Re*Move

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)

Fast charging EV batteries and the future of the fuel station

We're heading down a road where large numbers of cars will be powered by batteries in the future. Aside from the cost of batteries (dropping fast), the main reason for consumers to hesitate about jumping into an electric vehicle (EV) in the next few years, is range anxiety. We are not suddenly going to develop cars with batteries in them which will cover 500 miles on a charge, so how are we going to cover longer distance journeys?

The auto industry is (sensibly) proposing a solution which meets the average driver's needs about 95% of the time. You'll be able to drop the kids at school, get to work, and then home again via the shops all on one overnight charge, which you'll do either at or outside your home. But for road trips and non-average commuters, a host of new partner firms (and industries) claim to have a solution to the range problem. Best know of these is BetterPlace - who are developing an electric car charging network in several countries, and who will provide roadside swap stations in Israel and Japan within a couple of years, where you drive in and a depleted battery will be swapped - within two minutes - for a fully charged one.

But there's another solution which falls between the standard eight hour overnight charge, and the battery swap solution. It's known as the "fast charge" and it's a term which is being bandied about with increasing frippery. We've seen a section of the emerging EV industry (both start ups and established auto OEMs) change their tune about this. Back in 2007, no one had an answer to the problem of how to juice up the car's battery quickly if you ran out while on the go. Yet just two years later, here's the stock answer:

Finding meaning in Frankfurt - 2009 auto show review

What will the 2009 Frankfurt auto show be remembered for? While you’ve probably read it was all about electric cars, that misses the bigger story from the Messe show floor. This was the moment the auto industry got its mojo back.

Whether this sense of optimism is misplaced (especially when you take into account that scrappage schemes across Europe seem likely to end soon), only time will tell. For now, it serves as an antidote to the damp-squib of Geneva 2009, which was sorely needed.

Carlos Ghosn says "the time for change is now", introducing four Renault EV (or Z.E.) concepts

Back at the turn of the year, people like Renault-Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn were saying things like “I can’t even predict what’s going to happen next month, so don’t ask me about plans for 2010”. In Frankfurt, he assuredly hung Renault’s future on EVs, saying “the time to act is now” before unveiling four electric car concepts, and promising they’d all land by 2012. Whether consumers want them is now the 64 billion dollar question. Should the answer be a full-on no, Renault’s on a very slippery slope. If yes, its alliance with Nissan is extremely well positioned, backed up by its infrastructure partner, Better Place – who placed an order for 100,000 electric Renault’s on the first day of the show.

Alongside Renault’s offerings, BMW was a shoe in for car of the show with the Vision Efficient Dynamics concept. Pictures leaking out prior to the show’s opening didn’t diminish its impact in the flesh, and no-one has missed its relevance to the future of BMW’s M Performance division – previewing a future for high-performance cars in a carbon-constrained world. It’s a great halo car for the Efficient Dynamics campaign, too (which incidentally, is much smarter than the cheesy, over-arching new brand slogan, “Joy”).

BMW's Vision Efficient Dynamics concept, looked terrific from this angle

User research is in the detail: Ford Grand C-Max fold-away seat

What were your favourite details from cars in Frankfurt? The vents on the lower body sides of the VW L1 were far and away my personal highlight, until I looked more closely at the door handles on the Rolls Royce Ghost. But back in the real world, I was quietly impressed with the fold-away centre seat design in the Ford Grand C-Max, a car that otherwise leaves me quite cold. Aimed squarely at young families, I suspect it’s a design feature that will not only make people go ‘oooh’ in the autoshow or dealership, but that they’ll really use in day-to-day life - watch the video below to see a quick demo of how it works.

To say that the seating layout in family cars is important, is as obvious as saying that cars need wheels. But it’s easy to forget that, up until the age of about 20, many of us had difficult relationships with our siblings. Certainly, the idea of sharing a rear bench for several hours with my younger brother rarely filled me with joy, and there would often be a spat ensuing before we’d got beyond the end of the drive! So when the first Renault Scenic (the car that essentially created the c-size MPV segment in Europe) arrived, we’d pestered my dad into buying one within just a couple of months of its launch – mainly because we wanted separate, reclinable chairs, fold away picnic tables and cubbies to keep our own books and walkmen in (no iPods in those days). 

Ford Grand C-Max. Pity the name isn't as original as the folding chair design...

However, the price of all that independent rear chair malarkey was that to fold and remove them was quite a job (I seem to remember reading each chair weighed something like 15kg.) – folding and removing them usually resulting in skinned knuckles. So when Opel moved the game on with the seven-seat Zafira, it invented a very neat seating arrangement termed ‘flex-7’ which meant you could convert the vehicle into a van, without needing to take out all the chairs and leave them at home.

Access to that rearmost row of seats in the 7-seat MPV sector remains something of an issue, however. In the smaller, c-segment market that the Grand C-Max enters, the rearmost pews are only really big enough for kids. Yet to get there, they need (and this applies to most vehicles in the Segment such as the Scenic, Verso etc) to tilt and slide the outermost centre row seat forwards to access the rearmost row. Given that the chairs tend to be heavy, and the strength needed to operate the lever mechanisms which tilt the chairs, this isn’t an ideal arrangement when small people with tiny fingers are typically the ones trying to scramble into the back.

Now you see it...

...and now you don't

In fact, it's quite rare that seven full seats are used in these cars, typically it’s just five or six on the school run. So by allowing the middle row centre seat to be ‘disappeared’ into one of its neighbours, small kids can just walk straight through the vehicle to the back row without needing to get mum or dad to perform chair gymnastics. Ford have spent time designing a centre chair which makes all this possible. As the back tumbles forwards onto the squab, a secondary part of the backrest folds in, allowing the seat to be compact enough to fit inside the outer seat squab. The second device which allows this arrangement to work – and a critical change from the designs found in the opposition, is that instead of being secured to the floor, this centre seat is in fact supported by cantilevering off the outer chair. Once folded away, what’s left is a clear gangway between the two outer seats, allowing kids to simply climb in and walk through to the rearmost row.

It’s one of those ideas that gets you thinking ‘why didn’t anyone think of this before?’ But is a neat, if small, example of user-research led design, where actually observing how families use cars and spending time with them as they go about their lives has resulted in something genuinely useful and new. It’s amusing to hear, too, that Ford’s engineering and design teams aren’t above playing with Lego Technic in order to help them work out how the mechanism would work. We wonder if it was spending time observing kids that gave them that idea too.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 22nd September 2009

Disclosure: Ford is sponsoring the Movement Design Bureau's research work in 2009

Videos a go-go: Frankfurt auto show 2009 concept car videos

There was a huge amount to see in Frankfurt, so if you're pushed for time and want the quick whizz-around check out my "Frankfurt in Four minutes" review video. However, on the off-chance that you missed some of the concepts or want to have a (slightly) longer look, I've clipped out some 2-minute long videos for a few of the key concepts. So, without further ado, here's the:

BMW efficient Dynmaics Concept:

Renault Twizy:

Citroen ReVolte:

Renault Zoe and the 'ZE' range video:

As with the four minute video, you can watch most of these in HD mode, so it's worth clicking through to Youtube (logo in bottom right corner) and then clicking on high quality mode if you want them to see them in full, clear view. We'll have more thoughts and a bit of indepth coverage on some of these, plus more Frankfurt coverage, shortly.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 18th September 2009

Pictures-a-plenty: Frankfurt auto show 2009 photoset

Just over one hundred images of the car, people, details and things that caught my eye during the first three days of the 2009 IAA Frankfurt auto show. Click anywhere on the photo to head through to the set in Flickr and then into individual photos. I've added notes and thoughts to photos where they seemed appropriate. Enjoy, and remember these are creative commons licensed, so you're welcome to reuse them as you please:

Frankfurt in four minutes - IAA 2009 review video

Frankfurt auto show is so huge that, even having spent three days there, it's hard to cover everything that's in the halls of the Messe. So here's a fairly personalised view of the 2009 Frankfurt auto show, edited into just four minutes. There are things in here that will doubtless seem strange to you, and there are plenty of interesting things missing - simply becasue I didn't get time to video them, but hopefully you'll enjoy and get a flavour of what it was like to be there. Note, if you click through and run this in Youtube, you can watch it in HD too.

Just in case you watched it and are intrigued as to what certain things are, then in rough order from the top that was:

BMW's Vision Efficient Dynamics concept, The Mercedes Gullwing (nee SLS), the original Smart concept from 1994, Aston's Rapide, Ford of Europe's CEO John Fleming, Renault Nissan CEO Carlos Gohsn, the Renault Twizy, Joe Paluska of Better Place, Better Place's battery swap system, Mini's (loud) birthday celebrations, details of various cars  and concepts - BMW, Citroen, Renault, Aston, the fold away seat in the Ford Grand C-Max, Mark getting annoyed at being filmed, Stefan Lamm - Ford of Europe's exterior design director, talking about touch screen HMI influences, BMW's touch screen concept Apps store, the HMI in the Hyundai iX Metro concept, and finally Drew Smith enjoying saving the environment...

More video and thoughts from Frankfurt are on their way. Check back soon...

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 18th September 2009

Hitting the floor in Frankfurt - IAA 2009

Just before we hit the Frankfurt show floor, Mark asked Joe about what his expectations were for the Frankfurt motorshow. Let's see if these pereceptions change over the next couple of days...

Posted by Joseph Simpson from the Frankfurt show floor on 15th September 2009

Follow us in Frankfurt - IAA 2009 on Re*Move

The Re*Move team decamps to Frankfurt this week, as we’re covering the International Auto show (IAA) which starts tomorrow. So that you don’t have to blister your feet, we’ll be trudging round the messe’s vast halls – covering the important announcement and vehicle launches, asking the tricky questions and generally shoving cameras where others tend not to shove them.

Primarily, we’re there as part of our ongoing work with Ford – and we’ll be looking closely to see whether there’s been any progress with Ford’s electrification strategy. We’ll also be closely examining the new C-Max, a European c-segment MPV, but one which signifies the look of the new Focus family, a car which will be launched in all of Ford’s major markets including North America.

Ford Grand C-Max images leaked out last week...previews direction of world Focus

Elsewhere, we’re itching to find out what Renault’s four (yes, four) EVs look and feel like, and will be paying particularly close attention to the tiniest member of the quartet you see in this plan-view picture. Has La Regie seen the value in the personal-mobility future city market? And is it going after BMW’s project i and Toyota’s i-Series vehicles? We’ll find out.

Renault's four EVs for Frankfurt, from the top. We're most interested in the far left...

Sticking with the Renault connection, we’ll also be talking to the team from Better Place to find out how their electric car-charging network and battery swap-station plans are progressing. We’re also keen to learn more about BMW’s Vision Efficient Dynamics concept. It’s important because it’s positioning green technology, and green branding as a flagship idea which is synonymous with premium. BMW’s efficient dynamics programme has impressed us in the past, but it’s decision to make Project I vehicles a premium sell, and its recently launched ‘Joy’ brand campaign have left us flat. Where does Vision ED fit in?

Aside from that, we’re keen to field questions from the watching world. If there’s anything that’s bugging you in terms of news coming from the show, anyone you want us to try and grab, or something you’re particularly interested in, get in touch – and we’ll do our best to cover it.

Don’t forget all Re*Move material is creative commons licensed, so you can reuse and incorporate our words, photos and videos in your own publications. And if you want the intravenous feed of info, follow our twitter streams - @JoeSimpson and @Charmermrk (we’d also recommend @Drewpasmith, @carnorama, @ericgallina and @skymotoring if you’re watching on twitter), and we’re using the hashtag #IAATweetup along the way on twitter, and for our alternative designer/after show party on Tuesday night, which - we should point out - if you're in town, you don't need a VIP invite to get in to.... Here on Re*Move, all the material will be tagged Frankfurt. So sit back, stay tuned, and do feel free to comment or connect and ask us about what's going on. Tshuss!

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 14th September 2009, Frankfurt Messe picture - Mattingham on Flickr, Ford C-max - Ford, Renault EV - Renault (via autoblog)

DownsideUpDesign reviews E-class: concludes "it's got a muffin top"

The E-class. It symbolises everything at the core of the Mercedes brand. The latest model, 'soft launched' at the Detroit Auto Show earlier this year, then properly unveiled together with its coupe twin in Geneva, is hugely important for the three-pointed star, and is it's most technologically advanced iteration ever. Its design, however, has been something of a moot point up until now. But having spent some time with the car recently, DownsideupDesigner - Drew Smith, gave the car a thorough once over from a design perspective. His thoughts are well worth reading... over to Drew...

Posted by Mark Charmer on 26th May 2009

Original Post on DownsideUpDesign - "E is for "Eh"?"