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.
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?
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
It'd be stupid to suggest that more efficient, cleaner cars are a bad thing. Surely, getting to a point where cars produce little or zero emissions, and use no oil, would be a good thing - right?
To me, the biggest and most useful role the Prius plays today, is in acting as a technological stepping stone from where we are now, to where we're going to go in the future. It introduces the notion of a car being powered, and driving, differently to what many of us are used to, while still operating in a way we can understand and not looking so odd as to spook people out about our automotive future...
But last night, one unintended consequence of a future with zero-emission cars struck me right between the eyes. Allow me to explain. My own car sits outside the house most of the week, largely because I'm quite dictatorial about it not being used for short, local trips. Pick-ups at the station, shopping in Kingston, popping to the corner shop or supermarket - these aren't jobs for the internal combustion engine, they're jobs for my legs.
Yet at 8 o'clock last night, halfway through a Nigel Slater Japanese noodle recipe, I suddenly realised we didn't have a critical ingredient - the noodles. Normally at this point (besides swearing a lot), I'd have given up and cooked something else, or run half a mile up the road to Waitrose to get some. Yet, with a Prius parked outside, I didn't hesitate to jump in and glide up to said Supermarket, because hey, going in the car certainly was quicker than walking, and this was a hybrid car, so I could do most of the trip in electric mode and hence without guilt or emissions.
The issue this causes - potentially - is that we reach a point sometime in the future, where people stop thinking about the most appropriate mode of transport for a trip, and simply use their car regardless. I may be wrong, but today I think a healthy proportion of people now think about whether their car is the best vehicle to use for a very short local trip. I suspect two primary factors in this are cost and environmental concerns. But if we remove these two factors (which hybrid or electric cars potentially do) the unintended consequences are clear to see - worse traffic, more parking issues, all the usual stuff bandied about by the anti-car brigade. I'm treading a tricky line here. I'm not suggesting the Prius and the green car movement many credit it with creating is a bad thing, or that we should attempt to stop it. Lower carbon, less guilt car travel is largely a good thing. Yet I can't help wondering if we're asking the wrong question when it comes to urban travel. Electric cars are now seen as a panacea. But we should be wary, particularly about the impact on urban environments - of a future where we're using what is still a 1400kg, 10 square metre sized device to move one 80kg human a mile down the road.
Oh, and perhaps because of this type of driving behaviour, our average fuel economy has now fallen to 52mpg. Food for thought.
Toyota have lent us a new Prius for the week. Regular readers may remember that the last time we were in LA, we rented Toyota's ubiquitous hybrid for a few days, and came away somewhat unimpressed. We ended that piece by saying this:
"The final irony? For all its technical wonder, at the end of our trip
the Prius came out with an average of around 45.5mpg. Which is 5 mpg
short of the diesel Fiat Punto I use on the clogged streets of London."
But now there's a new Prius on the block. Toyota have moved the styling away from the dumpy, but highly identifiable shape of the second generation car, to something that is more crisply styled, and for want of a better word, 'dynamic' looking. The new car also agressively attempts to shut up those of us who've never been great hybrid fans, and who've long thought a good turbo diesel would be its fuel economy equal. The headline figure is 89g/km of Co2, and 72.4 mpg.
We'll run a regular blog/update over the week with our views on the car, but for now, first impressions are very favourable. The Prius is incredibly quiet - its new three way EV, Eco and PWR modes meaning you can switch the car's character quite decisively. In EV it will run electrically, up to 30mph for a couple of miles. Which means in stop start London traffic you barely have the motor kick in at all. In PWR, it's actually quite sprightly and responsive. Most impressive is that in 15 miles of chock-a-block London traffic, and without 'trying', we're getting 65.5mpg so far.
Wonder if we can keep that up over a week...
Check back for more soon. Right now, I have to dash and pick up my fiance, who demanded to be picked up in it from work once she heard I was in central London with it. A self proclaimed hybrid-hater, it'll be interesting to see if she's impressed as I am on first acquaintences. Oh and if you've any questions or things you'd like us to test, leave a comment or drop us a line.
