Looking Out #30
SEAT as Micromobility brand and the Paris Scooter ban; GM’s homegrown CarPlay and AI's perpetuation of bias; Spotify's personas and lessons for Bentley from beat-up Birkins.
8th June, 2023
Welcome to Looking Out, a newsletter and podcast 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!
Auto
Is SEAT about to become a micromobility brand? | JS
Why it’s interesting: the once-flamboyant Spanish brand appears DOA in the VW group. Is stopping building cars and becoming a mobility brand as bold a step as it seems?
What’s the point of SEAT? Under the sprawling umbrella of the VW group and in its 30 years life-span, the Spanish brand has gone from re-hasher of old fiats, to value upstart, to faux-Alfa latin flair brand, to what seems like the lame duck of the group.
Five years ago, sport trim level Cupra was spun off into a stand-alone brand. And with five products, it now outsells its Barcelona-based former mothership.
Perhaps more confusingly, while Cupra already has a dedicated EV in the line-up (the Born) and will get two others by the end of 2025, apparently there are no plans to introduce EVs to the SEAT range. Baffling, given the upcoming 2035 ICE ban in Europe (when SEAT is a Europe-only brand) and the VW group MEB platform sits underneath brand brothers VW, Audi, Skoda and Cupra cars.
Something is afoot. Mindful of a looming European ICE ban which will make cheap cars history, a brand which tends to sell cheap cars exclusively in Europe doesn’t look like a hugely viable proposition. But shuttering it lock stock would be an expensive and risky business, given the number of legacy products running around Europe’s roads and dealer network.
So the more surprising future, outlined in a recent article, is that SEAT’s leaders see the brand becoming a mobility operator, rather than car OEM. SEAT is one of the few OEMs already active in this space, with the Mó, an electric kick scooter, and previously shown Twizy-like Minimó concept.
Does it makes sense for SEAT to become VW group’s bridgehead into the world of micromobility and mobility-as-a-service? Perhaps. It might give another life to an otherwise dying brand. It gives the service, dealer and infrastructure network something else to do. And it enables a low-risk form of experimentation for the group under the banner of a reasonably well-known brand.
It’s a move that my head says we should be applauding. And yet there’s something about it that leaves me cold. I think it’s simply that—rather as it was with the unveil of Minimó in 2019—it’s completely unclear what SEAT adds to Micromobility, what problem it solves, or how it advances the space.
Here’s hoping that by 2030 (the rumoured timeframe for the transition), VW group has a bolder, clearer plan.
Pair with: McKinsey predicts deep curbs on car use, fall in new car sales, rise of micromobility
On GM, CarPlay and the challenges of bringing in outside help | DS
Why it’s interesting: GM’s decided to take away Apple CarPlay and replace with a system developed entirely in-house. Here’s a few reflections on how to make the job easier for the guy they’ve hired to do it.
That GM would announce that they are soon to evict Apple CarPlay from their in-car entertainment systems seems crazy enough. CarPlay is, after all, the interface that over 75% of American new car buyers consider to be essential to their consideration of a new car purchase.
But it’s GM's publicly-stated plans for besting Apple (and Android Auto) that really caught my eye. Because in the words of friend and coach Andy Polaine, GM's chosen to hire the "person formerly in charge of Apple’s most flakey service" to "make [a] flakey in-car entertainment system for GM". That’s right, GM’s hired Mike Abbott.
Andy’s snark aside, it's a mistake I've seen companies in many older industries make time and time again: they hire someone from the tech world, believing that hire will solve their tech problems.
But, with all the good will in the world, it won't. At least, not without a fundamental rewiring of how the car company works and the culture that enables it.
Having worked for one of the world's largest technology consulting firms, I got to see, first-hand, numerous well-intentioned folk take up digital leadership roles.
Having had success in the same role in a different sector, hopes—both theirs and their new employer's—were high that they could cure whatever ailed the digital infrastructure and output of their new home.
Then they'd realise that the challenges they faced ran the length, breadth and depth of the organisation and, in the first instance, usually had nothing to do with technology. Long-established ways of thinking, working and speaking underpinned proud cultures that could see no reason for change. Appeals for innovation fell on deaf ears, undermined by a failure to grasp the history, culture and language of the organisation.
Increasingly, the problem goes beyond digital leadership. Car companies are bringing in design leaders from beyond the industry in a bid to change the way their products are developed, and accelerate the shift to service-based offerings. Here too, 120 years of the incredible efficiency and optimisation of the core business model can make the organisation deeply resistant to change.
So how can we make the transition easier, both for new leaders, and for the organisation?
Firstly, give those new hires a guide to the industry and to the company, someone who can help them understand not just the way things work, but why, and who can help them interpret the human data they receive from the organisation. This will help them plan their changes with due respect to what's come before, and with an understanding of the implications for individuals and the culture of the business.
Secondly, create a vision of how life will be better for people as a result of the change. Get them involved in making that vision real in their day-to-day work. And share and celebrate their successes along the way. This way, you'll build envy around a new way of working, and momentum for lasting change.
Because for change to take root, individuals will need a reason to believe that it's all worthwhile, and that there's something in it for them. Because if you're going to take on Apple, that change is going to be hard and far-reaching.
Mobility
Making sense of the Paris scooter ban | JS
Why it’s interesting: Paris recently voted, resoundingly, to ban scooters. Does the result suggest a roadblock to micromobility, or something a little more nuanced?
Back to last October. A damp squib of a Paris auto show resulted in a group of colleagues and I foregoing a second afternoon of meandering the show halls. Instead, we went in search of creative inspiration in the 6eme and 7eme.
With time running tight for our return to the hotel and a shuttle to the airport we realised, with some horror, that strikes and protests meant the bus and metro network was paralysed and there wasn’t a cab to be found. A fleet of e-scooters came to our rescue, and we hot-footed the 3km back to the hotel just in time.
It was quite a lot of fun, and got us out of a tight sport.
So when the recent Paris scooter ban was announced, with Dott, Tier and Lime soon to remove 15,000 scooters from the streets of Paris, it seemed high time to look again at the polarising world of micromobility.
Cornell University’s Centre For Cities has a fantastic article which dives headlong into some of the reasoning behind the ban. Aside from the fact that only 7% of eligible voters actually polled it’s startling that 89% voted to remove the scooters. We touched on the vexing future of micromobility before, but author Nicholas Klein, suggests there are two predominant narratives at work.
In his research, most people, he says, have a negative perception of scooters; much of this has to do with the way they were introduced - “dumped” - flooding the streets overnight. There are further concerns relating to vandalism (they have a habit of being chucked into the Seine), safety for pedestrians and reckless riding.
But among the negative perception, one big issues stands out - parking. But this issue is more nuanced than first meets the eye, too. Klein again:
In a recent study I published with Anne Brown and Calvin Thigpen, "Clutter and Compliance: Scooter Parking Interventions and Perceptions," we dug into the question of what counts as naughty scooter parking. We found that "public perceptions of improper parking are largely driven by concerns about pedestrian accessibility and an aesthetic sense of tidiness and order." In general, we find that when scooters are parked in a tidy manner (left image, above), they are viewed more positively by the public. But when they are untidy, askew, or jumbled (right image, above), even if they are not in anyone's way, people viewed them as problematic.
Klein articulates how the newness of scooter-based micromobility plays against it in this regard. In his research, he suggests car ‘misparking’ is far more common than scooter violations, but such is the 100 year history of the car and its normalisation in society, that we don’t even notice it. This leads to ‘salience bias’.
His suggestion for cities looking to make micromobility with e-scooters work is unsurprisingly simple: create dedicated spaces and infrastructure which shows not only where - but how - scooters should be parked.
Image: Klein, Nicholas, Anne Brown, and Calvin Thigpen. 2023. "Clutter and Compliance: Scooter Parking Interventions and Perceptions." Active Travel Studies 3
Design
Prompt: A shot of a futuristic car design, with a person wearing clothing or accessories that reflect current fashion trends
Generative AI and perpetuating the auto industry’s worst biases | DS
Why it’s interesting: in an industry that’s hardly known for its inclusivity, the adoration shown by designers for generative AI risks further entrenching some pretty outmoded ideas.
Biases against LGBT+ folk have lead to some pretty horrific outcomes. In the places I’ve lived, I’ve had it relatively easy, but in some parts of the world, members of the community are still subjected to abuse, outright violence, and state-sponsored eradication programs. So you'll forgive me if the conversations around bias in generative AI have a particular resonance.
People like Timnit Gebru have been raising the alarm that these tools are perpetuating the unconscious (or conscious) preferences of their creators and the biases inherent to the datasets on which they're trained rather than reflecting the full diversity of our societies.
But I have to admit that, up until recently, these conversations had been abstract. I'd read a lot, I knew it was a problem, but I hadn't seen it first hand.
Then just the other day, I asked my client why he'd prompted Midjourney to create images of cars with women in them. And he said he hadn't, that's just what Midjourney did.
He showed me the prompts he used and sure enough, each time he prompted the tool to create an image of a car with a person, that person was an idealised woman.
And when he wrote a prompt asking for images of designers working on a car? Well, those designers were all men.
Prompt: Car design studio and designers working on the future car
The automotive industry has, historically, been notorious for its lack of diversity, misogyny, homophobia and sexism. The studies back it up. And now our designers are in thrall to artificial intelligences that reinforce these biases.
While we're thinking about the incredible creative opportunities these tools give us, we need to think very carefully about what they might be taking away.
Because while they might look like the future, in some ways, they’re just recreating the past.
Images and prompts: Kostas Stylidis, Intended Future
How Spotify created (and uses) personas | JS
Why it’s interesting: personas have a bit of a bad name in some industries and some corners of user research. But Spotify’s case study illustrates their relevance and value.
Antonella. My first brush with personas—a fictional character, based on research to represent a type of user—came in 2008. I was working with Ford, who, about to launch the sixth generation Fiesta, made a big play of a character called Antonella. 28, female, and living in Rome, she was the guiding persona in the car’s development and at the time I thought a way for Ford to communicate that it both understood its market, and was becoming a much smarter, user-centred company.
At least that was the idea. But in the circles I moved in within design and research at that time, scorn was heaped on Antonella. Perhaps not least because—to Drew’s article above—she seemed to represent a series of stereotypes rather than any meaningful user focus, or deeper insight on Ford’s part. More recently, the work driven first by Ideo and now D-Ford, and its impact on products such as F150, Bronco and Transit, suggests that Ford’s been really working hard on its user focused design, and its products genuinely show leadership thanks to real user research.
But I digress. Personas have got something of a dirty name. Using they can lead to issues within product teams, and fundamentally big product and service misses, when done wrong. Nielsen Norman’s ‘why personas fail’ tells more on why.
Which is where Spotify comes in. Personas have in part got a bad wrap because they don’t land across teams and with leadership. They tend to get used or ignored, they sometimes don’t have leadership buy in, and they are created in silos and aren’t communicated properly. This leads to disenchanment from those who created them in the first place (when they aren’t used), a lack of buy in from teams in other silos (not invented here syndrome) and sometimes dismissal and a lack of understanding from leaders, especially those focused heavily on data.
Spotify’s explanation of how they built their personas isn’t just interesting because they managed to summarise Spotify’s millions of American users into five personas, but because they went to such care to avoid the pitfalls described, namely:
They asked ‘why’ a lot - about the users and their behaviours but also at each project stage, of how this could be used and what role it played in Spotify.
They did their own real world research, with real users - multiple times, on which the personas were based.
The personas weren’t just based on needs. Spotify quickly spotted the need for wider context - what was happening in the real world around the music and core user, drove their part 2 field research, and led to much richer insight.
The users weren’t represented in high fidelity, life-like ways. Instead they were visually abstracted - making the material easy to engage with, easy to refresh, and easy to present in low-fi, quick ways.
The team communicated with and involved the wider spotify stakeholders throughout the project.
They created an internal website everyone could use and access, which in turn drove buzz around the project and usage of the end result.
They created physical assets to raise awareness of the project and give others prompts and props they could easily use in their work.
They ran workshops and sat with other teams, to ‘learn by doing’ around the personas.
It’s an old article, published in 2019 that for some reason came back across my radar recently, at an opportune moment. Rather than being dismissive of personas (a trap I had fallen into) it helped me re-evaluate their possible value - especially in a large company, with hundreds of millions of users.
I wonder what Antonella (presumably now 42, living in the Roman suburbs with a husband and two kids, and driving a Ford Escape PHEV) would make of it?
Culture
Old handbags, old Bentleys, old iPods and status | DS
Why it’s interesting: because sometimes quality isn’t about perfection in the here-and-now, but about well-worn character and the way things age.
I'll never forget the first time I sat in a second generation Bentley Continental GT. It was at the Geneva Show and the car in question was a limited edition Blower Number 9.
In honour of Tim Birkin's original "Blower" 4 1/2 litre Bentley, it had a tiny sliver of wood from the seat in Birkin's car set in to its perfect little clock. This was set in to perfect wood punctured with perfect switchgear and surround by leather, the stitching of which, you guessed it, was perfect.
Everywhere I looked around the cabin, I found perfection. My mind boggled at how much effort had been expended to achieve this result in a mass-produced car. You could sense the sleepless nights endured by the designers and engineers. But what it lacked was any trace of human imperfection, the kind of intervention that lets us know that something has been crafted with love, rather than turned out mechanistically in the thousands.
Contrast this with the early Bentley Turbo R I once drove. Exposed screw heads abounded, but they were beautifully chromed. The gaps between the glovebox and the dash would have made a Volkswagen perceived quality specialist weep. But open that glovebox and, behold, a slab of solid wood, the veneer perfectly matched across those gaps to the rest of the dash and, evidently, hand-lacquered. The stitching in the leather wandered a little, as it might when the person in the Crewe factory had so much of it to do. And the piping on the seats seemed to take inspiration from a slightly lazy snake. Human hands had been everywhere in this car.
With over a hundred thousand miles on the clock, it wore its age well, the leather softened and a little scrunched, the steering wheel exhibiting the soft sheen of a hundred thousand caresses. It smelt expensive. It looked rich.
Now, I'm not for a second suggesting that it's reasonable, let alone viable, to build things like Bentley used to. The market's come too far for that. The iPhones in our hands have taught us to demand perfection from mass-produced products.
But then again, I once shared a lunch table with Richard Seymour of design agency Seymour Powell. He recounted asking Jony Ive why the back of the iPod was polished, when there might have been other finishes less prone to scratching. Apparently Jony pulled his iPod out of his pocket and stroked it with a look of delight in his eyes, purring about how polished metal felt like nothing else. Also, as the iPod aged, he said, it would come to tell the story of its relationship with its owner, developing a unique character of its own. Even today, there’s a sort of shocking, fuck-it authenticity to a cracked glass on the back of an iPhone Pro. It suggests that the owner has more important things to worry about than keeping their phone pristine.
Back to Birkins now, but of the Hermès variety. Thanks to the emergence of a resale market and social media, the four- five-and six- figure handbags are seemingly everywhere. So what marks an old-school Birkin customer from an arriviste influencer? How beat up you allow your bag to become. Because the more you use it, the more you show to the world you care less about the status it confers, and more about the practical qualities for which the bag is famed. See also: Jane Birkin with her bestickered and smooshed-up Birkin at the top of this piece.
There’s something to be said for considering how things age, especially as the service life of EVs can, in theory, be far longer than their ICE forebears.
And as manufacturers start to push up prices and push upmarket to reclaim the margins lost to the EV transition, we might once again enter an era in which the car is an occasional purchase, and not something flipped every three years on finance. And if that’s the case, wouldn’t it be nice if, once again they aged gracefully?
Pair with: Succession and the era of billionaire bore-core, a fantastic write-up on the (re)emergence of quiet luxury, a review of Gwyneth Paltrow's quietly luxurious courtroom attire, and the resale market for well-used status bags.
Podcast
In our most recent episode, we discussed Drew’s interview with the father of micromobility, Horace Dediu.
We ask:
what does it mean for the automotive industry to make a worse car, and where might we start? (starting at 24m 57s)
how does looking down versus looking out change how we think about designing for automobility? (starting at 50m)
just how screwed are the economics of automobiles in a heavily urbanised future? (starting at 1h 14m 57s)
If you liked this issue of Looking Out, please share it with people whom you think might like it too!
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.