Looking Out #6
Audi's hyper-aggression, DriveNow's shambolic shutdown, Dieter Rams' legacy and the history of persuasion
23 August, 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!
Auto
Hyper-aggression: car design identity as a reflection of society
Why it’s interesting: if cars have human or animalistic characters, why is aggression today seen as a positive characteristic? And what does that say about society at large?
Car designers work to give cars strong characters and clear identities. Primarily this is communicated through the car’s front end – its face – or in design industry terminology, the down road graphic (DRG).
John Lasseter’s Pixar movie, Cars, introduced this concept to the wider public. The movie team even consulted car designers, J Mays (ex-Ford, now Electrolux) and Peter Horbury (Geely) on the project. [As an aside, the portrayal in the movie of the car’s windscreen as the ‘eyes’ of its face runs counter to the view of most designers – who read a car’s lamps as its eyes].
Which brings us to Audi’s new RS6. The design of the high performance model – and particularly its front end – is extremely aggressive. If you imagine that the RS6 is alive, it looks like it wants to kill anything that gets in its way. But the RS6 isn’t alone in its aggro. Its DRG reflects a trend that has been growing for some time in car design: aggression is good. And the more powerful a car is, the greater the need for aggression.
Why? In our human/animal identity reference, performance, power and capability do not directly correlate to the degree of menace or aggression someone shows. Usain Bolt is muscular, athletic and is physically larger than the average male. But would you say he was more aggressive than the average man in appearance or demeanour? If a friend described us as an aggressive person, or angry in character, most of us would likely see this as a negative quality. In response, we might even take a long hard look at how we were behaving.
What then does growing aggression in automotive form say about the society that consumes it? Nir Kahn, Design Director at Plasan, has a very relevant take:
Perhaps on some level we want the social advantages of being aggressive without the drawbacks. And by wearing it as a car we can do that. It allows us to project aggression and simultaneously legitimately distance ourselves from it.
This relates to Chris Bangle’s famous quote, that ultimately, cars are avatars – representations of who people want to be. And while in real life, many wouldn’t act aggressively, they do wish to get ahead, don’t want to be pushed around by others and have this growing sense that it’s a dangerous, dog-eat-dog world out there. Aggressive gets the job done. Aggressive wins. Look at Donald Trump.
So ‘wearing’ an aggressive car is one way of ensuring that you win on the road. But if cars are becoming more aggressive and buyers see a need to present aggression, doesn’t this say something sad about our insecurities as a society and the state of play on our highways? Is it too much to say that hyper-aggression in automotive design is ultimately a reflection of populism? Perhaps.
But it’s worth remembering that the link between an aggressive appearance and performance is a relatively recent concept. And it is emphatically not the only way to present automotive potency and performance. Take the Porsche 911. For many it remains the pinnacle performance car. Yet over 50 years after the model was introduced, the latest 992 retains a benign, non-aggressive facial expression. Just as 911s always have.
Will we see a time again, when more in the industry follow the ‘speak softly, carry a big stick’ approach to defining the identity of performance models? I hope so, because I can’t be the only one who wants to drive a high-performance, non-aggressive looking car.
| JS
Mercedes UK is tracking its finance customers
Why it’s interesting: Although Mercedes claims that customers are informed of the tracking in the fine print of their contract, it calls in to question the integrity of the brand
The placeholder title for this piece was "Mercedes tracking bullshit" and, if I’m honest, it still feels like bullshit.
The long and short of the story is that customers who purchase their cars on finance from Mercedes UK (as 80% of their customers are wont to do) also agree, contractually at least, to having their location tracked.
The idea is that should a customer default on their finance agreement, Mercedes can easily locate the car and send bailiffs to repossess it.
Mercedes claims that the tracking clause is bolded in the contract. But what are the chances that dealers are explicitly informing customers of the fact?
There’s complying with the letter of the law, and then there’s the spirit of fair play. According to this article, Mercedes is manifestly failing at the latter.
Will datagate will be the coda to dieselgate, I wonder.
| DS
Mobility
Uber has now lost $16.2Bn since 2016
Why it’s interesting: despite growing cash burn and slowing growth, Uber continues to be an investment darling. But are investors’ hopes of ultimate success through market monopoly dead in the water?
Uber has owned a disproportionate amount of column inches in Looking Out. And that’s likely to continue with headline figures like this:
Uber, a company that uses rich people’s money to subsidize artificially cheap taxi rides provided by underpaid drivers, continued its streak of having never made a profit by losing another $5.2 billion in the second quarter of 2019.
The writer of that quote, Aaron Gordon of Jalopnik, probably echoes the thoughts of many in the auto industry, when he writes:
it sure does get tiring reporting on companies that lose nine figures every quarter only to get doused with billions more in investor cash while your industry slowly shrivels into a cacoon of misery.
Why do investors continue to shower Uber with money, as its losses only deepen – and with no clear tech solution or event on the horizon looking likely to change things? Uber’s year-on-year revenue growth even slowed to 14% – the lowest since its formation.
As commentator Richard Leyland opines on twitter:
The issue in this case is that they're killing entire industries while operating on what's essentially a non-commercial model
And that’s the big clue to why investors continue to pile in. The hope is that Uber can still grow into a company that has a monopoly in what was previously called the taxi market.
Meanwhile its diversification into micromobility, food delivery (and more) as Drew reported last time, hints at a potentially much bigger goal – owning every aspect of moving people and goods between one point and another.
For now, the market has taken fright at the latest results. Could Uber’s time as an investment darling finally be up?
Pair with Richard Sharma in the New York Times, on how policies created to pull the world out of recession have created giant like Uber, who have market monopolies and in turn are now strangling the global economy: When dead companies don’t die
| JS
Services are hard #374
Why it’s interesting: The failure of DriveNow in Seattle and Portland shows the need to give as much attention to designing the end of a service, as we do to the beginning.
I feel for OEMs, I really do.
For years, they’ve been designing and building products and getting them off their books as quickly as possible. It’s the finance companies and dealers that deal with what comes next: sales, servicing, complaints, reputation management.
But now, car manufacturers are trying to become service providers overnight and in the process are coming to terms with the mutual obligation that exists between a service provider and service user.
Or failing to come to terms, as is the case with the BMW/Daimler joint venture, DriveNow.
Car sharing customers received this email
“If you are in an active rental, do not fear, please end your trip in the coverage area as normal when you are done.”
Ride-hail drivers and city authorities were left similarly in the lurch, with little to no notice given to either.
It’s a shocking example of a failure to design the end of a service in a way that lets everybody down gently.
Beyond the practical considerations of working out how to move around, how to make a buck, or how to deal with the hundreds of defunct cars now parked on your streets, this kind of poorly-planned shut down does enormous damage to the idea that OEM-operated mobility services can be as dependable as a car that you own, or public transit.
| DS
Design
US Navy fleet rejects touchscreen controls, reverts to physical
Why it’s interesting: a poorly-designed touchscreen interface was found to play a significant role in the death of 10 sailors and leads to a major redesign.
One of the long-running conversations between Joe and I concerns the use of touchscreens as primary and secondary interfaces in car interiors.
While we agree that they can have their place, the most common implementation - which sees a like-for-like digital replication of physical controls on the screen - fails to acknowledge the need for new mental models and affordances that come with the new interface type.
While I’ve been accused of being alarmist for suggesting that a failure to understand this is a question of life or death, the ongoing saga of the fatal USS John S. McCain collision lends support to the idea that poor touchscreen interfaces can lead to disastrous outcomes:
The investigation into the collision showed that a touchscreen system that was complex and that sailors had been poorly trained to use contributed to a loss of control of the ship just before it crossed paths with a merchant ship in the Singapore Strait.
Expanding on another tragic example of research uncovering technology for technology’s sake after the fact, a senior navy official stated that:
“When we started getting the feedback from the fleet from the Comprehensive Review effort… it was really eye-opening. And it goes into the, in my mind, ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’ category. We really made the helm control system… just overly complex, with the touch screens under glass and all this kind of stuff”
and
“we got away from the physical throttles, and that was probably the number-one feedback from the fleet – they said, just give us the throttles that we can use.”
So, with the touchscreen interface now tarred with death of 10 sailors, that’s what the navy is now doing: retrofitting physical controls back in to their ships.
| DS
The story of Dieter Rams and the Gillette Sensor
Why it’s interesting: Dieter Rams managed to lift the humble razor to design greatness – but in doing so, did he violate his own principles and inadvertently highlight the crisis faced by many designers today?
Arun Venkatesan’s blog features a superb piece which reveals that Dieter Rams designed the 1990 Sensor – one of Gilette’s most successful razors.
It is surely one of most ubiquitous products Rams designed, following Gilette’s acquisition of Braun in 1967.
Venkatesan chronicles the development of the razor and then proceeds to conduct a fabulous deconstruction of the product, measuring it against Rams’ own ten principles for good design, with assessments such as:
At first glance, it has the telltale signs of something penned by Dieter — something conforming to his Ten Principles for Good Design. The most apparent principle that it, like most of Dieter’s work, represents is the third.
“Good design is aesthetic”
But the most interesting aspect is Venaktesan’s conclusion, that:
it’s clear that this model violates Dieter’s ninth principle.
“Good design is environmentally-friendly”
He continues:
Each cartridge may be small, but at the scale at which Gillette produces them, the impact is immense. These cartridges find themselves in landfills, never biodegrading, and returning to the environment.
Venaktesan ends by asking what Rams would do if he was asked to design such a product today? He cites Rams’ own bleak assessment of his career: so concerned is he for the environment – and the environmental impact of design – that were he to start again he would choose not to be a designer.
The piece concludes:
While the Sensor is beautifully designed, the waste it creates makes it and other razors like it, products that deserve reinvention.
And reinvention, surely needs designers.
| JS
Culture
A History of Persuasion
Why it’s interesting: Long before the current crop of technology titans put persuasion to work, governments and scientists were laying the foundations. This fascinating podcast walks us through the history.
What links the Unabomber, flatworms being fed other flatworms, Mark Zuckerberg and the undermining of western democracy?
Over the course of three episodes, this podcast charts how scientists and technologists have discovered and applied tools of human persuasion, and plots some way markers for a resistance movement.
Fascinating and chilling in equal measure, it’s a great pairing with the work of The Center for Humane Technology, and this talk by founder Tristan Harris in particular.
Image: Eleanor Shakespeare
| DS
Is it time to let employees work from anywhere?
Why it’s interesting: More companies than ever let employees work from home. But stigma and suspicion still exists around remote-working productivity. New research provides some interesting insight.
As someone who has spent much of the past decade working remotely from the organisations and teams I’ve been involved with, the title of this piece on remote working caught my eye.
Culturally, working remotely is more common-place than ever – it can often be seen as a perk for employees, and for employers it has overhead benefits. But there’s a flip side: the stigma attached with remote working. That ‘working from home today’ deserves those inverted commas, because secretly it means being sat on the sofa in pyjamas, watching daytime TV.
The report highlights an important shift that’s occurring – from work from home (WFH) to work from anywhere (WFA), based on needing only a reliable internet connection.
But more interesting – and countering the stigmatised view – is the research findings, that, for specialised professionals, those ‘working from anywhere’ increased productivity by 4.4 percent.
The report highlights often little considered, but positive second order consequences that are emerging:
examiners transitioning to WFA relocated, on average, to locations with significantly lower costs of living, representing an effective increase in real salary for these employees, with no increased cost to the organization.
The piece concludes with a series of useful ‘work from anywhere’ recommendations for organisations, the key take away being:
if a work setting is ripe for remote work – that is, the job is fairly independent and the employee knows how to do their job well – implementing WFA can benefit both the company and the employee.
Ten years on from implementing this approach in my work life, I say Amen to that.
| JS
Thanks to Nir Kahn, Drew Meehan, Arun Venkatesan and Brian Black 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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