Re*Move

The 2009 Ford Hedge – A Review

Like a prized suburban garden, Ford is cleaning up in the neat-and-tidy-American-car-company stakes. Joe Simpson pushes past the perimeter and asks, is it enough?

Last week, 100 ‘agents’ pulled the covers off the 2011 Ford Fiesta at the LA auto show in the climax of the six month-long “Fiesta Movement”. Just a couple of weeks before, Automobile magazine named Ford’s CEO, Alan Mulally, their man of the year, which must be all the sweeter for Dearborn considering GM promptly lost its second CEO in eight months.

Yet there’s another way of looking at where Ford currently stands, a viewpoint that throws away the rose-tinted spectacles. Ford is lauded in America because it has avoided the traps fallen into by Chrysler and GM. But is that enough to define success? As someone who has just spent the last year looking at Ford’s approach to sustainability, I should be well placed to do that.

One year ago, the company quietly opened its doors to us, two British researchers armed with video cameras, and said “go in, ask questions and poke a camera where cameras haven’t been poked before, let people see how Ford is changing”. They had no control over what we said - a potential PR rep's nightmare. Yet it was just one part of Ford’s strategy to communicate more openly, and be more social. Crucially, it also wanted to show the world it was going green – Ford was changing.

"Poking a camera in.." in this instance with Nancy Gioia and the Plug-in hybrid Escape

Standing up

So what’s changed? Last December, we found a company reeling from the fallout of the auto bailout debacle. Auto CEOs were just one rung down from bankers in the evil stakes, and many commentators had wrongly lumped Ford into the same boat as GM and Chrysler, saying it needed bailout money to survive. It didn’t, and wanted to let the world know, so then newly appointed head of social media, Scott Monty, spent the next few months contacting and correcting every blogger, analyst and media commentator on Ford’s position.

Come January’s Detroit Auto Show, the wind was changing direction. The Lincoln C concept proved Ford was in touch. A downsized, premium vehicle for Ford’s limping upmarket brand, based on a Focus platform, felt very of the time. More importantly, Ford’s self-titled “electrification” program got underway in the form of a Magna-built Focus Battery Electric Vehicle, and a commitment to build two electric vehicles (EVs), more hybrids and plug-in hybrids by 2012.

Ramming home the point about Ford’s seriousness was an actual car – one available to buy right now. The Fusion Hybrid could not only run fully electric up to 47mph, but it bested the Camry Hybrid’s EPA figures and wowed critics at how ‘right’ Ford had got the powertrain. It also featured a driver interface that in a nutshell encapsulated what the new Ford was about. Developed using ethnographic research techniques, in conjunction with Ideo and Smart Design, ‘Smartgauge’ was a reconfigurable, four-level coaching interface which helped drivers to ‘learn’ their Fusion Hybrid, ‘grow’ with it and become more efficient drivers over time. Developed by engineer Jeff Greenberg and his team using simulators in Ford's incredible ‘Virtex’ lab on its Dearborn campus, when we got to drive it, we thought it was proof Ford was truly going places on the eco front.

Mark Charmer 'driving' in Ford's Virtex lab simulator

Sitting down

Yet it’s a sign of how fast things are moving in the green car world, that today we no longer feel Ford is level pegging with the front runners. We know Ford possesses some world-beating engineers, who are developing things entirely cogent with what other car companies are doing, yet the company’s strategy feels conservative and the message isn’t clear.

In September, at Frankfurt, John Flemming pulled the covers off a euro-spec electric Focus and announced a trial fleet of 10 cars for the UK. Sadly, no one noticed because in the very next press conference, Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn stood up, said that the auto industry had until now been merely tinkering around the edges, pulled the covers off four Renault EVs which will all be on sale by 2012, and effectively bet Renault's future on electric cars. Meanwhile, BMW's quietly built 600 Mini Es already, GM’s letting anyone with two legs drive a prototype Volt, and come last week in LA, VW showcased not just another Up! variant – but one that will do 96mpg. What did Ford do? Launched a car we’ve been able to buy in Europe for 18 months…

Ford's strong corporate culture has shielded it from accepting reality. I sense that within the corridors of power in Dearborn, there’s a frustration and lack of understanding as to why people don’t see Ford as green, and why there doesn’t seem to be the same level of interest and excitement in Ford’s electric cars as there is in – for instance - GM’s Volt.

But having watched Ford and the wider industry through this period, it’s clear to me that one reason for this is that Ford’s proposed ‘clean’ vehicles don’t have the same design-led, risky, visionary, ‘exciting story’ elements to them as the current crop from GM, Renault or BMW. The electric Focus and Transit Connect simply look like regular Focuses and Transits. Compare that with BMW's Vision Efficient Dynamics, which is a design and materials–led radicalization of a future coupe. Or Renault’s Twizy – a small car/scooter cross which feels ideal for the world’s growing number of mega cities.

The BMW Vision Efficient Dynamics - an all together different look for the car

Indeed Ford's green future looks more conservative than GM’s Volt – which while nearly three years old, is a fundamentally different car to anything GM has produced before, and one which – thanks to the company's ‘troubles’ – has a bet-the-company, edge of the seat, ‘will they won’t they manage to make it’ PR story wrapped around it, which has the world gripped.

Don’t scare the neighbors

Part of the problem could be J Mays, Ford's global design chief. Asserting to me this summer that "I have this crazy notion that an electric car should look like, shock horror, a car" Mays' view that electric cars shouldn’t look weirdly different might be a major weakness. Of course, in times of economic uncertainty, and when consumer acceptance of cars with radical new powertrains is far from assured, this may turn out to be a safe and sensible approach.

Yet it is just that - safe. And I can’t help but say that if Ford really wants to go green, and have people believe it is green, then it has to stick out its neck. It needs a halo, a vision – a car and a story – that grips, wows and inspires people. Because I suggest to you that in the next five years, there will be more change and upheaval in the automotive world than there was in the past 100. And that those who dare most boldly, will be rewarded most handsomely – with long term profit.

There’s a strong sense of history and tradition at Ford. In recent times, that tradition – the Ford family tradition specifically – has provided the firm with a backbone to cope with the horror scenario that has engulfed the US car industry, leaving it as the only one of the big three not in bankruptcy. But that strength could stifle the company, too. Dearborn, Ford’s home, resembles a suburban estate, with still carefully trimmed gardens and a freshly painted fences. But beyond are derelict lots and empty streets.

Now ought to be Ford's moment to be truly inspired by its past. To look back to the man who started - and risked - it all, Henry Ford. Because Ford needs its Model T for the 21st Century. And it needs to remember what the great man said: “If I’d have asked people what they want, they’d have said faster horses”.

Joseph Simpson is a researcher at The Movement Design Bureau, a think tank.

Posted on the 7th December 2009. Full disclosure: Ford has sponsored The Movement Design Bureau's research in 2009.

The pitfalls of sustainability

 
An image from The Paper City exhibition and Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Miniumum...or Maximum Cities event at the University of Cambridge, which was organised with Blueprint magazine and the Paper Cities exhibition, which moved up to the famous university town having been at the Royal Academy for the past few months.

Tim Abrahams has produced an excellent write-up of the event over on the Blueprint site, which I’d urge you to check out if you’re interested, because I think he raises a series of important points about where we find ourselves in relation to the sustainability debate.

For some time now, Re*Move has proposed an agenda where sustainability was the context rather than an end in itself, and like Tim, alarm bells rang in Cambridge, because we were left with a feeling that the only reason anyone is doing anything today is in an attempt to be “more sustainable”. When it comes to movement and transportation, this approach of sustainability first is clearly causing problems, because it seems to be preventing us from envisioning and demanding the future that we actually want to have, and instead pushing us towards something influenced primarily by guilt over past excess.

For example, a lot of transport debate in the UK today centres around whether or not we should be building a high speed rail line to the north of England. Anyone who suggests this is a daft idea is right now likely to labeled both unprogressive and anti-sustainability . Yet anyone who dares suggest a third runway at Heathrow is a good idea, is obviously hell bent on seeing the planet rapidly burn.

Yet the pitfalls of high-speed 2 are multifold. We can already get from Manchester to London in two hours, so should we really prioritise spending billions on reducing this by half? And while it’s automatically assumed that getting the train is better from a carbon perspective, throw real-world load factors into the bargin, and the reality is that a modern, full Airbus is comparative. Meanwhile, the car (which has apparently lost its number one spot to the airplane, in the planet mauling stakes) has improved so much in the past five years that if you’re driving two-up in a Golf diesel, you’ll definitely produce less carbon than going on the train. For me, the biggest issue with High Speed 2 is that an idea which is fundamentally two-hundred years old seems to be stopping us from pushing the boundaries of imagination about what we might do instead, that would be palpably better.

So some of my talk at Cambridge bemoaned this sense that we’d got stuck with a handful of transport formats, and that – with cars and trains at least, they were monocultural. We’ve sized everything to fit them, and one of the reasons we aren’t all riding round on things like Segways in cities, is that cities are fundamentally designed, and sized, for people to use cars. This might sound like I’m suggesting we simply have to keep using cars – as they are - to get around cities. I’m not, but what I’m pointing out is the need for a systems level approach. Will you enjoy trundling up the A40 in a Renault Twizy? Or would you be altogether more tempted by the idea of La Regie’s concept scooter/car cross if you could zip up and down one of Chris Hardwicke’s Velo-City cycle tubes on your way to the office?

Sustainability is the context we now work in. And we’ve little doubt (and are very happy with the notion) that in 5-10 years time, our cities will all be full of things like electric cars. Which will be great for local emissions, but highlights the problem with today's short-sighted sustainability focus, as it won’t do anything to stop us from spending half of our lives sat in traffic jams.

If we simply focus on sustainability as our end point, we’re likely just to end up with a mildly de-carbonised version of what we have now. And the likelihood is that we won’t even achieve that, because when people know they’re saving carbon, they psychologically feel (and often financially are) able to do more and just end up ‘reusing’ what they’ve saved.

Sustainability has created a psychology of fear, where we fear to dream of real improvement and hesitate to think big. What do we mean by improvement? Things which work more quickly or get us places faster, thus providing us with more free time or time with our families and friends. Things that are measurably more fun, or more exciting to ride in or drive than what we have today. Things which cost us less money to use, own or run. Better means thinking about how we link up travel – so we might spend more time in one place and combine trips – rather than rushing from one short hop flight destination to another. Better might mean finding a way to link leisure and business travel together.

But better also means new. New ideas, new products, services and concepts. In essence, we need to dream, and be allowed to think big. If we think of the figures who created some of our totems of mobility – people like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Andre Citroen, Frank Whittle – we still admire and count on the inventions and contributions they made for our mobility backbone today. On Re*Move, we try to highlight and showcase the work of people we hope or think might become modern day IKBs or Whittles. But there are precious few of them around. I’d go as far to argue that the contributions and inventions made by these famous figures, would never have happened had they been around today, working in this world constrained by the fear of sustainability. We are not simply going to solve the predicament we are in by attempting cut, after cut, after cut. We are going to have to dream, and dream big.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 1st December 2009

Pranav Mistry at TED: the thrilling potential of sixth sense technology

Where will augmented reality (AR) - and the current crop of AR apps, eventually lead us? While many are sceptical about its benefit, surely AR's indicative of a push towards some form of hybridised digital/physical world? Pranav Mistry, in a recent TED talk (video above), provides perhaps the most convincing vision of where we may end up - with some frankly jaw-dropping technology demonstrations.

What's interesting about this 'sixth sense' idea though, is that rather than simply making you go 'oooh' at the tech, you can actually being to understand how this would be useful and valuable in real life - geniunely bringing the physical and digital worlds together.

Crucially (and unlike AR right now) it means that we don't face a future walking round looking through tiny screens either - which is encouraging. Suddenly, anything is a screen, but as Pranav suggests towards the end of the video, what's really interesting is that this potentially helps us to:

"get rid of the digital divide, but it helps us to stay human - and not just be machines, sitting in front of other machines".

Amen to that. Best of all though, Pranav plans to make the software to do this open source... watch this space. Things could get really interesting.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 23rd November 2009

Phones replacing infrastructure?

Something I'm currently thinking about. Could GPS-enabled, location aware mobile phones (which soon everyone will carry), help us to understand where things and people are, negating the need to build certain types of new infrastructure?

Auto parking? The new power seats?

I am not a technophobe, or a technological luddite. While not the most tech-sympathetic (witness how many computers and phones I’ve gone through in the last couple of years) I will typically give new tech, and geeky gadgets a fair crack of the whip. If they’re attached to a car, then all the better.

So give me ipod integration, navigation, cruise control and power seats. I’m up for them. I can even see the point in onboard fridges, TVs and the like. But I just don’t get auto parking, which has been around for a while now and have recently experienced first hand. I realise that might put me at odds with many who'll welcome this feature as a boon, but here's my take...

It was standard on the top of the line Prius that we tested last month, and Ford rolled it out as a feature in some of its 2010 MY cars starting back in the summer - even winning awards for it. As you can see from the video below – using the systems in action, they vary only in the minor details: Press button. Car identifies big enough space. Slot car into reverse. Car steers, you brake. Done. Parked.

They work well enough, up to a point. As the guy in the Ford video suggested, the system needs a space around 120% the length of the car to get in to. That’s my first problem. In a lot of spaces in the city, that’s too small. I reckon on about 6-8 inches either end of the car is what I need (and often, what you’ve got to play with in a typical London street). Secondly these systems take longer to slot the car in to the space than an adept human driver. That might seem a small detail, but in the city, you’re often on a street, blocking traffic and under pressure to park, and park fast.

I'm not trying to gloat about my parking prowess. Seeing these systems in action is impressive – has a ‘wow’ factor even. But fundamentally, they aren’t as good as a good human. For me, until that changes, then I’m not interested. They simply become another techy thing for car makers to sell as extras – just like they do sat navs, power seats and more powerful stereo systems. In a way, part of my problem is that they don’t go far enough.

Perhaps the next step on from these systems could offer something really useful. Link it – via the sat nav – to something like IBM's parking space sensors as part of a Smarter Cities programme – to help you actually find (and reserve) a vacant space. Then allow the car to completely take over – parking itself, controlling brake and throttle pedal. So the car really parks itself. You might even want to get out at the entrance of a parking lot, and let the car drive itself up three or four levels and slot into a tight space. Now that’s something I can see the value of.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 18th November 2009

"If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." *

* Henry Ford - upon the introduction of the Model T

Dan Sturges is a transport visionary. For twenty years he’s foreseen and been tackling some of the transport-related problems the rest of the world is only just starting to grapple with. Sturges isn’t anti-car. He is simply pro shaking up mobility full stop, and believes that far from just moving people in to electric cars, we need to introduce people to a variety of vehicles - ones that are the right size for each journey they make.

A couple of months back, I chatted to him over skype about his current thoughts on his company Intrago, the future of mobility, and what the auto industry is up to. You can see an edited highlight of that video below, and then after the jump I’ve pulled out and discussed what I think are the key points he made.

Toyota Prius - a photographic review

Rather than simply post a load of photos into a huge post here on the blog, I've uploaded some Prius photos, to form a photographic review which is hosted on my Flickr account. This set is fully captioned up, so do take a look through and feel free to comment. Click here to go to the set, or on the screengrab preview below:

All our photos, video and material is sharealike creative commons 3.0 licensed, so you can lift and reuse these images as you like. All we'd ask is that you link back to this site.

2010 Toyota Prius - positioning, hybrid system and interior design (on video)

Just before I took off on a recent holiday, a man from Toyota came to pick up a (by then) not so shiny, white, new shape Prius that he'd dropped with me the previous week. It's a sign of how much this car moves the game on from the previous generation vehicle that I was slightly sad to see it go.

We've not hidden the fact that we aren't huge fans of the previous generation car - both as a vehicle in its own right, the image that exists around it, or the generic 'type' of person who seems to drive it. We therefore went into this test with a decent level of scepticism. But the new car is in a different league to its predecessor. It's bigger, yet feels even more at home on city roads. It has a bigger petrol engine, yet is more economical. The thousands who will buy this car, especially those upgrading from the previous model, will doubtless be delighted. For the rest of us who weren't fans before, it's true to say that the Prius is now a competent car which makes a decent case in its own right - you no longer need to make excuses for its hybrid drivetrain nature.

You can read some previous musings I had while actually living with the car here and here, but a couple of weeks after it left MDB towers, three things stand out - and we've split them in to three short videos:

• The image and positioning of this new car - (includes our snapshot verdict)

• The hybrid system, how it works and its three different modes

• The car's interior design, features and equipment (and what we don't like)

For all that we were impressed with the new Prius though, we still can't get over one or two key issues and a few of the bigger picture questions it asks, rather than answers. We'll talk more about that next week in our post test wrap up and review - which will include a full details photoset.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 2nd November 2009

Mad Men won't save Ford

I'm sitting here tonight trying to make sense of Ford's belief that the Fiesta Movement campaign is an example of the kind of social media that will translate into a successful Ford.

Here's a picture of what it's all about. A video by Parris Harris and Yoga Army, aka Phashion Army.

Fiesta Movement is getting quite the PR push at Ford right now and it'll only get worse as the December LA show draws near, when the Fiesta is actually launched in the US. What's the product? A car that Ford designed in Europe several years ago and launched there in autumn 2008. It hasn't even gone on sale yet in the US - it'll be a 2011 model year car.

This quote from an awesome Clay Shirky article earlier this year (about newspapers but don't worry about that) says why this is flawed, better than I ever can:

"Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’'t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away."

The reality is that this is what's happening right now in much of the car industry. And I fear it's happening in Ford, too.

Fiesta Movement is an ad campaign - nothing more. The philosophy that ever more "sophisticated" marketing can solve problems. Web-savvy, video-producing creative people will transform Ford's brand image and reconnect it with a new generation. Meanwhile Ford, despite thinking it's had a terrible year, has had a lucky one. Both of its major US competitors have gone into bankruptcy. General Motors and Chrysler are probably fatally wounded.

Let's talk about real stuff - well electric cars, which aren't real yet, but will be soon. Even in a world short on EVs and high on rhetoric, Ford's current global 'electric' product range is weak - the company has one star car - the fantastic Fusion Hybrid - and a scattering of dated Escape and Mariner SUVs. The next generation? Ford has been hanging on the fence about which suppliers to use for a Focus EV – and unless there's a big surprise, we're still in limbo on that and much else as Ford insists the numbers don't add up. We're so, so far, from the car Ford really should build - an electric F150 truck. Parris and Yoga talk about Ford reconnecting with the American psyche. But Americans, beyond a few areas on East and West coasts, don't want small cars. Most of them don't even want cars. They want trucks.

But the guys who design trucks are seemingly sitting elsewhere right now, watching a football game. So cars is the only place where innovation is happening. As GM and Chrysler fade away, Ford's key competition in that zone is now global. And be in no doubt that the global competition is about to become truly formidable. Renault Nissan has the boldest strategy of all - we were there to see Renault blow everyone away at Frankfurt in September, with bold plans for four production pure-electric cars by 2011, and Nissan is deadly serious about its mainstream, mass-market Leaf, due in 2011, and undoubtedly the first global car that will shake the Prius out the tree it's got right now all to itself.

And that's just the start. Volkswagen is doing intriguing things with very efficient diesel vehicles, BMW's Efficient Dynamics strategy makes Ford's new EcoBoost petrol engines look pretty conservative. And that's before we talk about Honda, Toyota or anyone else.

I can't help but think that Ford will default to present Renault Nissan as the crazy radicals, imagining an unrealistic future. When the reality is Renault Nissan are the pragmatists, because they and others have the pieces in place to push ahead. They've forged partnerships with entire countries to roll out electric cars, while Ford is trialing 15 electric Focuses in Hillingdon in North London, and in patches around the US.

Right now Ford is not a global car company. It is a multinational car company - in fact the granddad of multinationals - with different product, management and marketing teams on different continents. And it thinks it can treat customers in different places in different ways. Imagine if Apple did that, fobbing off its American customers with a social media campaign, to launch a product it introduced in Europe over 12 months earlier. Advertising guys, dressing up social media as big change, would get nowhere. Customers would see through it right away.

"Imagine if Apple did that, fobbing off its American customers with a social media campaign, to launch a product it introduced in Europe over 12 months earlier."

Unless we get something better - unless we get genuinely great marketing - Ford faces slow decline. It's a long time since the ad guys alone could create a winning product.

Mark Charmer is founder of the Movement Design Bureau. Related reading:

The future of cars. Please? (December 2007)

Three New Shapes for Ford (April 2009)

Sue Cischke meet Dan Sturges. (April 2009)

Drew Smith on the car industry's failure to "do digital". (May 2009)

Ford showcases its electric future - in Hillingdon. Forgets to share it.

How do you feel about the idea of driving an EV? Fancy trying one out for a bit? Wondering what the range is like in the real world? Have you gone as far as to consider how the Jones's next door will perceive you when they see you've got one of those new-fangled battery cars on the drive?

If so, then now's your chance. As part of the UK Government's push to speed up adoption of low carbon vehicles, it has set up a 300 vehicle-strong trial through the Technology Strategy Board, to gain real world data and understanding on electric vehicles. Several auto makers, cities or boroughs, and power firms are taking part. Clusters of cars in specific geographic locations will form part of the trial over the next couple of years. Mini is already looking for potential users of its 'E' in Oxford and London, while Ford's fleet of 15 battery electric Focus's will be based in the London Borough of Hillingdon. Today the Borough announced it is officially looking for households and individuals who would like to be included in that trial.

So how's the trial going to work, and what's the point? This is the latest in a long line of announcements connected to Ford's electrification strategy, and a couple of weeks back at the Frankfurt auto show, we got the low down from Ford's manager for the UK trial, Tim Nicklin. What appears to have been missed by others, is that this small trial could have huge implications for both Ford and the wider EV landscape in Europe. That's because although we know that an electric version of the next Ford Focus will definitely be offered for sale in the USA, Ford of Europe have apparently not yet decided whether to offer it, and it seems that this trial will go some way to informing a decision as to whether it will or not. As the Focus has frequently been the UK's best selling car over the past ten years, and is normally in the top ten best sellers across all of Europe, the potential impact of such a decision is clearly huge. Over to Tim for more then...

15 vehicles is a very small number, but it's interesting to learn that these cars will in fact be cycled between housholds each quarter. Thus, over the planned two year trial period, the number of people who get exposure to them, looks likely to be somewhat higher than expected.

Clearly it's critical that - from a technical point of view - these cars are exposed to as many different drivers, driving styles, trips, loads and contexts as possible. Doing so should give manufacturers such as Ford a reasonable set of data to work from, and ultimately calculate real world range for these vehicles. That's a critical challenge when we talk about actually selling production versions of EVs to the average man in the street, because as Darryl Siry suggests, if manufacturers launch their vehicles with range claims that prove unrealistic in the real world, then it could have a massive adverse impact on a potential future market for EVs. If the first adopters see figures that are half what they were 'sold', they feel cheated, mislead, and tell their friends, who tell their friends and quickly you've got a situation where people don't trust range claims and potentially shun EVs.

Missing a trick with dated research methods?

Our real concern though, is that there appears to be over-emphasis on the technical side, and not enough talk about user experience research. Surely, a critical element of this trial ought to be open, ethnographic user research. Tim talks about user research from the point of view of clinics when we challenged him on this. As this is something that even old-school types in the auto industry are now starting to shun, that doesn't wash. If you put people in a room with others and ask them a bunch of questions, you'll get skewed results.

Instead, via modern tools such as user video diaries, blogs, photo blogs, tweets, video-based research, and ethnographic studies where researchers practically live with a family while they have the car, there would be a real opportunity to collect useful information about the very intangiable stuff that can't be captured via questionnaire or data logger.

Ultimately if more people are going to buy EVs, we need to understand how they feel, what their motivations are, their perceptions, reflections, likes and dislikes. There's an argument that with families who do get to use one of these Focus's for three months, we should be doing this before, during, and again after their time with the car. It comes down to understanding intangiables. It's hard to do, but ultimately, why people buy a particular car, what they think about it, and what it says about them - is often intangiable.

As a by-product, doing this research work openly, publishing it via the web and building communities around it could be used as a way to raise awareness, improve understanding and even generate greater public demand for EVs. Right now, the penetration of the web, use of social media, and cheap cost/fast speed of consumer video tools coupled with Youtube, means that this research could be published almost as it happens. Ford did it with Fiesta Movement. Why can't it do the same in Hillingdon?

The car industry has long conducted its research in secret, but it really shouldn't here. We aren't talking about why you'd buy a particular type of Ford instead of a particular type of VW. We're talking about an entire new power source, a new driving experience and an entire new eco-system around it. Right now, that entire eco-system is in its infancy and is fragile, and there's a clear danger that if car makers, politicians and the like, try to run before they can walk, then the whole thing may fall flat on its face due to confusion, lack of understanding and a general sense of miss-trust among the car buying public.

Ford, Scottish and Southern, the Technology Strategy Board, Hillingdon and all of the others involved in the similar trials across the UK need to get with the times and bring this stuff to life. A few families filling in questionnaires will be mere dust. It could be much much better.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 16th October 2009

Disclosue - Ford is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work through 2009.