Re*Move

Goodbye SAAB

We're not going to act like it is a surprise, but we're still shedding a tear or two this afternoon after confirmation from GM that it is to shut its Swedish sub-division SAAB. After years of new product starvation and the collapse of talks with Koenigsegg and now Spyker, the brand from Trollhattan - beloved of sensible professionals the land over - will shortly close its doors.

The death of SAAB saddens me in a way that - I'm sorry to say - the demise of MG Rover didn't. I can't entirely put my finger on why, but perhaps it's a personal thing. My piano tutor throughout my formative years had a fabulous green 900 that I regularly used to ride in. I've known many architects who drove, and raved about, SAABs. Sarah's dad used to have a 9000 as a company car, and her mum runs a current generation 9-3 convertible, which to me is much cooler than its competitors from BMW, Audi or Merc, even if by any objective measure it's somehow 'less good'.

How it's come to this is well documented, and not worth raking over again - but what happened is a good example of why mergers and takeovers can be a bad thing. Prior to GM's investment, SAAB made sub-cool, idiosyncratic cars, which while rarely regarded as class leaders, were at least different. The aforementioned 900 run by my piano teach was bought in 1990 - largely thanks to it having a vast boot, needed for transporting her husband's paintings across Europe to their native Hungary for exhibitions. Back then - to the 9 year old me - a car whose ignition barrel was on the transmission tunnel, which wouldn't let you turn the car off unless you locked it in reverse, and which had a turbo boost gauge, was the height of excitement. 

A real SAAB - in Detroit. Oh the irony.

It's testament to what SAABs were then that she still drives that very car to this day, and that as far as I know it's still running as sweet as a nut. Its qualities - safety, solidity, spaciousness, ergonomic intelligence and an image that was resolutely different to BMW, Mercedes or Volvo, was what attracted so many of the professional classes to the brand. Nice, smart people - doctors, architects and teachers, drove SAABs. In my view, it's to GM's eternal shame that they couldn't capitalise on this. They kept the looks, the funny ignition barrel and the good dashboard ergonomic, but started basing the cars on platforms that were far from in their first flushes of youth. The 90s 900 based on the 80s Vauxhall Cavalier/Opel Vectra being the classic example. That was fine for a while; the people who bought SAABs weren't bothered.

Yet the upper echelons of the car industry were changing, and GM starved SAAB of the ability to keep up. While GM were completely failing to get the appeal of SAAB to a predominantly European buyer, BMW and Mercedes were inventing and filling niches left right and centre, that were changing those buyer's perspectives. What they did was create demand among those very classes who once-upon-a-time had driven SAABs, for small premium hatches (1 series, A-class), SUVs (X5, X3, ML) and small lifestyle wagons (3, 5, C, E, A4, A6). Worse still for SAAB, while GM was dithering, Audi hauled itself out of VW's shadow, and turned itself into a premium brand that (until very recently) became what you bought if you wouldn't be seen dead in a Beemer or Merc. All the nice, design-aware people were suddenly driving Audis.

By the time GM admitted defeat, the 9-5, once the mainstay of SAAB's range, was 13 years old, and had acquired a pair of bizarre Dame-Edna Everage spectacles on its snout. Find another mainstream car in the industry that's anywhere near that age and I'll eat my hat. Its age alone sums up where GM went wrong. But there was so much more. The new 9-5 - reputedly signed off years ago, still isn't here - and probably never will be (at least as a SAAB). It was still running around Millbrook proving ground on final validation tests when I was there in September. A great shame, because even though the new 9-5 was unlikely to ever be a 5 series-beater, it was an impressive enough car, which priced right, might have hit its target quite well. Combine that with the fact that Anthony Lo and team in Russelsheim had knocked out some fantastic-looking, authentically SAAB-feeling concepts over the past few years, and one starts to think that had GM only had big enough balls and deep enough pockets, the story might have been very different.

In the cold light of day, SAAB clearly no longer stacks up. Sales are too low, and it's a European niche brand. The American's never really got it - certainly not well enough to own it - and GM needs to save money. So shutting SAAB is the only thing it can reasonably do now.

But stop for a minute and consider these things. The topic du jour in the car world (actually, with Copenhagen, just make that the world - full stop) is green issues. SAAB, thanks to its Swedish roots and early implementation of things like catalytic converters, has long been thought of as a green, clean brand. So when everyone else is busy inventing new faux green 'sub-brands', GM is busy killing a fully authentic one. Smart.

Continuing on the green theme, if we look to current and future gasoline engine technologies, today's talk is largely about turbo-charging. Ask anyone in the industry which company is synonymous with the word 'turbo charging', and I guarantee they'll give you one answer: SAAB. SAAB practically invented the technology, it has for years used it on its cars, and I think I'm right in saying every car it currently sells is turbo-charged. So just when you want to talk turbos, and how you’ve years of knowledge and history building them, you go and kill the world's most famous turbo-charged brand. Welcome to the world of GM.

Finally, design. In an era when people will pay - frankly - silly prices for an Arne Jacobson chair or table, and have more design ‘literacy’ than ever, Swedish design ought to be a major selling point. SAAB's design foundations, and design language feels apt for our times. Retrained, sophisticated, clean, pure, and non-showy. There's depth in SAAB's design too. The seats in SAAB's cars have long been regarded as some of the best in the industry, and to this day are still paragons of ergonomic comfort. Likewise the dashboard. Everything is ergonomically right, and falls to hand. And if you've ever been to a motorshow on press day, you'll usually find us folks from Car Design News down the SAAB stand, bathing in the cool white lighting and Swedish chairs, partaking in the best lunches and cappuccinos at the show. Cars like the Aero-X concept show that there are people working for SAAB/Opel who understand what good, Swedish, SAAB design is about too, and how it could be used as a selling point. And I haven’t even touched on safety. Yet now it’s all academic. 

The 9-X concept. Which people like me would have automatically bought ahead of the default Audi A3

In years to come, books will doubtless be written about bad management, which will use GM's handling of SAAB as case studies in how things shouldn't be done. Such thoughts make us sad, so we'd prefer to remember some happier things about SAAB. Stig Blomqvist flying through a rally stage in a SAAB 99 Turbo, the comedic torque-steering power of various Viggen models, the theatre of the Aero-X concept’s lifting cockpit canopy, and lazy summer afternoons, wind-in-the-hair in the back of a top-down 9-3 convertible. They might not have been perfect, but SAABs had this way of making you feel deeply secure, happy and content. In a world where so much is changing, and so much is uncertain, we still think there’s room for that kind of car. It's just a pity that GM never saw it. So goodbye SAAB, you will be missed.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 18th December 2009

Related reading: 

On Saab's Passing (by Ben Kraal, on his blog).

Report from Detroit: We Bear Witness (Firebird Man).

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)

Futurama

I was speaking yesterday at Burning Rubber, a LowCarbonSouthWest event.

Southwest England is Britain's first official UK "low carbon development zone". The region has an amazing technology legacy - think Roman Baths, Georgian Cities, Brunel, SS Great Britain, Concorde. It's got great coastline, a strong surf culture, hilly, beautiful cities and green icons like The Eden Project. It's also the part of Britain most closely linked to the idea of the permanent traveller - the South West is Britain's leading hippie region. If it had good, flexible flows of investment capital and more inward and outward migration I'd almost call it Britain's California.

I argued to the audience that while the car industry is working out how to replace combustion engines with electric motors and batteries, it's worth asking whether in twenty or thirty years' time it's what we'll need. Are they simply servicing a declining market, while something else altogether different happens outside the window? Rather than being about electric powertrains, could the real answers be related to something else - how we live and work?

The dangers of designing for a false future

The writer Hamish McRae once told me (in the Hole in the Wall pub in Waterloo) that "the future of how we move is entirely connected to the future of how we work", and his thought has shaped my thinking ever since. Those British and French engineers built Concorde for politicans concerned with national prestige and jobs, and for airlines who where, in the early 1960s (Concorde was launched in November 1962), in the middle of a jet-age boom fuelled by postwar technology and wealth. This had seen tremendous wartime advances in aircraft design and propulsion take us on an incredible performance curve from 1940 through 1960. For context, remember that Concorde was only launched four years after the first transatlantic jet services were launched in 1958 between London and New York. It seemed reasonable back then to believe that speed would dominate as business people would want to be in London for a meeting in the morning and then an evening reception in New York.

Of course, aviation's development curve took on a different path. Instead of getting ever faster flights for an elite, minority "jet set", the 1973 oil shock and the flight of creative engineering talent in the early 70s from mechanical to information technology meant supersonic became a step too far. The reality of work and leisure took over and the world embraced flights for the masses. In the 1960s, airliners replaced ocean liners and airports supplanted seaports (Britain effectively moved its main passenger ports from Southampton and Liverpool to Heathrow) and subsonic airliners went on to redefine flows of migration and underpin and expand globalisation through the '70s, '80s and '90s. Boeing, while getting government funds to develop an SST, cannily developed the 747 as an insurance policy. Pioneers like Juan Trippe (who led Pan Am and is why we have the 747) eventually moved over and people like Freddie Laker and then Herb Kelleher, Richard Branson, Stelios and Michael O'Leary created today's air travel reality. Today we have incredibly low cost flights for the masses supporting migration, everyday business travel and leisure (unfortunately all still powered by 1960s-era engine designs).

Norman Belle Geddes and the 1939 New York Expo

I remind you of the above for context - about how technologies and visions developed in one era often only really create massive change in another one - and how some distract and others define what comes next. Which brings me back to cars, home and work. Today, the majority of people outside the centre of cities live a lifestyle that was first showcased at Futurama, the General Motors' pavilion at the 1939 New York Expo. Americans (and everyone else) were dazzled by designer Norman Belle Geddes's vision that people would live in communities linked to highways, using their own fantastic vehicles to flow smoothly and comfortably from one place to another. We would finally face the death of distance.

Lots of people and businesses loved Futurama. It helped the car industry find a way forward from a Fordist world of slightly dull, standardised mass-made cars, and it influenced the entire world's concept of what urban development should be. The economics of vehicle manufacturing could scale to meet it, property developers loved it, and it suited employers who could access a bigger workforce pool, all addicted (often through debt on car and house finance) to perpetuate the lifestyle. Yet the reality of the cost and blight of the resulting highway infrastructure, congestion, high energy costs, pollution, and the enduring draw of dense, sociable old pre-1940s cities undermined Futurama in fundamental ways.

So in 2009, 70 years on, with General Motors just bankrupt and great tracts of suburban America covered in unwanted repossessed, stripped out McMansions, are we facing the end of Futurama as a blueprint? Has it literally stopped being sustainable?

Hamish McRae's wife is Frances Cairncross. She wrote a book in 1997 called "The Death of Distance". Written 12 years ago, that's as good a place as any to start working out what comes next. It explores how the communications revolution - the internet and mobile phones - will change our understanding of, and response to, distance.

And perhaps the ultimate irony here? Norman Belle Geddes, architect of Futurama, was the father of Barbara Belle Geddes. Some of you will remember that Barbara played Miss Ellie, the epicentre of the Ewing family, in the 1980s TV series Dallas. The one all about the excesses and lure of '80s capitalism, and the power of American oil.

It's ok. My head hurts too.

Mark Charmer is founder and managing director of The Movement Design Bureau. Images: Futurama exhibition. Source - Wikimedia Commons Update. I added Southampton as a key passenger port. Northern bias, overcome. 19/1/10

Does the car industry now get it... whatever 'it' is?

The past few weeks have seen a flurry of activities by the car companies, and their design and marketing departments, to take social media to another level and exploit its potential usefulness for designing and selling future vehicles.

First came GM with its LAB. GM has been in the social media auto world for a long time, but the Lab was a new way to test the waters with some of its more 'skunkworks' projects – such as the 'bare necessity' car and truck concepts, which you can see more of here.  What's interesting is that it gives designers, who remain - to quote Roland Barthes (yet again) "unknown artists" who are creating the "gothic cathedrals of our era" a window out into the world, and respectively, one back in to them. The videos are over-produced and slightly inauthentic feeling (the hands of a slightly nervous PR team are all over them), yet the Lab presents a platform, which, outside of the razzmatazz of the auto show, might be one of the only ways for a team to test an idea, and open up a dialogue about what they're doing, outside of the company.

The power of social in this respect seems to be growing - with the web going all-a-chatter just a couple of weeks back, when GM canned a proposed SUV, apparently in part, due to adverse responses on twitter.

GM's bare necessities car, showcased with its LAB platform

Next comes Fiat, downsideupdesign drawing our attention to their 'Mio' project, which is openly 'collecting' user research via the web, as part of the early process for developing a young person’s car, which will be showcased at a forthcoming Sao Paulo auto show. The interesting bit is that Fiat is going to openly publish all of the information it collects, licensing it under creative commons. Why interesting? Because it represents a u-turn in an industry famed for its secretive research and development processes. Furthermore, it means that others can not only reference and use the research in their projects, but critique and analyse the information, and the way Fiat use and interpret it.

While at first glance what's interesting about all of this is that it simply provides greater volumes of available raw data, what'll really be interesting is following the creative process of how Fiat translates this into something physical, and - in particular - how their reading of the data differs from that of other (outside) observers.

I'll come back to that in a minute, but it's worth mentioning the third project in this arena right now, which is Audi's (facebook log in required). As part of the development process for the LA design challenge, Audi is asking users on its facebook fan page for their input to the development of its entry to this year’s competition, which sees the car design studios of Southern California competing to design a youth-orientated car for 2030. This will only exist in 2D form, and is traditionally a place where we see designers experiment with the sublime and the ridiculous. As such, this is a low-risk, semi-serious dipping of its toes into the shark-infested waters of social media for Audi. It does signal though, that crowd-sourced ideas, and social media research could play some part in future car developments and marketing campaigns.

Audi design video from its Facebook / LA design challenge page

So what? I hear you ask about all of this. Well, let’s get the positives out of the way first. The auto industry is repeatedly accused of lagging behind other sectors when it comes to getting on new bandwagons. No such worries with social media - the train has left the station, auto industry onboard (for once). Secondly, it’s one of the simplest, fastest, most high-profile ways for an industry which has been repeatedly accused of ‘not listening’ to customers, to actually engage them and show it’s interested in their view.  

The question is, does all this mean that the auto industry now ‘gets it’? Is this a way of acknowledging the development processes needs to change, that it needs to listen more, open up, and that user-based design and research has much to offer?

I’m honestly not sure. On one hand, thinking and attitudes – in some companies – is clearly changing. On the other, using social media platforms for data collection and user research is a complete no brainer – and is becoming a prerequisite of proving that you’re a contemporary company.

But the ‘is it marketing bullshit’ or ‘is it genuine new engagement’ argument actually misses the point. Because simply having conversations, running competitions, asking for input and conducting user research online is only the first stepping-stone, and arguably not the most important. What’s missing today is the bridge between talking to customers and collecting information from them, and when the designer first picks up his or her pencil in anger. At the moment, the bridge between these two places is called 'marketing', but it has oft proved inadequate at helping deliver products people want, or in helping companies successfully innovate. In my view, there’s a clear role being created, which exists between the data collection point (be that online or in the real world), and the marketing and design teams. An ‘auto analyst’ if you will – whose critical skills are three-fold

• Being able to ask the consumer the right questions in the first place
• Analysing the data, digging deeper than the raw numbers, and testing the conclusions that these new types of research – or indeed other existing methods – lead to

• Translating the findings of research and user engagement into meaningful insight, which marketing and design teams understand and can work together around.

At the moment, social media-based user research in the auto industry is in danger of just becoming 'the next big thing' - jumped on by marketing teams as something new and radical, that they’ve got to have in order to look contemporary, but which ultimately is being treating as just another marketing method. Left like this, the results of these – often worthwhile and interesting - new means of research and engagement seem destined to be the subject of the same frowning and eye-rolling from the designer, engineering and planning teams who are ultimately charged with designing the ‘fallout’, that exists in the industry today. 

Related reading:

User research on the Ford Fiesta - the view from real life Antonellas

Drew Smith on the car industry's failure to do digital

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 1st September 2009. Hat-tip to Drew Smith at Downsideupdesign for sparking the train of thought that led me to this

Images: Joe Simpson and Drew Smith talk future auto in London - June 2009 (Mark Charmer); GM bare necessities car (GM), Audi video (Audi)

Bill Ford - man on a mission, man with a vision?

Bill Ford with his great grandfather's most famous creation

Bill Ford is a man on a mission. He’s currently championing the idea of raising gas taxes, something that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable for a car company boss to say. But we live in changed times. Chrysler is in bankruptcy protection, with GM perhaps shortly to follow, but Ford's balance sheet isn’t entirely rosy either with a net loss of $1.4Bn in the last quarter, and sales off 30 percent.  Scarier still, Porsche (most profitable car company in the world by reputation, trying to swallow – now merge with, VW) reportedly came close to bankruptcy for three days in March (schadenfreude anyone?). 

So why does Bill Ford think these are exciting times to be in the auto industry? Because what he has talked about for years – big and scary stuff, namely change – is now happening. Bill (Ford) is the guy who set Ford (Motor Company) on the path towards a more sustainable future. Doing things like hiring 'eco architect' William McDonough to rebuild the Rouge site was the start. He oversaw the hiring of Alan Mulally as CEO – a man from outside the auto industry, who had overseen the most radical restructuring of an industry’s development process (Boeing) that had been seen for 50 years. And now, the assembled team at Ford are bringing you the all-conquering Fiesta, a Fusion hybrid which out hybrids the Japanese, a real Taurus and the next euro-Focus, which you just know is going to be top of its class. Ford has a line of products people want. What it’s done, doing and thinking about is strong enough to get hard-bitten journalists like Jean Jennings – editor-in-chief of Automobile Magazine – talking about the firm like this:

But more than that – signs are even there that Ford’s daring to stick its head up above the gun turret and have a think about scary future concepts like car sharing, high-speed rail and mega cities. To which we say: get on with it guys!

The mood of optimism in Dearborn is palpable, but Ford must be careful not to appear smug. It is likely to benefit from the current difficulties its neighbours from across town are experiencing. Spend some time online and you might have noticed the brand throwing its weight around too. Ford recently ranked first among automotive brands in terms of Internet buzz. That’s thanks to campaigns like Fiesta Movement; and people like Scott Monty – who you’ll find here, there and everywhere in the world of automotive social media; not to mention them letting some weird guys from the UK in to interview top Sustainability and Design brass.

Ford's innovative 'Smartgauge' display screen debuted in the Fusion Hybrid - which Jean Jennings talks about in the video above

The path ahead is fraught with pitfalls. Having supported auto bailouts until now, John Fleming – Ford of Europe’s chairman – became a dissenting voice last week, suggesting that nationalistic bailouts to Europe’s other car makers (think French) were putting the company’s European arm at a competitive disadvantage. What’s more, few are convinced Americans want small cars, and building hybrid and electric vehicles is hellishly expensive. Compounding this is that if gas stays sub $2/gallon, no one’s buying small, and no one’s buying eco – which could prove problematic. No wonder Bill wants increased gas taxes. And while Ford and Toyota pursue ‘top-up’ plug in hybrids and pure electric vehicles, the Chevy Volt might still prove to be the ideal third way. Ford has a five-powertrain future strategy, covering petrol, diesel, hybrid, plug-in and pure EV - which tries to cover all possible bases - but it’s going to be hugely expensive to develop all of them well, especially considering uber-stringent diesel emission regulations, and the fact that you need different cell chemistries for hybrids, plug-ins and pure ev batteries.

One ace up Ford’s sleeve? Electric delivery. We launched our project on this last week, because we think it’s one of the biggest ‘win’ areas in transportation today. While everyone gets hung up on moving people around, it’s goods logistics and delivery which presents arguably a bigger problem – and a greater opportunity - right now. Clearly someone at Ford has realised this, and the electric version of the Transit Connect delivery truck will be arriving shortly, and we’ll be following it every step of the way to launch and beyond.

Risky Ford’s path may be, but the auto industry’s going to hell in a hand-cart right now, so someone has to stick their neck out. Bill Ford appears to have got a taste for doing that, which is why he’s enjoying the ride.  He clearly recognises the need for industry and regulators to work together, and understands the benefit in Ford sharing some of what it’s learnt so far (green roofed factories) and sharing risk in tomorrow's future strategies (city and electric power company partnerships). So 101 years after his great grandfather pretty much invented the auto industry, could Bill Ford re-emerge as ambassador and mouth piece for not only Ford - but the wider industry's future? Stranger things have happened.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 26th May 2009

Images: Bill Ford: Ford media Others: Movement Design Bureau

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

Sue Cischke, meet Dan Sturges

On Thursday we interviewed Ford's Sue Cischke about the company's sustainability strategy and put the interview online. Now we're gathering comment from key thinkers we know. Here's Dan Sturges, president of Intrago Mobility. Over to Dan...

I think Ford is a typical company that would communicate sustainability issues to engineering teams, design teams, sourcing people, etc.. I would bet that 85% of Ford's employees do not get a view over the "dashboard" - the view she or Bill Ford see of this complex new emerging mobility + access landscape un-folding. Sure the employees hear they should recycle their paper, fill their tires with air, etc.. But not about bold new vehicle sharing business models - Robin Chase talking about open-source transponders for every car and any car can be a rental car - how iPhones can make any car into a taxi (or so many other developments). Unfortunately for Ford employees they don't get to see all that is possible, but may get laid off because those who see what is ahead too often don't know what to do about it.

I think Ford should have an intranet site for their people that shares these bold new possibilities - to every employee that wants to look + learn. Why not let even a janitor at their St. Louis plant see what's happening. Perhaps he has some cool idea for a business offering seniors rides in mini-ev shuttles around his community. While Ford should really have a VC arm for employees starting new ventures - even if they didn't - it would be an important service to someone you might have to layoff at somepoint - to have a better sense of what the future of transpo might be and opportunities for them beyond Ford. Most likely, this type of creatve collaboration with 100% of your employees would bring amazing ideas to the business as well as a lot more happy excited "employees".

So, no, I think Sue and I have a very different idea as to who should be involved in sustainability at Ford.

Here are some things for me that stood out:

1) Vehicle Microrental.

Sue Cischke seemed to know more about the Zipcar business model than I had expected – about how consumers would have more choice in vehicles by moving past the ownership model, to instead match mode to trip.

This made me think that a Ford announcement in car-sharing might not be too far away. Perhaps they'll make an investment into Zipcar, or help a few Ford dealers test a “Flexible Lease” approach where a consumer’s car can be exchanged on the fly for another type of Ford car or truck at the nearby Dealer's lot. If this is true, and Ford will put their foot in the car-share pond, how odd it will be that they sold Hertz only 4 years ago. So much for the “vision thing”!

2) Mega City Mobility HUBS.

Sue said their work in the mega cities was not their core competency, but they were bringing IT to consumers in cities regarding transpo choices. Oddly, with 80% of Americans not able to get to or from public transit with ease, why not bring the Hub Concept to USA? Allow communities that need to match personal mobility with existing and new transit options to meet at the Community Mobility Hub? Why study Hubs with no connection to personal mobility in South America or India?

3) Small Car Safety.

Why do we never hear about how car companies are working with communities and cities to leverage IT to really reduce the chance of big and large vehicles hitting each other? Making travel in local communities like traveling in a boat is a Safe Harbor. Most of the tech she talks about is for freeway travel. But why not make it so small vehicles for community or urban travel are less likely to hit? We don’t design planes with bumpers, we make it so they won't hit.

4) Custom Solutions.

She said they make a car different for the Europe from the USA. But why not make these "local cars" I've mentioned - in a shape that's right for the Midwest or the Southwest? We tooled up the first Neighborhood Electric Vehicle for $1M. Now that fleet (of 50,000 NEVs) generates around 80 million one-way zero-emission trips a year in the USA! The digital revolution is poised to change the way we travel, as well as how we DESIGN, MAKE, and SELL this future. Ford just doesn’t think all that differently.

5) Working with others.

Yes they do, but the right groups? I don’t see any intent to really find the true disruptive thinkers in the space. I lived in Ann Arbor and heard all of the intent, but never saw it lead to the right folks.

I guess this last point relates to one of the first thing Sue said - that her job was to get the sustainability message to the right people in the company. I think there is likely a big difference between who she and I think are the "right" people.

Dan is based in Boulder, Colorado and designed the G.E.M, still to date the world's best selling EV. He is widely recognised as one of the world's leading evangelists for new vehicle and mobility concepts.

The future of the urban car? It's a 'PUMA' say GM and Segway

P.U.M.A on the streets of New York yesterday

GM appears to have been vying for the prize of ‘World’s most hated company’ recently. Right now it might be losing that battle to AIG, but consolation is at hand – because there are clearly some bright people still left in the Renaissance Center. They appear to understand what the term ‘vision’ means, and are not treating the word ‘future’ simply as a threat. And they’ve teamed up with the guys behind the self-balancing human transporter, the Segway.

GM and Segway have been friendly for a while. They’ve worked together on the Opel Flextreme, a concept car shown at Frankfurt in 2007. It featured the Chevy Volt’s range-extended EV drivetrain, a euro-friendly sub-MPV body shell and (the collaboration bit) a pair of Segways that tucked away into the rear bumper and charged off the car's battery when they weren’t being used.

Opel Flextreme concpet featuring integrated Segways

But no one really took any notice, and the Volt steals the headlines to this day. But while GM has been forced to can or put on hold many of its more ‘traditional’ new car programmes, another collaboration project with Segway has popped up today. A signal that GM thinks there’s a future beyond today's car? Take a deep breath now…

The press release for this project proclaims “GM and Segway Join Forces to Reinvent Urban Transportation”. In doing so, they’ve created ‘P.U.M.A’ - Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility. Utilising a similar gyroscopic, two wheel-based, self-balancing platform to today’s Segways, PUMA addresses some of the flies in the ointment of the Segway concept. PUMA can carry two people, and they can sit down (rather than one standing up on the Segway). There’s a roof (rather than just a stand and a stick), and it’ll do 35mph (bit speedier than 12.5, eh?). Quite how that’ll feel when you’re actually driving the thing is another matter, because speed lover that I am, 12.5mph on a Segway feels giddily quick at times.

President Obama’s team (among others) are focusing on keeping everyone moving in the same way as before but with different motive power (ie: shifting people into more economical, or electric cars). But as Joel Makower points out today, this is – to put it mildly – only a very small part of a very big problem. For once, GM’s read the script in advance (or more likely it talked to Segway, and probably MIT for good measure) and has seen that getting people using a 300lb electric PUMA rather than a 6000lb electric SUV to nip three miles down to the shops to grab papers and coffee is going to have some seriously big environmental and spatial advantages. Even Larry Burns (GM’s VP of research and development) who in 2002 suggested “only 12% of the world owns a car and we need to get that up to 40% ASAP" is now talking up the advantages of PUMA - big style. We wouldn’t say he’s done a complete volte-face yet, but it’s a start.

PUMA concept sketches

There’s not much point in conducting a design critique on the pictures of what are currently prototypes. However, a serious question and note of caution rides on whether GM and Segway see this as a product or a service. Right now that’s a moot point, but the fact that GM’s a car company and talks in the press release of this being “one-fourth to one-third the cost of what you pay to own and operate today’s automobile” suggests it’s thinking about it as product, and therefore in terms of sales. If that’s the only route to be taken with this idea, then our spirits are dampened, no make that drenched. Outside of the boardwalks of LA, San Diego and the police departments of Rome and Chicago, the Segway is still as rare as the lesser-spotted flying pig. As a product to buy it's a toy – rather than a mobility device to displace the car on small trips and change the world. If people are going to buy just one, expensive ‘mobility’ product, then we’d bet that thing looks like a car for a good number of years to come.

So instead, for PUMA to fulfill its true potential, we hope that GM and Segway are looking to push this as something to rent, something to share, something for city authorities, large coporations and institutions to implement on a wide scale – at a local level. Intrago Mobility – headed by Dan Struges, and who Makower talks about today, showcases a clear route to how this could be done. [Full disclosure, Dan is a long time friend and supporter of The Movement Design Bureau]. MIT’s smart cities car (concept), Paris’s Velib (bike rental) and Daimler’s Car2Go (car share) are other, obvious example models of where PUMA could – and should – go.

To reinvent the production form of urban movement is only half of the answer. To create a path by which citizens can get their head around, and easily, cheaply use a service-based mobility system is the critical bit. Still, GM and Segway should for now be congratulated. In one jump this puts them level with Toyota and its iSeries (iReal, iSwing) suite of concepts from recent years. Into the bargain, we bet they’ve caused much head scratching in Dearborn, Auburn Hill and on Capitol Hill this morning… something we encourage them to try and make happen much more frequently.

Follow up: We're due to chat with MDB friend and Segway's chief designer - Scott Waters - at some point in the next couple of weeks - keep checking back for an update.

You can see the PUMA official video here at 3pm UK time / 10am EDT, Jalopnik has it being trialled this morning on the today show here

Images: GM & Segway media sites under creative commons

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 7th April 2009

The party's over

Above: The Ford and Firestone families taking tea - see the full table plan here (Henry Ford Museum)

If it gets much worse, the birds will probably stop tweeting.

Yesterday saw an American president take the unprecedented action of (essentially) firing the CEO of one of the country's largest corporations (GM) and giving another (Chrysler) just 30 days to live. He also mooted a ‘scrappage’-type scheme where drivers will trade in decade old (dirty) cars, to receive money off a shiny, (clean) new one. A similar programme has worked wonders for new car sales in Germany. We’re sceptical this is a good idea from an environmental point of view, but no one seems to want to talk about that right now – driving new car sales is paramount.

Today both Ford and GM launched a scheme, similar to Hyundai’s, to cover finance payments on new car purchases should the owner lose their job.  Will all of this be enough to kick start car sales? Possibly. Certainly it may just be enough to help those in better shape to ride out the current crisis.

The problem is that few people connected to the industry seem to want to look much further than the end of their own noses, even in these unprecedented times. All of the above news is intended to help the auto industry in the short term. It doesn’t solve some key long-term problems.

There is oversupply in the industry, on a systemic, worldwide level. Even with fewer factories and laid off workers, healthcare and pensions burdens will remain vast for the auto industry for years to come. The rate of change of digital technology is still progressing at a rate fundamentally out of step with the auto industry’s development processes, which in turn have difficulty mapping and staying congruent with consumer demand. A piece in today’s Guardian aimed at GM and Chrysler is entitled “Create the market you idiots” and doubtless consumers will echo that sentiment. For years the industry has conducted clinics and market research essentially asking consumers ‘what sort of vehicle do you want’. Predictably enough, cars designed by clinics and market research tend not to be winners, because consumers don’t usually know what they want until they’re shown it. The problem for the industry is that right now, nobody in control knows what consumers want, and what they do want changes with the prevailing wind.

Even if everything being done now results in the industry getting back on track, just what constitutes back on track? Is $250 profit from each car, and every consumer tied to a $250-per-month, three-year car loan, back on track? That’s how it’s been for the past five years, so one might speculate that if this qualifies as back on track, then the automotive train will be falling off the rails again within a couple of years.

The industry needs to respond to bigger, critical issues – like that brought up by The Mechanic’s blog on Edmunds today. Young people aren’t interested in cars anymore. That simplifies the situation too far, but it’s a problem that the likes of Nissan have identified, yet done little about. At 27, I see the issue first hand. I can count on one hand the number of my friends who own a car at all, and the only person I know who’s bought a brand new car in the last two years, I’m engaged to. Beyond that, what’s the industry’s answer to the fact that in big cities like Tokyo, Paris and New York – the wealth generating capitals – between 30 and 50 percent of citizens don’t own cars? Don't think this is important? Last year for the first time, more than 50 percent of the world's populations lived in cities. Think about the logic of this - the majority of people who could afford a car, are now city dwellers.

Time was when Honda were promoting themselves as more than just a car company, and as a mobility provider. Likewise, when Jac Nasser embarked on his CEO mission at Ford, he not only bought Land Rover, Volvo and co – but took Kwik Fit (auto spares and repairs) and Hertz (car rental) under Ford’s wing. Car companies were doing more than ‘just’ making cars.

Now, in the desperate rush for survival, cost cutting has come to the fore. All this nice, cuddly, big thinking and advanced stuff is heading for the bin. Car companies – we are told – must focus solely on building the cars that people want. Apparently they’re going to be powered by electric batteries, and look pretty much like the cars we have today. But that many of the car companies already build great vehicles, and that those that don’t probably soon will (or die), seems beyond doubt. The question is whether in focusing solely on making and selling cars, the car companies will fail to provide the real answers to the future of how people need and want to move around.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 31st March 2009

Related reading: Boom, Busy and the Revival of Detroit (Mark Charmer, 5th December 2008)

An eye on Detroit: NAIAS '09 - Day 1

Keeping an eye on the competition in Cobo today... guess which manufacturer's car this is from?

Judging by the response of some auto makers, you'd have thought this year's Detroit autoshow wouldn't be worth the effort. However, judging by twitter chatter, mainstream news coverage and the response of people on the ground, hell hasn't actually frozen over (its only Detroit's pavements) and those that ventured to the Cobo Hall today for the start of the North American International Auto Show 2009, were rewarded with some treats and surprises.

This show was always going to be about certain North American manufacturers proving to a skeptical American public they deserved bailout money, and for every other manufacturer, a chance to prove the auto industry wasn't actually on its knees, and could still deliver the vision, and kick-ass products that would make people open their wallets.

It started slowly, but over the day, momentum built... General Motors kicked things off unveiling a bland new Buick, and a Cadillac SRX Crossover that didn't set anyone's pants on fire. But the real big news was never going to be about these cars - and sure enough, the General used NAIAS as an opportunity to build on its good press with the Chevrolet Volt, and make the most of its E-flex, plug-in hybrid vehicle architecture. Renamed "Voltage" today, it sat under a new, rather crisp looking Cadillac Coupe callled the "Converj" (which tied for 'crap name of the day' with Kia's "Soulster").

Cadillac Converj, and a 'not the actual production car yet', Chevy Beat

But GM wasn't quite done at that, and made a slightly bizarre "reveal", which actually wasn't. It announced that the Chevy Beat, one of three baby cars shown a year or so ago, had received the public's blessing to be its new north American small car. It is to be put into production in 2011, known as the "Spark". However, we say it was bizarre, as GM showed the original Beat concept on their stand, and had just one photo of the new Spark on a big display screen. Although too early to judge fairly, in the photo, it looked less funky than the Beat, and a little clunky compared to its big competitor, the Fiesta, which Ford brings Stateside in 2010...

Speaking of Ford, they appeared to be having a rather good show. Not only was the new Taurus well received by mainstream auto press, but it made a big (some would say shock) announcement about electrification of its range - with four new cars - regular and plug-in hybrids, plus a pure battery electric vehicle, all due in the next three years. Interestingly, some of these will be based on the next Focus platform, which means they could be seen in both the US and Europe. Most interesting to us was how Ford played up its partnership with those outside of the automotive world, such as power and research companies, and how it says it is working with specific cities on the development of these vehicles. We hope to have more on this in the next couple of days and to interview some of those behind the announcement, so if you've any questions about Ford's announcements, please add them in the comments below.

Alan Mulally on stage, announcing Ford's big electric news

Alan Mulally, Ford's CEO, drove onto the stage in a -suitably coloured- green Fiesta to make this announcement, and we're intrigued by "The Fiesta Movement" Ford has launched in relation to the model, which apparently sees 100 Fiestas put into the hands of people with 'strong' web presence, before they're launched in the US. Throwing the green bathwater out with the eco baby on the Ford stand though, was the new Shelby 500 Mustang. It gets the prize for "Most brooding-looking vehicle of the day":

You'd get out of its way if you saw it in your mirrors, wouldn't you?

Completing the trio of domestic manufacturers was Chrysler, who once again showed that EV, which looks rather like a Lotus Europa covered by a "wafer-thin mint" sized Dodge badge and some EV stickers, which it promises will be on sale by 2012. If I were a betting man, I'd probably put money on Lotus themselves turning out pure EVs before Chrysler do... but most people seemed to think that Chrysler might have been better off concentrating on making their production cars look a little more like its surprising, and rather attractive-looking 200C EV concept.

Chrysler contrasts - third outing for Dodge EV concept (nee. Lotus Europa); rather good looking 200C

The Germans had still turned up in Detroit in their droves, with all of the major manufacturers except Porsche in attendance and unveiling concepts today. BMW had obviously heard there was something on the show agenda about the greening of automobiles, but appeared not to have realised no one's into SUV crossovers anymore, so showed an X6 Active Hybrid. If you haven't seen an X6 on the road yet, you'll know about it when you do, as the photo below from Mark shows. You don't truly appreciate how big it is until you see it next to something else (as Mark says, "don't believe the scale is a matter of perspective in this pic")...

 

Still, BMW took the opportunity to be serious and launch its new Z4 - a replacement for the car which got the world all a-fluster about Chris Bangle and 'Flame surfacing'. While that surface language is now officially dead, the new one still isn't without its creases and kinks. It appears to be, like many modern cars, somewhat 'colour sensitive' - showing off much better in the dark blue, than champagne.

Put me down for a blue one please...

It's always amusing to watch how announcements are reported. While the world seemed to be getting excited over the idea of Toyota 'beating the Volt to market' - with the Japanese company's announcement they'd lease 500 plug-in hybrids in 2009, everyone seemed to have forgotten that, using the same matrix, BMW has beaten them both to it with its Mini E - on show again here. Surely, anyone who's watched the film "Who killed the electric car" would hesitate to classify a car that's simply part of a manufacturer test fleet (the Toyota plug-in), and a car anyone can buy (the Volt) in the same arena?

A reminder from BMW Mini, of what the future car seems likely to be powered by...

Indeed, green poster-child Toyota is in danger of being eclipsed by a bunch of manufacturers before long. A new Prius is launched tomorrow, but this time it won't have the market to itself, with the likes of Honda's Insight on the way. We were disappointed too, that Toyota's EV concept, the FT-EV, had turned the clever, funky-looking iQ into a bit of a micro-van lookalike. I'm interested in really starting to ask serious questions about what electric cars, and advanced hybrids should look like. And it's disappointing to think they might all be Prius-a-like...

Toyota FT-EV concept, is an iQ in disguise

A car that was about as aesthetically far removed from the Prius as it's possible to get, but which still played up its green credentials, was the VW Bluesport roadster. Robb felt this looked a little predictable, even stale - something Darryl Siry attributed to TT-similarities. But then it appeared that VW's stand girls might have helped Robb change his mind... ! Slightly odd orange hood apart, this was VW proving that it could do good, clean fun - and that it was still top of the tree when it came to interiors and detailing.

VW Bluesport, some models, and detailing

Still, we could just be hallucinating about this VW due to the strength of the lighting rig the Germans had employed on their show stand. This brought about 'tweet of the day' from @commutr, who summed up the situation by saying "Maserati, Aston Martin and Tesla have saved money on lighting by being next to VW. The sun is less bright. :)"

VW Stand: "The sun is less bright"...

My car of the day though, was the final unveil, the Volvo S60 concept. We haven't had time to upload the photos yet, and it's really the interior you need to see... but if Volvo's are going to look this sexy in the future, then I want one... Check out pictures like this and this to see what I mean.

"If Volvo's are going to look this sexy, then I want one"

Stay tuned for continued coverage - and some interviews and video tomorrow.

Full photoset from today here.

Posted by Robb Hunter on the show floor in Detroit, and Joseph Simpson watching on the web in London. You can follow our ongoing coverage of the show and thoughts on twitter - @potatowedge, @JoeSimpson, @CharmerMark.

All Photos by Robb Hunter - Potatowedge on Flickr

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

All material, including photographs, is licensed as Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0. Please feel free to copy, distribute and adapt the material within the terms of this license.