Looking Out #10
MercedesWe, Tesla's Smart Summon threatens the future, a service design primer, and eating your own dog food
28 October, 2019
A newsletter about the auto industry, mobility, design, and the cultures that surround us. 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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MercedesMe becomes MercedesWe and alarm bells ring
Why it’s interesting: Building cars is hard. So is building safe and secure digital services and products. OEMs need to nail both if we’re to trust them with our lives.
A few months back and against a backdrop of breathless praise for Mercedes Benz’s MBUX entertainment, navigation and connected services system, I had the opportunity to make an in-depth evaluation of the system.
One of the things I remarked on in my report was just how poorly Mercedes had executed the connected services aspect.
Privacy notices were borderline unintelligible. User account creation was a ball-ache of back and forth between my cellphone, the car and the MercedesMe app. Some features simply didn't work.
And now it seems that had I remained a user of the app and the car my privacy could well have been compromised, too.
While only possible for a brief spell on October 18, a fault somewhere in Mercedes’ back-end made it possible for users of the MercedesMe app to view location, vehicle and contact details for other MercedesMe users.
Mercedes is not alone in their struggles to keep their vehicles and owners safe and secure. A few years ago, hackers took control of Jeep’s vehicle systems, and researchers have shown that it’s possible to spoof Tesla’s driver assistance systems.
Lest we forget, these are the companies to whom we’re supposed to entrust our care in an increasingly automated world.
Simply nailing the basics of secure software and system design would be a step in the right direction.
| DS
Owning the software eco-system: considering consumer value in the future car
Why it’s interesting: software is becoming a huge battleground in the automotive arena, and while many brands are partnering with tech companies, Volkswagen is in-housing.
In a move that will cost it billions of pounds, Volkswagen is hiring between 5-10,000 software engineers. Th aim: to develop “an all-encompassing software universe in-house”, according to Automotive News, fulfilling a desire for the VW group to create its own automotive operating system.
Many of today’s cars run on an OS like QNX - the operating system from Blackberry – It’s so ubiquitous that it’s almost an industry standard. But OEMs want their own slice of what they feel will be a lucrative pie.
Just as Volkswagen has developed its own electric MEB platform, and brought many of the component sub-systems (normally built by suppliers) in-house, this move suggests that Volkswagen sees big value in owning the entire software eco-system for the car and having everything in-house.
The question is why, and where is the value?
It’s perhaps unsurprising because the customer’s experience and perception of the brand is increasingly influenced by the digital aspects of the car, and the eco-system that sits around it. Normal automotive thinking suggests that the software eco-system therefore needs to be owned, because it’s a critical aspect of delivering value to the user, and you don’t really want this to be shared with anyone else. You make it a USP.
But an OS isn’t the same as a front end that the customer sees and interacts with – and we wonder how this move will ultimately play out. Especially compared to – say – the entirely different approach of a brand like Volvo. They are working closely with Google’s Android Automotive team on its next generation of in-car experience, which debuted in the XC40 Recharge last week.
Full disclosure - Joe is a consultant at Volvo
| JS
Mobility
Could Smart Summon deny us the future we deserve?
Why it’s interesting: Smart Summon raises more questions than it answers.
A lot has been written about Tesla’s Smart Summon, which was pushed via an update a few weeks back to users who have purchased the $6000, “full self-driving package”.
If you haven’t yet caught one of the videos of a Tesla making its way cautiously (in some cases hap-hazardly) across a busy car park yet, then I admire your social media abstinence.
The feature raises a couple of very interesting points around autonomous vehicles and the future of mobility more widely.
The first is that the banal environment of something like a car park remains one of the greatest challenges for autonomous vehicles. Granted, the current Tesla system isn’t truly autonomous. But it nonetheless shows that a car park – hard to map, often with ambiguously marked sections, and human-driven vehicles flouting rules and moving in multiple different directions – may be one of the most difficult places for an autonomous car to deal with. And as we talk about everything from autonomous deliveries to the challenges of micromobility, Tesla’s Smart Summon once again seems to suggest that it’s the few meters between the front door of a building and the main road, that will be the biggest challenge for anyone to overcome.
The second is the question of when you introduce a new technology to an expectant public, at what point can we say ‘yes’, it’s ready? Tesla Smart Summon is a clear selling point for the brand, because it’s unique to Tesla (for now) and something owners can show off.
But Consumer Reports called Smart Summon a ‘glitchy science experiment’, while Alain Kornhauser – head of Princeton University’s driverless vehicle programme, went further – calling it “Stupid Summon”. Kornhauser has been one among many to raise an altogether more important point. He argues that by introducing a technology like this, aggressively, Tesla could scare off the public, slow development, cause regulators to knee-jerk in their reactions to it, and ultimately deny us the (autonomous driving) future we think we deserve.
| JS
Sustainable shared micromobility is still a pipe-dream.
Why it’s interesting: For all the tech-bro boosterism in the sector, the business case for shared micromobility is far from clear.
Let me declare up front that I almost joined a micromobility startup.
And let me also declare that there’s a reader of Looking Out who will be crowing “I told you so!” at this item. He’s right to.
Roughly two years in to the emergence of shared micromobility, more data is emerging about the companies trying to make it work.
And try as those companies might, it doesn’t work. At least, not yet.
Beyond the the depreciation and durability of the scooters - which is, admittedly improving - there are still massive operating costs associated with recharging and redistributing the fleets.
Take this analysis of industry behemoth Lime as an example.
In July alone, it burned through around $200 million in cash, and is set to lose more that $300 million on revenue of $420 million.
Like so many other start-ups, Lime is keeping the lights on with venture capital while it searched for a profitable business model.
If the recent implosion of WeWork is anything to go by, financial markets are becoming increasingly wary of such an approach, especially when it comes time to go public.
As one VC fund partner suggests, perhaps micromobility players would be well advised to partner with cities and transit operators
In so doing, they become part of a slower moving, but, perhaps, more sustainable transit ecosystem.
| DS
Design
Product or service? There’s a map for that.
Why it’s interesting: As boundaries between physical and digital product and the services that can connect them continue to blur, a little way finding can be helpful.
Although this chart is already causing arguments among the more academic service designers out there, it’s nonetheless a useful tool for answering some of the more fundamental questions about product and service design.
Also, as a car designer, if you follow the logical path…
Can you drop it on your foot? > Yes > Do you use this object as part of a wider system? > Yes > It is a physical product that delivers a service
… it leads to some pretty deep philosophical questions about the role of the car, the industry that produces it and the part that it should play in delivering mobility.
As the creator of the map suggests:
… recognise when your product embodies a service and push your remit to explore the entire design challenge.
| DS
Culture
Eating your own dog food
Why it’s interesting: much can be gleaned from Mark Zuckerberg and Bob Lutz’s refusal to use their own products.
Ad man David Ogilvy used to insist upon using his clients’ products, in order to be intimately acquainted with them and, by turns, learn how to better sell them.
This week, we learned of at least two leaders who think it beneath them to do likewise.
Firstly, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg - under intense questioning from Rep. Katie Porter about his company’s content moderation policies - suggested that it wouldn’t be a good use of his time to walk in the shoes of a content moderator. He thinks Facebook’s community is better served when he’s focused elsewhere.
Conveniently, focusing elsewhere also means that he wouldn’t be subjected to the scenes of rape, torture, murder, bullying and animal cruelty that have driven his contract moderators to the point of emotional breakdown, and to commit acts of violence of their own.
The second story concerns Bob Lutz, former Vice Chairman of General Motors.
In a panel discussion with the Autoline After Hours crew, Bob admitted that his favourite daily driver is his
“2015 [GMC] Yukon XL Denali… I love the fact that it still has knobs. That’s why I didn’t go for a [Cadillac] Escalade because I didn’t want to deal with the CUE system...”
For the uninitiated, CUE stands for Cadillac User Experience. The user experience it offers is better described as a raging bin fire, so it’s easy to empathise with Bob’s desire to steer well clear of it.
Except that CUE was - and I’m taking a punt here on GM’s corporate and product development chronology here - must have been signed off while product-obsessed Bob was still in a senior leadership role at General Motors.
So what does it say about your company and its products when you decline to use them yourself?
Whether its to learn how to build better products, or to boost team morale, good leaders always eat their own dog food.
| DS
Drawing: a mis-understood tool for learning?
Why it’s interesting: We think of drawing as an art, but should we instead think of it as another – important – tool in our ability to learn?
Drawing, or sketching, is still seen as a key skill in many design professions. But when I tutor at the Royal College of Art, it always irritates me when design students sit and sketch during lectures or presentations – particularly if it’s a visiting speaker stood up front. “Just pay attention and listen,” I’d say, “you’ll learn something.” I must sound like some know-it-all father. But I’ve always had that nagging sense that maybe I wasn’t right on this – the students, perhaps, were actually listening – and the drawing was helping them to learn or process what was being said…
This Big Think piece on drawing, explores this very idea. Referencing D.B. Dowd’s book Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice, the piece explores the idea that drawing (or sketching) is more than just a tool for creating art, but a key way of helping people to think, process and learn. It even references my pet peev:
It's…likely that you've scribbled curlicues in the margins of your notes during some particularly boring lecture
Dowd argues that:
"We have misfiled the significance of drawing because we see it as a professional skill instead of a personal capacity. This essential confusion has stunted our understanding of drawing and kept it from being seen as a tool for learning above all else."
That’s important, because ultimately:
“doodling has been shown to affect how the brain runs and processes information in a significant way…some believe that doodling during a boring lecture can help students pay attention.”
It’s an interesting piece, which has relevance for anyone who thinks creatively for a living, which let’s face it, is most people – not just designers. The overall point, about how we think about drawing (as a ‘skill’ that needs to be done well, rather than a way of learning and developing) feels particularly acute for a profession such as car design, where some still equate the ‘quality’ (beauty) of the sketch with a person’s quality as a car designer.
Regardless, from now on, I’ll be letting RCA students doodle away during lectures!
| JS
Thanks to Drew Meehan, Jay Bartlett and Katie Wishlade at Clearleft 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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