Looking Out #9
14th 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.
Auto
SUVs: An inconvenient truth
Why it’s interesting: despite breathless reporting about the growing popularity of electric cars, it’s worth remembering the metric that counts: sales volume.
Joe’s previously covered the backlash against SUVs, and for lovers of high-riders, the public discourse around their favoured wheels grows ever bleaker.
But in all the Sturm und Drang, or in the case of EVs, Strom und Drang, it’s worth bearing in mind a few salient SUV figures: 45% (USA), 34% (Europe), 42% (China) and 23% (India).
While sales in developed markets are starting to slow, it’s hard to see consumers’ love for the SUV dropping off a cliff overnight. Nor will manufacturers be keen to encourage such an outcome, given SUVs found close to 30 million buyers last year.
Expect turbulent times ahead as manufacturers try to reconcile the buyer’s taste for SUVs with an increasingly unfavourable regulatory environment and ever-louder calls for their banishment.
Source: Jato
Images: Newcentre1tv.com
| DS
Dyson pulls the plug: or making cars is hard episode 392
Why it’s interesting: As Dyson pulls the plug on its electric car project, will the wider new brand revolution turn into one great flash in the pan?
You’ll read many ‘told you so’ style stories in the wake of news Dyson is pulling the plug on its £2.5Bn electric car project.
Electrification, among other revolutions, was supposed to tear down automotive walled gardens, allowing innovative start-ups to change the industry, pulling the rug out from under the bloated, corporate incumbent OEMs.
But while some of those incumbent OEMs continue to make questionable moves, the Dyson news may represent the opening of the flood gates, before a tidal wave of bad news about the start ups. The fact is, as any seasoned auto analyst will tell you, €3Bn to start things up from scratch, is a drop in the ocean. You can three times that much and conceivably get nowhere. Making a new brand stick in the automotive world is hard. Making money is even harder.
And the Dyson news comes hot on the heels that many – mostly Chinese – electric start-ups appear to be in a precarious position. It’s a badly kept secret that Nio is in significant trouble. Faraday Future are already written off by many analysts, and now it’s Byton turn for a feet-to-the-fire moment.
Building cars is hard. The investment, in R&D and factories alone, is enough to empty the deepest of investment pockets. But that’s before you’ve even considered the supply chain behind you, creating a brand, marketing and awareness campaign which sells enough customer on the viability of your brand, and coming up with any USP through the design, engineering or sales model.
As this FT piece by Peter Campbell points out,
"Before Tesla there was a rule that you couldn't start a car company and succeed."
Sadly, that’s likely still true. While the incumbent OEMs surely face many challenges of their own, will we ultimately look back on this period as being the one that forced upon them the change that ensured their survival?
Without Tesla, there would be no Taycan, no i-Pace, no BMW i, no Mercedes EQ. And everyone I know in the industry has spent the last three years examining Tesla, Byton and Nio in detail. Their legacy? I suspect we’ll look back on these brands as having delivered the boot up the arse that the car industry collectively needed.
| JS
Mobility
Reversion to the mean
Why it’s interesting: Janan Ganesh, writing for the FT, argues that global mobility may prove to been an exception, rather than the norm.
I’m sure many of you have done it: slightly weary and perhaps a glass or two of wine to the good on a Wednesday, you open a discount flight booking app. Before you know it, you’re flying to Ibiza, Istanbul or Irkutsk - insert regional variation here - come Friday evening.
EasyJet dispenses with distance for 50 quid. Uber sorts your transfers, reliving you of the need to speak the local language, and AirBNB finds you a comfy bed in an enchanting corner of town.
Seeing the world has become very easy, and very cheap.
Fuelled by numerous subsidies - whether low or no tax on aviation fuel, the free-flowing venture capital that allows the likes of Uber and Lyft to charge customers less than the cost of a ride, or an inability to regulate fast-moving marketplaces, we’ve become used to living first-class lives at economy prices.
And yet the tide may be turning on this very 21st century luxury. The case for imposing aviation fuel taxes in Europe is gaining momentum. The transport network companies, newly accountable to shareholders, are scrabbling to find profits in business models that don’t deliver them. And cities, tired with the fuck-and-run mentality of many of their visitors, are starting to turn them away, making it difficult for AirBNB to operate.
As Janan writes:
The passenger in seat 1A was never the interesting case study in globalisation. The world has been a small place for the rich since at least the Grand Tours of the 1700s. It was the person on the budget flight, bound for a cheap rental, via a bargain ride, who was the larger relative winner. This decade — the decade of Uber and Airbnb — was theirs. The next might not be as kind. It is not globalism per se that is in trouble so much as the democratisation of it.
Image: Steve Gale
| DS
Letting the train take the strain
Why it’s interesting: As the Flygskam movement gathers pace, does the real answer to driving modal change lie in smoothing bumps in the experience?
TGV Lyria last week announced a bold service expansion, seeking to capitalise on the flying shame movement. In a move that’s surprisingly hard to pull off in the context of rail timetables and track access pathways fixed months (sometimes years) in advance, the intercity train company will increase the frequency of services between Paris and Zurich and Geneva by over a third from the end of the year.
Le Monde says:
“TGV Lyria has chosen to take a risk from the end of this year to compete with the plane. The Franco-Swiss company is prepared to increase capacity by 30 per cent to its offer of high-speed links between Paris and the main Swiss cities.”
Despite the likely increased costs compared to flying, the appealing city-centre to city-centre times of 3-hours (Geneva) and 4-hour (Zurich) give the TGV an advantage over the plane once you’ve factored in getting to Charles de Gaulle, check-in time, waiting and the reverse at the other end.
And let’s face it, the on-board experience – particularly if you consider the dining options, space and on-board wi-fi – hands a further advantage to the train.
As Drew mentions in his piece above, with the era of cheap, democraticsed air travel possibly coming to an end, the budget era may soon come under threat. But there’s a real opportunity to re-frame the entire concept of travel around positive experience and less-but-better, rather than more-for-the-sake-of-more.
Yet considered in the context of mobility more widely, what train companies like TGV Lyria and city authorities really need to work on (together), is smoothing out the bumps and barriers to that still exist which stop people using the train at all. It’s not the product, its cost or its speed that stops many opting for it. It’s the difficulty in getting to the station in the first place, or (for those who don’t live in north east Paris) the need to work round the Parisian metro system, potentially with luggage, having come into another terminus.
These small experience barriers are common place in the non-car world form of mobility. But over-coming them is critical if the world is serious about driving behavioural change and seeing modal shift. It’s the classic first-and-last mile challenge, that everyone involved in mobility, is still ultimately struggling to solve – and why the car so often still wins out.
| JS
Design
What SaaS giveth, governments taketh away
Why it’s interesting: in our headlong rush to find alternatives to ownership, we’ve opened the door to paralysis at global scale.
I remember my indignant rage when I realised that I was going to have to trade my much-coveted Adobe Creative education license for their new-fangled Creative Cloud subscription, known generically as Software as a Service (SaaS).
At the time, I was mostly outraged at the idea of having to pay over $1000 every year to access software that was critical to my job as a freelancer.
The news that Adobe is deactivating Creative Cloud accounts in Venezuela, in compliance with a U.S. Executive Order, is a sickening twist in the tale.
We’re used to sanctions targeting persons of serious political or economic influence hailing from a nation state that another considers rogue.
In this instance, the sanctions appear to affect anyone using an Adobe product and, as a kicker, there’ll be no refunds.
Apple is pulling apps and content from Hong Kong to the dismay of those who believe the company is a shining light for human rights. Now just imagine if Microsoft pulled Office 365…
Happily, the introduction of Creative Cloud spurred the development of a wealth of wonderful independent products that you can indeed own.
It’s not hard to imagine that moves like the one that Trump has pulled against the creatives of Venezuela will only further galvanise that development.
| DS
Humans in the loop: the sound of a penny slowly dropping?
Why it’s interesting: are we finally understanding that humans don’t always react as we expect them to in high-stress environments?
The Boeing 737-Max saga, continues to run on – with the plane still grounded. But it’s a story that continues to be of interest for anyone learning about human factors, or Boeing’s mistakes in assessing them. For those in need of a recap, Drew’s piece in Looking Out #2 is a good place to start.
This week, the NTSB – the US independent transport safety board, delivered its views and recommendations. Core among them, the NTSB raised the following point about how Boeing approached human factors, citing:
“a gap between the assumptions used to certify the Max and the real-world experiences”
In summary, Boeing didn’t factor on the impact that a host of secondary alarms and warnings going off in the cockpit would have on the decision making abilities and behaviour of the pilots, as they tried to recover an aircraft which was determined to nose down.
Perhaps, somewhere a penny is now dropping. The assumption that a simplified simulator set-up is a proxy for the real-world, is being questioned. As is the idea that regular, and sometimes relatively in-experienced commercial airline pilots, will make the same decisions as top-of-their-game, expert test pilots who certify the aircraft and are practised in recovering it from edge scenarios, when under stress.
To wit, one of the reasons the 737-Max still isn’t back in the air is that during one of the previous attempts at recertification, Boeing failed to gain the certificate needed because:
FAA test pilots ran simulations that deliberately assigned corrupted bits to the MCAS—telling the computer that the MCAS was engaged when it actually wasn’t. One of the three pilots testing the system was unable to restore steady flight and lost the aircraft.
Which pilot failed to recover the plane? Yep, you guessed it. It was not one of the Boeing test or certification crew. It was the one who was a regular, commercial US airline 737 pilot.
| JS
Culture
Off-piste in Copenhagen
Why it’s interesting: How do you make people happy to have a waste incinerator built next door to where they live? Make it an architectural event and build a ski-slope on top of it.
You might have heard of BIG architects. BIG – otherwise known as Bjarke Ingels Group (Bjarke being its founder) is the hot-shoe Scandinavian architecture firm of the moment, vying with Snøhetta as the go-to firm for anyone in the Nordics who needs a statement building. BIG’s profile got another boost this week with the opening of the Amager Bakke waste-to-energy project, otherwise known as Copenhill Urban Mountain.
In simple terms, it’s a waste incineration plant – which generates energy from the process – that’s been turned into a snaking, 85-metres high landmark building, on top of which has been built a dramatic and rather death-defying dry ski slope.
It’s a project Ingels has been talking about for over 10 years, is over a year late opening and cost £485M. But it could have greater cultural significance than meets the eye. As architecture critic Rowan Moore points out:
It’s an emblem of a culture of why-not and because-you-can that currently pops up in a number of modern cities: twisting towers in Toronto by the Chinese practice MAD; the Dubai palm-islands and sail-shaped hotels that are by now almost historic.
And yet it also represents a specific kind of pragmatic, bold Scandinavian approach to design. Projects such as waste incineration plant, and new forms of energy generation such as wind turbines, are going to be increasingly needed as energy demands soar, and electricity generation is decarbonised. Yet these projects are generally hated by the public, and buried either out of sight or out of mind, far from highly populated areas. But that’s not going to be practical for some places, and many countries, for much longer. So to solve some of the challenges facing society and cities, architects like BIG present an entirely tongue-in-cheek approach. One which dresses sustainability in clown-pants, and presents it as an opportunity to have fun and new experiences for the public, while getting rid of their waste and generating their energy. Let’s call it bright green sustainability.
If we’re to create sustainable, liveable cities and clean energy for the future, we’ll need more of this kind of new cultural thinking. As Moore sums up:
Nicety is not really the thing in this robust location; a compelling idea is. Plus a dollop of chutzpah. Subject to caveats on questions that will only become clear in use – that it really works well as both ski slope and power station – this is one project that lives up to the hype.
Image: rasmus hjortshøj
| JS
The Sound of Silence
Why it’s interesting: in a world full of noise, one man is out to capture its quieter moments.
For a number of years now, when times have called for some perspective, I’ve turned to a podcast series called On Being, hosted by Krista Tippett.
Blending her experiences as a religious scholar and journalist, Krista gently teases apart the perspectives of a range of remarkable scientists, artists, authors, poets and scholars. I can’t recommend the show more highly.
For an example of the the type of magic she brings to the world, look no further than her recently-published interview with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton.
Having recently been involved in intense discussions about what cars of the future should sound like, and grappling with the notion that as designers we are often responsible for creating more noise in the world, I was particularly struck by this insight:
The modern measure of silence is the noise-free interval. Now we might think the noise-free interval should be measured in hours for places that are very distant on the planet and even some places here that are isolated such as Olympic National Park off the northwest corner of Washington State. But if a place can have a noise-free interval of only 15 minutes or longer during daylight hours, it’s added to the list that I’ve collected for 30 years called The List of the Last Great Quiet Places. At last count, here in the United States, there were only 12. None of them are protected.
Pair with The Book of Life on the small pleasures of walking in the woods.
Image: Richard Darbonne
| DS
Jobs
UX Strategy Lead – User Experience Future Pursuits, GM
Interaction Design Director, Ford
Design Thinking Catalyst, Ford
Thanks to Krista Tippet , Peter Campbell and Janan Ganesh 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.
If you like Looking Out, please forward it to people and send them to this link to sign up.
If you’d like to meet other folk who are just as interested in where the automotive industry is headed as we are, think about joining The Automobility Group Slack community.