Looking Out #29
Looking Out #29
Automotive OS wars and autonomy. The father of micromobility and rolling street furniture. What the Semi says about Tesla and why Moncler raised the bar. The right to repair and automotive fragility.
9th March, 2023
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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Auto
Are OS wars the new screen wars? | JS
Why it’s interesting: the battle for your eyes in the car was just the start. We might not be done with maximising screen real estate just yet, but a new factor is looming - the operating system.
As VW group (finally) launched the new app store from its Cariad software subsidiary at MWC, it’s interesting to reflect on whether we’re entering into a new era of OS wars, which will play out on the (seemingly ever larger) touchscreens with which automotive brands have been trying to outdo each other over the last few years.
Why OS wars? Well there’s now a distinct split in the automotive fraternity, between those piggy-backing off the Android Automotive OS (GM, Ford, Renault-Nissan, Volvo Cars Group, possibly BMW) and those sticking firmly to their in-house guns (Mercedes-Benz, VW Group, Tesla).
For years, we have been discussing who will own the in-car experience, and whether automotive OEMs were willing to essentially let Google or Apple dominate the experience in the car, bringing their app ecosystem into the car and ultimately owning an OEM’s customers eyeballs, and wallets.
But as time has rolled on, this question has become a little thornier. For one, there’s the small matter of—Tesla aside—legacy automakers not exactly having covered themselves in glory when it comes to software development.
What’s more, when you’re trying to get third party developers to do things for your own operating system, we can’t help but wonder about the dev appeal of being seen and sold to a few million VW owners, versus the casual billion or two users that the Android and Apple ecosystems boast.
All automakers clearly see a future that is software-enabled and that obviously goes far beyond just an operating system. As we’ve previously reported on, many hope to open up a new line of revenue by selling software, or to be more precise—software enabled hardware features that are baked into the vehicle—but which are locked out of use until the customer ponies up an additional monthly fee.
Using Android’s Automotive OS shouldn’t be any reason to stop you doing that as an OEM, but for anyone looking for the reason VW has percevered with Cariad and working on inhousing its own software by and large (and why Diess got fired for its many delays and flaws), it’s here in black in white:
VW group said that Cariad could generates as much as €1.2 Trillion in revenue by 2030, via subscriptions and other sales.
But this OS and app store seem distinctly underwhelming.
We started this newsletter with the intention of opening up to public debate some of iMessage conversations that pass between Drew and me. When it came to this piece of news, it was fairly short shrift:
Me: this Carid announcement - isn’t this the thing (Herbet) Diess (ex-VW CEO) got fired over?
Drew: is that it?
Me: I fail to see what competitive advantage it brings them. What does it do more than Carplay? Except inhouse?
Drew: An app store for a few million VW customers. Versus an App store for 1 billion Apple and 2 billion Android.
Drew. Go home. Don’t waste your time and money
Yes, I appreciate there is much more to Cariad than just this App store. But as you can see, we sit on the side of being underwhelmed by VW’s in-house software announcements. Yet it will be fascinating to watch this situation evolve, as the automotive world sifts into two camps. And to see which approach ultimately proves more beneficial commercially—but just as importantly—for the customer.
What a chauffeur-driven car can tell us about the future of autonomy | DS
Why it’s interesting: Research out of Berkeley indicates that when we have access to an automotive servant, we’ll treat it like one. It doesn’t bode well for a more sustainable, efficient future.
Now I love me some real-world research, especially when it blows holes in a commonly-accepted narrative about how people use (or will use) products and services. Many’s the time I've taken a client's intended solution to the customer only to unearth that reality simply didn't match the outcome that the client had in their head.
And that's precisely what I love about this research from University of California Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. It explores how autonomous vehicles will change peoples' usage of cars and skewers the narrative that total vehicle miles traveled—or VMT—and, therefore, traffic will be reduced in the utopian, autonomous future peddled by the likes of Waymo, Cruise and others.
But how did they do the research, you might be wondering, when there are no autonomous vehicles available to private users? I'm glad you asked.
Realising that an AV is nothing but a car with mechatronic chauffeur, the researchers gave participants a flesh-and-bone chauffeur to drive their car for a week. They then observed how participants’ behaviours changed from the week prior, during which they had to drive themselves.
In a limited study with 13 participants (a follow-up with 53 participants is in progress), VMT increased by an enormous 83% when using the chauffeured car to commute, run errands (which included sending the driver to collect goods while the owner stayed home), and visit places that would have otherwise been too challenging for older participants to reach. Of particular interest was the induced demand for poorly-planned errands, with owners sending their chauffeur on inefficient, single-use journeys to pick up packages or pizzas or to refuel their cars.
The study helps us think about how we might incentivise the "good" use of AVs—say, the provision of pooled transportation in areas underserved by public transit or helping someone with a disability access places they otherwise might be excluded from—versus using an AV to go pick up some takeaway or milk from the grocery store.
While far from representative, it's nonetheless an interesting indicator of how people might use AVs that are freely-available for personal use. And it's precisely the kind of research we need to conduct as we frame the introduction of new technologies to market so that we might catch unintended consequences before they catch us.
As this article on the research states:
[The study author] worries that, should people become comfortable with using AVs under current laws and policies, it will become exceedingly difficult for cities to curb the technological abuses sure to follow.
“It’s going to be very, very difficult to take away something from people after they got used to it,” Harb warned, which is why he considers it vital that the policies be put in place before people do.
Mobility
Interviewing Horace Dediu, the man that named micromobility | DS
Why it’s interesting: the father of micromobility spent years studying the automotive industry. He’s learned some fascinating things along the way.
Alongside publishing Looking Out with Joe, I’m also a correspondent for a podcast called The Next Billion Cars. Futurist Mark Pesce, inventor Sally Dominguez, and I have just wrapped our fourth season of exploring the issues that are influencing the future of how we get around, and how these will impact the automotive industry.
For the penultimate episode of the season, we explored the topic of micromobility, its promises, and its pitfalls. And to understand its origin, I interviewed none other than the father of micromobility himself, Horace Dediu.
It was a fascinating conversation, one rich with insight about the automotive industry and it’s failure to catch a break in the micromobility space, and what micromobility means for the design of how we get around.
You can listen to that episode here: The Next Billion Cars – Micromobility and the ‘Rest of World’.
In the next episode of Looking Out - The Podcast, Joe and I will take a deeper dive in to the implications of Horace’s insight for the automotive sector. We’ll send you an email when it’s live.
The Semi-truck: a representation of Tesla in a nutshell? | JS
Why it’s interesting: of all Tesla’s products, the Semi truck has perhaps the greatest game changing potential. And it neatly sums up how the company operates, weaknesses and strengths alike
Back in December, Tesla delivered its first Semi truck to Pepsi co, a product the company first unveiled nearly five years ago (yes, five). However despite it being a Tesla, and perhaps because it’s a truck, you might not have heard quite as much about it as you’d expect. Or maybe you have, and I’m just trapped in an echo chamber of cars.
Anyways, the Semi is another perfect representation of Tesla’s ecosystem vs hardware logic that—beyond Elon—is what seems to divide people into lovers and haters when it comes to the Tesla brand.
On the ecosystem side, as James Carter points out, the Semi should be game changing.
Why? It’s primarily down to economics. With a 500 mile range, and a load hauling ability that is all but equal to regular diesel trucks, Tesla solved one of the major issues of electric trucking right out of the box: haulage companies don’t want to reduce what they can carry, and they don’t want to be charging every five minutes and have trucks sat doing nothing. A truck needs to be moving to earn its keep.
Secondly, there’s Tesla’s focused on total cost of ownership rather than just purchase price. A Semi will be twice as much to buy as a diesel truck, but the running costs are so low that the difference gets paid off within two years beyond which point the fleet operator is winning. James suggests that such is the advantage on the running costs that:
“This is so big that no freight or logistics company can NOT afford to not go electric.”
Add to this the new Megawatt V4 charge system, which can charge the truck to 70% in 30 minutes and Tesla looks like its once again set to change the game, this time in the trucking sector. Industry commentators like James are predicting that fleet operators will lap up the Semi. Pepsi pre-ordered 100 back in 2018. Walmart and FedEx will be other major operators.
In the context of what I’m about to say, its interesting to note some of the approaches to hardware design that Tesla has taken to ensure the Semi is as efficient as possible:– the sloping windshield and narrower front cabin with central driving position help to reduce frontal area and aerodynamic drag. So far, so Tesla.
But what will the experience of the Semi truck be like for the people that drive them? Possibly less appealing than the ergonomically sophisticated modern truck to which they’re accustomed, according to Tomasz Orynski, a journalist and translator, but also a seasoned trucker.
Orynski points out that Tesla made great plays about how the Semi is ‘built around the driver’, but under his scrutiny and this great twitter thread the reality appears to be the opposite.
It starts with the central driving position:
This makes overtaking or looking ahead more difficult. But also makes it impossible to reach out of the window to pass the paperwork or to talk with the guy in the gatehouse when you enter a port or a factory or, say, a tollbooth.
And the odd access and egress set-up will cause issues, too, he believes:
The doors are in the back. You enter, hang your coat, and then have to walk a few steps forward to sit behind the wheel. This means that you are wasting cab space for a corridor basically. You can't place a bed there so the driver can rest, because there are doors there.
But that’s not the only issue with the door position:
The fact that you have to walk around the cab means it will be full of mud. The good thing about getting straight into the driver seat is that you can shake the snow or the mood when getting up there, and even if your boots are still dirty, only this little piece of floor
The argument about touchscreens rumbles on, but could they have greater safety implications in a truck:
Tablets are simply not designed for use in moving vehicles. You need a physical button, so you can reach for it even without taking your eyes off the road and feel it…. even those small tablets are annoying as hell at night, as even if you turn them black, they still tend to glow.
And that angled windshield might aid aero, but Orynski reckons it will create other issues:
The angled windscreen means two things:
Snow staying on it when you were parked up in the winter. Remember how annoying it is to have to clean one's windscreen of the snow in the car? Now try to do it 3 metres up... If the window is vertical, snow is not a problem.
Cab overheating when driving on a sunny day in summer. Even sprinter van cabs can get really hot - even in winter on a sunny day - because of that angled big windscreen. You can solve it with A/C of course. Which will use even more power, shortening your range.
And the list of issues goes on… You can’t accommodate a bed deck, the cab design creates more blind spots, the long mirror stalks mean you wont be able to quickly reach and clean them.
Ultimately, it seems that the Semi truck is a neat encapsulation of where we find the Tesla brand. Still innovative, prepared to break out of the pre-determined format a sector has established, and in doing so, giving itself a huge commercial advantage.
But it's also a brand that builds hardware and products that sometimes aren’t that pleasant to use, aren’t that well thought through, and at their worst raise some significant safety questions. They almost feel like they’re setting the uninitiated user up, for failure. It will be interesting to see how that plays out in the world of trucking.
Pair with: Motor Trend visits Pepsi to get answers on what the Semi truck is like
Design
A Mercedes 600, Nokia’s G22 and some thoughts on right-to-repair | DS
Why it’s interesting: The responses of Nokia and Apple to right-to-repair laws show the various approaches OEMs could take in building circular economies around the car.
Last Friday, I visited the mechanic to take a look at my beloved and beleaguered Mercedes 600 SEL. It has, thus far and to put it mildly, been quite the journey. Right after I bought it, I booked it in to have the head gaskets and under-hood wiring looms replaced, both known weak spots on early W140s. The looms suffer from insulation that degrades in the heat of the engine bay, causing short circuits and all sorts of associated electronic maladies. It can get extremely expensive, extremely fast.
For a number of reasons, not least of which is the appalling factory parts availability, that work took 7 months. After picking it up in October to drive from Amsterdam to Leon in Spain, I made it all of 1200 kilometres before an incorrectly-installed timing chain tensioner snapped the timing chain and bent 24 of the 48 valves.
This week, the long-suffering mechanic installed the rebuilt engine back in the car only to find it wouldn't start. A new round of electrical issues, resulting from the disturbance of more degraded wires during the extraction and replacement of the motor, are at the root of the problem.
If I'm lucky, I might get away with new mass airflow sensor wiring looms, available from a couple of specialists that have set up to fill the gap in the market left by Mercedes. If I'm not and the body loom needs rebuilding then it'll be 60-70 hours of labour.
Faaaaaark.
I don't tell you this to bring your pity upon me (although donations are welcome), but more to emphasise that—in spite of Mercedes' lack of dedication to their back catalogue—this is a car that, with enough will, money and expertise, can actually be repaired. Even the ECUs, which can be damaged from short circuits, can be brought back to life by a handful of dedicated suppliers.
Will Mercedes facilitate these sorts of repairs amongst independent specialists with the current generation S-Class or EQS? Once the manufacturer's legally-mandated support dies, I expect that these cars will, too. The highly integrated nature of their electronic systems means that they will be beyond the expertise of most mechanics (and owners) to repair.
The steady advance of right-to-repair laws and a drive towards the development of circular economies might remedy this situation in time, but not before entire generations of product have been laid to waste.
This week, Nokia launched the G22, an Android smartphone designed in collaboration with the electronics repair site iFixit. The owner can replace a battery in 5 minutes, a broken screen in 20, with simple tools easily purchased on the internet. It's another step in to the mainstream for a design philosophy that's underpinned relatively niche products like the Fairphone and the Framework laptop. And it's emblematic of a owner-centred, systems-aware approach to product and service design that stands in stark contrast to Apple's. Should you wish to replace parts of your iPhone, it'll involve 35 kilograms of specialised tools—shipped in two Pelican cases—, proprietary software, and overcoming the feeling that Apple would really rather you paid them to carry out the repairs instead.
If automotive OEMs are serious about developing circular economies around their vehicles, as Stellantis and BMW claim to be, then it should be the owner-friendly Nokia, Fairphone, and Framework that they seek to emulate, and not the owner-hostile Apple. Or, dare I say it lest I sound like a luddite, return to the engineering philosophies of yore when cars, even those as complex as the W140 Mercedes S-Class, were designed for repair, rather than replacement.
Moving street furniture as walking micromobility in Japan | JS
Why it’s interesting: How micromobility and people co-exist in pedestrianised spaces is an interesting challenge. Moving street furniture in Japan is an interesting exploration of the how we might solve it.
Tatsuaki Hatanaka, consultant at Mitsubishi Jisho Design shared this interesting piece of product design on the streets of Tokyo. It’s a piece of street furniture that can accommodate three people standing, and moves at the pace of a walking pedestrian, so that it can flow well with people in pedestrianised areas.
Products like this often get criticised, critics falling into a ‘what’s the point - why not just walk?’ argument. The same was said of the numerous Toyota’s ‘i’ series from back in the early 2000s (iReal, iSwing etc).
But this argument seems to ignore the many reasons that we willingly choose to jump into a 2 tonne car, to simply move one 80kg human, 500m down the road. Or the real issues that exist in terms of speed differentials between pedestrians and vehicles.
The concept of moving street furniture is fundamentally extremely interesting - and in design terms, under-explored. This is an interesting first step, in what we hope could be an interesting future city design landscape.
Images: Tatsuaki Hatanaka
Culture
Moncler’s Art of Genius - a blueprint for consumer brand immersion? | JS
Why it’s interesting: Making your consumers part of the experience is the next big things in the fashion world. Moncler just raised the bar.
I’d be prepared to bet a significant portion of my savings you’ll have come across something from Moncler’s Art of Genius show last week, even if you didn’t realise that what you saw was part of a bigger event.
Whether it was Mercedes’ Project Mondo G, Horishi Fujiwara’s robot peepshow, or Pharell William’s so on-trend packable outdoor collection, Art of Genius was an event that brought together no fewer than eight collaborations between Moncler and other creative establishments. In the process, the brand fused music, art, design, fashion, sport and entertainment in to one spectacle under the roof of London’s Olympia exhibition hall.
The event itself and the different collaborations are well worth diving in to, but what’s perhaps most interesting from a cultural point of view is that this immersive extravaganza wasn’t just an A-list celeb fest or a who’s who of the creative world (although all the names you’d expect were in attendance).
No, it was the fact that the Art of Genius show brought 10,000 members of the public, who’d registered on the Moncler website, along for the ride. And in the context of the show, as Dazed and Confused neatly puts it,
This wasn’t just a clinical activation or in-store event; it was an extravaganza that made you part of the experience, an actor, not just a spectator.
As Dazed opines, Moncler’s event joins an emerging trend of highly immersive, “anyone invited” fashion events, that seems to tap into the zeitgeist for consumers wanting to be part of the creative action (as opposed to just consumers).
But there’s also something fundamental about this, in a time of TikTok, generative AI and Metaverse. Monclear created something that you take part in, that will exist only once, in that moment in time, and where the creative thing is happening—being created—at that moment, rather than being shown in retrospective. The consumer is participant, creator, and voyeur all in one. Giving access to a hedonistic experience, that isn’t available online, and can’t be relived, is perhaps the ultimate in immersing a customer in all your brand represents, and endearing them to it (to put it mildly).
Expect this to be just the start of a wider trend, and in fashion at least, for events like this to become the next big thing.
Images: Dazed and Confused
The irreducibility of the challenges we face | DS
Why it’s interesting: command-and-control product development has made the automotive industry remarkably fragile. What might cybernetics offer companies looking to become more adaptive and responsive in times of massive change?
Walk in to any automotive OEM and you’ll find a team dedicated to headlamps, one dedicated to seats, one dedicated to closures, one dedicated to HVAC, and others dedicated to pretty much every component from which a car is constructed. For while the consumer buys an integrated product, its development is handled at the level of components and subsystems. All going well, these only ever meet once the body-in-white starts to move down the production line.
In the transition to what are now becoming known as software-defined vehicles, this historic and highly-compartmentalised approach to sub-assembly development is causing all sort of issues.
Stories abound across OEMs of independently developed components that don’t talk to the newly-developed system software, the OS for the car. And system software—fiendishly more complex than anything automakers and their suppliers have had to code before—is being developed in isolation from the teams developing the components. It's a challenge so profound that Herbert Diess lost his job as the CEO of Volkswagen Group largely because of the inability of CARIAD, the company’s software division, to deliver reliable system software on time to the Group’s vehicle projects.
While cars—and the companies that have built them—have historically benefitted from the setting of a single-minded goal and its single-minded pursuit within a closed system, effective software development demands the realtime accommodation of new information as the user requirements and operating conditions evolve. And—whether it’s responding to the advance of climate change and legislation designed to mitigate it, or the rapid evolution of customer preferences and the technology that enables them—is it any wonder that car companies are having such a hard time making the shift?
But let's take it up a level and consider the development of equitable, sustainable mobility systems. If we focus on just one component, like manufacturing a scooter and making it available to share with scant regard to the context in which we share it, we wind up with scooters dumped willy nilly on the street and ridden recklessly hither and yon. Citizens will hate your product and may well encourage councils to remove it, as might happen when Parisians vote on a scooter ban on April 2nd. But how is this, really, any different from the way that automotive companies have effectively externalised all the costs that their vehicles produce?
On the whole, however, shared scooter companies have been far more adaptive than automotive OEMs to shifting regulatory environments, demographics, and any other variables that might alter their operating conditions or end user needs. Scooter companies will use live data feeds to monitor fleet distribution and density to actively manage their presence within cities, while automotive OEMs tend to prefer to lobby against any regulation that might disrupt their domain, or simply cheat to get around it.
I'd argue that OEMs take this approach not because they want, specifically, to be the bad guy, but because the closed loop design and development philosophy on which they've been built—and the enormously cap ex- and time- intensive means of manufacture—doesn't easily accommodate rapid changes in the operating environment.
In the face of this, I'm fascinated by cybernetics and the blueprint it offers for creating approaches to automotive design and development that are highly adaptive and responsive to changing conditions.
Rather than focussing solely on the reduction of the car to a series of subsystems that are reassembled to meet the needs of a customer, a cybernetic approach would consciously locate the car in a much broader system of infrastructure, culture, citizenry, policy and environmental constraints. If viewed as sources of insight and assessed holistically, these realms might inspire radically different solutions than yet another 2.5 tonne EV SUV.
For a practical explainer of how cybernetics can inform the design of physical products, Amber Case has written a couple of great articles: Part 1 and Part 2.
Thanks to Horace Dediu, Mark Pesce, Tatsuaki Hatanaka, James Carter and Tomasz Orynski for inspiring us this past couple of months.
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