quicker and easier. But which also, subconsciously, helps us to reassure each other that we’re all smart, educated and – ahem – speaking the same design language (down road graphic, day light opening and centre screen display in case you’re curious).
Before car design, I worked in the architecture profession, and it was worse. Certainly, ‘fenestration’ beats ‘DLO’ in the hifalutin stakes for words to describe windows.
Reading articles about Panasonic’s recent exploration of the future of wellbeing in Milan piqued my sense that this special code creates barriers to entry and understanding, and a club-like mentality.
According to Panasonic’s team:
“closer collaboration between brands, experts and designers from multiple sectors is needed to create truly sustainable products and services that address wellbeing holistically.”
I wholeheartedly agree. Such a similar sentiment is ringing out across industries and from many brands right now. But at some point we have to stop talking about collaboration and actually do it. And when we talk about different industries, designers from different backgrounds, even employees from different departments in the same company – let alone users who you want to engage during a development process – we are not speaking the same language.
It’s a paradox. Designers often need specific knowledge, understanding and expertise in an industry to simply do their jobs. That creates a specific language. But one of a designer’s jobs is communication, and being able to communicate ideas - often complex ones - to diverse audiences and stakeholders. We’re sales people on one hand, problem solvers on another. Perhaps the word designer is a part of the problem I’m getting at here. It’s at once too broad, and yet creates a specific idea in your mind about what a person does. So how should we speak, and what language should we use?
Today I’m always conscious of audience. And when working with people outside of my department, the acronyms go. Today when I introduce myself, I’m also conscious that I’m helped by the framing of the big, well-known automotive brand that everyone I speak to has heard of.
But where I once used to introduce myself as a designer, today I try to be more specific about what I do, while (hopefully) explaining it in clearly understandable terms:
I help our company understand the future. I join dots between departments and their different needs. And I do research to help us understand customer needs and desires. I then creates strategies that help us deliver the right products. Ones that will bring those customers joy and solve problems in their lives.
Those products just happen to be cars. But that doesn’t make me a car designer.
Why does Apple’s new CarPlay look so bad? | DS
Why it’s interesting: Apple’s technical demonstration caters to the short-to-mid-term needs of Automotive OEMs, rather than radically reimagining what the in-car experience might look like.
During Apple’s WWDC keynote yesterday, the company presented a new version of CarPlay, which, to date, has been a better way to interact with an iPhone while in the car.
Far beyond what the current CarPlay system offers, this new version shows a much deeper integration with the vehicle. It can display data picked up from sensors (such as speed, RPM, temperature, and fuel/charge level) as well as providing control for vehicle hardware, like air conditioning, seat heating and so on.
And rather than being limited to just the centre stack display, this new version is able take over all in-car display functions: Apple showed mock-ups covering the driver gauge pack, the centre stack, and the increasingly-fashionable passenger screen.
CarPlay is no longer just an interface for the phone in the car, but is becoming the interface for the car itself, powered by the phone.
It was interesting to watch people's reactions on Twitter as they decried the lack of sophistication in Apple’s design, and the apparent lack of understanding of what’s required to make a successful automotive user experience.
For the record, I'm certainly not advocating an interior covered with screens, like Apple showed. But it’s automakers, not Apple, that insist on putting ever more and ever larger screens in cars. Perhaps Apple simply wanted to show their customers - the automakers - that they can meet their multi-screen needs.
And while the graphics are (shockingly) naive, again, perhaps the demo was designed to show that Apple can collect and represent vehicle sensor data and hardware states, while leaving the ultimate visual interpretation of that data up to OEM design teams, who will best know how to express their respective brands.
So where is Apple going with this?
In the 21 years since the launch of BMW’s iDrive, the automotive industry, as a whole, has failed to make meaningful progress in the development of digital in-car interfaces that are safe, usable and beautiful. This is despite manufacturers investing heavily in the development of their digital design teams. In many cases, as screens, and touch, voice and gesture interfaces have proliferated, things have become worse for end users, rather than better.
The current version CarPlay, which has only been around for 8 years, is nonetheless better than pretty much any proprietary OEM interface I’ve tried. It's in 98% of new cars in the United States - which means that there's no learning curve if you switch vehicles - and 79% of car buyers in that market will only consider a car if it has CarPlay fitted.
It’s clear that customers want what Apple is offering, manufacturers know they need to deliver it, and judging by the number that have signed up, they're glad for the help.
This new CarPlay offer goes much further than simply providing a better way to operate a phone in the car, however.
It suggests to automakers that they can stop trying so hard to make something that’s beyond their demonstrated level of competence. Apple is saying “here’s a kit of parts that covers all your needs and a voice agent (Siri) that’s one of the best. Leave the hard digital stuff to us, and you can focus on the bits that you’re good at” i.e. engineering the physical attributes of the vehicle.
In this frame of mind, and aware that yesterday was a developer's keynote, not a product launch, I read the presentation as a technical demonstration, rather than the reveal of a production-ready product. I can imagine Apple being pretty receptive to both assisting and learning from automotive human factors and user experience experts to further refine the offering. The new CarPlay is 18 months away from launch, after all.
In the long run, if CarPlay continues to be a success, it’s hard not see Apple coming to own the in-car experience. I’m particularly excited to see if they offer ways for their vast developer ecosystem to create new products and services using a fusion of iPhone sensor data and vehicle data and hardware in ways that carmakers have so far failed to do.
It’s also not hard to imagine CarPlay, and the iPhone, becoming a key enabler of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) networking that will dramatically improve road and pedestrian safety and the efficiency and environmental impact of cars.
While yesterday’s demo lacked sophistication, with the current CarPlay, Apple have amply demonstrated that they have the ability to develop an automotive UI that surpasses that offered by manufacturers when it comes to consumer desirability.
Over the next 18 months, Apple, in collaboration with their automotive clients, will learn and improve. I’m certain that what comes to market will look nothing like what we saw yesterday.
I’m also certain that this is just the beginning of what CarPlay has to offer.
Culture
Maybe the new 7-Series is meant to be ugly | DS
Why it’s interesting: the democratisation of music production just might help us understand what’s going on with BMW design.
BMW’s pugnacious new 7 Series has caused more than a few raised eyebrows and clutched pearls.
With its launch, many have decried the death of the sporting elegance for which BMW was once renowned, much as they did when Adrian van Hooydonk’s equally contentious E65 7 launched in 2001. Indeed this latest car just another in a line of recent BMWs that challenge notions of good taste and good design.
But what if the new 7, and its similarly outrageous brethren, the XM and iX, are just rational responses to a rapidly changing world, one in which BMW is fighting to retain its relevance?
In his superb newsletter Culture: An Owner’s Manual, W. David Marx talks about how the proliferation of cheap musical hardware, largely originating from China, and the emergence of AI-driven sampling, have democratised the production of new music. It’s now relatively easy for anyone to take the hooks, loops and beats from other artists’ songs, and produce their own.
I would argue that we’ve seem a similar democratisation in the automotive industry, driven by Japanese, Korean, and latterly, Chinese manufacturers.
Although they often started out producing kitsch replicas of Western designs, rapid increases in design maturity and manufacturing quality, and the reduction in the time and cost of production, mean that there are many more cars of good enough design quality on the market.
Just as in the music industry, however, there’s a downside to this democratisation: the design themes that signal quality and innovation become exhausted far more quickly as they replicate across manufacturers.
This raises a tough question for a brand like BMW: when everyone is looking good enough, how do you become exceptional? How do you make people feel something - anything - for your brand?
There’s technology, of course, and BMW continues to pursue the technological supremacy that has made its brand among the most admired in the world.
But as an experiential technology - something you take in with all your senses - electrification is, fundamentally, pretty boring. Once you get over the neck-snapping performance, an EV drivetrain is more about what you take away - emissions, maintenance, cost of ownership - rather than what you gain in emotion.
Other technologies, like suspension and steering enhancements, driver assist systems, entertainment systems and connected services are other areas in which manufacturers can innovate. However, as most OEMS outsource the development of their latest tech to a small handful of suppliers, it’s not long before the competition has a comparable bell or whistle. Very quickly, your tech stack becomes commoditised and, well, plain common. Technology is also largely hidden from view. You need to read a spec sheet or a review to know whether there’s anything interesting under the skin.
So in the age of Instagram, how something looks becomes everything.
Marxs says of music:
As once-innovative sounds become pure kitsch, it forces ambitious artists to seek out new techniques (or re-appropriate the kitsch in new ways). If cheap gear devalues all the classic sounds of electronic music in their conventional form, talented producers will push towards something new
And I think that’s what we’re seeing with BMW - a push for something new in an attempt to stand out against a sea of good-enough sameness. There’s also a parallel here with the emergence of postmodernism in furniture and architecture as a riposte to the high rationality of modernism.
My good friend Christopher Butt said in his review of the car:
By this point, it has become absolutely and inescapably clear that BMW are not interested in beauty any longer. At some point, some years ago, someone within this organisation clearly came to the conclusion that beauty stands in the way of the brand’s future and must hence be purged.
Perhaps BMW’s approach is as intentional as Chris imagines. Perhaps the company’s designers are like those talented musicians, pushing for something new. Perhaps there really is a big idea behind these grotesque new cars. If so, and in time, we may see this uncomfortable first album resolve in to something more harmonious but no less impactful.
But for now, I’m just living in hope.
Post-script: after I shared this piece with Chris, he directed me to a piece he wrote in 2021 which explores the topic of visual novelty from a same-same-but-different angle. It’s well worth a read.
Have you heard of Manfred Gotta? | JS
Why it’s interesting: You might not have head or Manfred Gotta, but you’ll have definitely heard of the names he’s come up with
Recently, I’ve been exploring the role of character in product design – which is a fascinating area in its own right. But I was struck by this quote from Manfred Gotta in relation to the role names play. Gotta is founder of Gotta Brands and the brains behind many famous car and consumer goods names:
“Creating a name is a very special, personal process. I lock myself in with the car at the beginning. I lie in front of it, I sit in it, I smell it, I stroke the car. Many cars have human features – you’re dealing with a real personality. I always call it “the soul of the car” – a name has to fit it.”
While some see a car as a mere conveyance from A-to-B, part of their enduring role in our lives and as a cultural object comes from the fact that great cars have personalities. Or as Gotta puts it “a soul”. This is part of why people develop relationship with their cars and – of course – give them names (ask Mr Smith about this if you ever get the chance).
But it’s fascinating to understand how Gotta – behind car names such as Smart, Twingo, Cayenne, Panamera, Megané, Avantime, Actros, and Vectra – spends the time to understand the car at a deeply visceral level, to interpret the meaning and character that design teams have spent putting into a car and give it a name which adds so much meaning and value to the end customer. And how he muses on it having to be right for the car it’s attached to:
“A lorry called Twingo would certainly be inconceivable”
Interestingly, Gotta says that “The most important thing is to listen to the customer and understand what he or she really wants.” Which if you think about it, is quite different from ‘asking’ the customer what they want, the oft-hackneyed assumption of the role of market research.
Gotta continues to be active and shape how we think about cars and consumer goods through their names – we wait with interest to learn more about “project 42” (yes that is a Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy reference), which Gotta’s team are working on for Tesla.
Hat tip to the wonderful plankhond account on Twitter for the reminder of Gotta’s work.
Thanks to Plankhond, Alex Roy, Roman Meliška and W. David Marx for inspiring us this past fortnight.
That's it for this issue. We love feedback (positive and negative), and to answer any questions you have. So email Joe or Drew and we’ll get back to you.
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