24 January, 2024
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Announcements
Drew’s producing an in-depth, illustrated report covering CES 2024. In it is be everything he did — and didn’t — see at CES2024. It also contains the critical questions the show posed for automobility companies trying to find their way in an increasingly-uncertain world. If you’d like to have access, you can email him here.
And If you can’t get enough of Drew talking about CES, check out his other podcast, The Next Billion Cars, created in collaboration with futurists Mark Pesce and Sally Dominguez.
For the better part of a decade, it's been easy to think of the Consumer Electronics Show as the most significant motor show on the international circuit.
As cars have become increasingly connected, as tech giants like Amazon and Google have made their way in to the automotive realm, and as our expectations of products and services have been set by the devices we carry in our pockets, it's understandable that car makers would want to be associated with the world of consumer tech.
And yet there's a fundamental mismatch at play between the auto land and consumer tech land.
Agile and operating on 12-month product cycles, tech companies can turn up in Vegas with polished products that will be on the market and generating revenue before the next show rolls around.
For car companies — at least the legacy ones — that kind of agility and speed is but a dream, so CES has tended to offer a preview of the stuff we might see on the road a couple of years down the line.
And if what we saw from OEMs and suppliers in 'Vegas is what we can hope for a year or two or three hence, hoo boy are we in trouble.
Whether it was generative AI that generated the wrong responses at Volkswagen, beautiful vapourware from Honda, or the dad-dancing collaboration between Mercedes-Benz and Will.I.Am, there was little to make one optimistic about the future for the old guard. As I wrote in my article for Car Design News, legacy OEMs continue to ask the wrong questions of technology, and in the wrong order.
So much of what we saw on the show floor smacked of teams being handed a technology and then trying to find a job for it to do. How might we instead identify the consumer need and the value proposition first, and then corral the technology to deliver it? This isn't rocket science — I’ve been helping companies do this for the better part of 16 years now — but it seemed to be beyond the reach of many this year.
On the upside, Kia presented a troupe of truly lovely commercial vehicles which demonstrated some deeper level of thought. But what of the Koreans’ desire to run our cities, our logistics and, if we include hydrogen-huffing Hyundai, our energy networks? Moving from product to service to systems design, to say nothing of execution, requires careful consideration, and I’ve got more to say on this in my report.
It wasn't all bad though, for outside of the OEMs and the suppliers to whom they increasingly outsource their R&D, there was a lot to ponder on a wander among the halls of the convention centre and hotel suites.
From companies that had spent the past 12 months thinking about how conversational agents change our relationship with apps, there were interesting experiments in interface design. Skyted’s mask, the WHSP ring, and the much-feted Rabbit R1 pose some important questions for user experience teams exploring the future of HMI.
The threat of ongoing climactic, cultural, and political instability seemed to find its mirror in the superabundance of products that are designed to help us survive when infrastructure fails. How brands can contribute to feelings of psychological and physical safety will be important to explore in years ahead.
Side note: all of those ChatGPT features OEMs were talking about would be rendered mute should a cyclone take out the cell network... and CES did not have an answer for that.
And there were examples aplenty of how technology of the quiet kind can change for the better our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, without relying on a glowing screen pressed up to our faces. This, I think, I one of the most immediately interesting areas to explore with my clients, especially in the face of the savage dismissal BMW has just received at the hands of Harry Metcalfe…
On balance, CES 2024 will not be remembered as a banger for the industry Joe and I love so dear. Conversations, first hand and overheard, belied a sense of panic that the fundamentals of the old-school automotive world are looking pretty shaky.
On the flip side, China's car makers continue to prove relentless in their ability to out-think, out-design, and out-produce everybody else. The faces on Ford's designers as they pored over the incredibly accomplished Zeekr 007 (door card above) would delight Edvard Munch. China has numerous incentives to crack as many international markets as it can, and I have no doubt that it will as it keys in to Western tastes and attitudes. It will be interesting to see if factories in Mexico translate to cars on show stands at CES 2025... how America votes in November will no doubt be decisive on that point.
Joe and I hope you enjoy this episode of Looking Out - The Podcast. We're both glad to be back in our virtual studio, and grateful to be able to share our observations with you all for another year.
And if you want to dive deeper in to the topics covered in the podcast, in this newsletter, or in my report from the show, get in touch.
Cheers,
Drew (& Joe)
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