Re*Move

Geneva auto show 2009: video review (in three parts)

 

I spent a (very) long day on Tuesday at the 2009 auto salon in Geneva. Setting out to see all the major new unveils and concept cars was a tough job, but hey, someone had to do it! The key aim of the day was to try and gauge the mood of an auto industry which is currently up against the wall in face of a global recession and plummeting sales.

While the show floor was packed with new models and concepts, there was little from the industry to suggest it had the answers to its current issues. Instead, there was a mildly defiant air of 'business as usual', but a sense it might be slowly sinking in among some that 'business as usual' might not work for very much longer. It can be hard to try and take in everything at a show as big as Geneva, whether you're on the show floor or sitting behind a computer watching the world's automotive sites fight to get pictures up first. So, as an experiment, for the last half hour of press day one, I ran around the floor shooting footage and providing commentary on (almost) all of the important launches (sorry Opel, I know the Ampera's important, but it does so little for me (visually) that I forgot to film it!).

The videos are split into three, and each lasts ten minutes or less. If you weren't on the show floor earlier this week, then hopefully they give you a sense of what it was like to be there.

The first video features Infiniti, Hyundai, Ferrari, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley and VW:

The second covers a bit more of VW, Nissan, Honda, Fisker, Dacia and Toyota:

And the third and final one covers Kia, Alfa, Ford, Aston, Magna Steyr, BMW, Mercedes and Rolls Royce - before me rounding off with a few thoughts and feelings from the show:

Check back later for more from Geneva, and as ever, if you were there, have thoughts, agree or disagree, or have a question on anything here, do leave a comment or drop me a line.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 5th March 2009

Geneva auto salon 2009 - what do you want to know?

Despite the fairly parlous state of the auto industry right now, one event you can guarantee no manufacturer will pull out of is the Geneva auto show. This is Europe's big automotive deal, and it's a guaranteed draw for the car world's great and good each March.

Because of this, hotel rooms tend to book up about half a year in advance, and because I never like to plan things too far ahead (*ahem*), I won't be staying overnight at Geneva this year because I didn't organise a hotel soon enough... I will, instead, be getting up at a frankly silly hour next Tuesday morning, to drive to Gatwick and hop on an Easyjet flight which will hopefully have me in the exhibition hall before 10am.

Despite there being a lot of stuff to cover in just one day, I'd like to experiment with making my coverage interactive, rather than just trundling round photographing cars, and lunching at the expense of Nissan, Audi, Peugeot or whoever. So what would you like me to try and find out, who would you like me to try and field a question to, and which cars are you particularly interested in? Drop me an email or leave a comment here and I'll do my best to cover it or get you an answer.

What's more, I'll be tweeting throughout the event on Tuesday, so you can follow my thoughts and photos or direct a question to me there, then come back throughout Wednesday and Thursday for reports, updates, photos and video both here on Re*Move, on my flickr account and on our BlipTV and Youtube channels.

Are you keen to know more about the BMW Concept 5 Series GT's general bizarre-nesss (above), or if I've got it wrong about the Citroen DS Inside? Or just who'll spring a surprise? I wonder what the show star will be this year? Stay tuned...

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 25th February. Geneva Auto Salon's press days are 3rd and 4th March. It opens to the public from 5th-15th March.

Bye-bye to Bangle's Butts

Chris Bangle at his wild, gesticulating best at Art Center Pasadena. 7 February 2007 (Joseph Simpson)

Car Magazine today broke the story that Chris Bangle, BMW’s design chief, will leave the Bavarian company, and more shockingly, the auto industry entirely.

Bangle is the latest in a band of successful car designers to jump from the mainstream, big-brand car firms lately. Murat Gunak walked from VW to form Mindset – and has since been joined there by David Wilkie from Bertone. Franz Von Holzhausen left Mazda (one of the few mainstream brands doing really interesting design stuff) for electric vehicle player, Tesla Motors. And Frank Stephenson left Fiat/Alfa and practically disappeared, before re-emerging at a very different kind of McLaren. It may be nothing, but I wonder if this is a trend? Are big-name car designers getting frustrated with the snail's pace of movement in the auto industry - and having reached the top of the game in their forties and fifties - seeking newer, greater challenges away from the established players.

The Flame-Thrower

Bangle upturned not only BMW, but the entire auto industry in the early years of this decade, with his controversial car body surfacing treatment known as ‘flame surfacing’. The idea flies in the face of previous car design convention, because it creates concave surfaces in the body panels. Before Chris Bangle it was customary in car design to try to create only convex surfaced panels, because it was thought this not only gives cars an athletic, muscular look, but allows light fall to across the metal surface to be manipulated better by the designer to create the highlights. The old school reckoned this contributed to the human eye’s perception of how a car looks.

Some (slightly sanitised) 'Bangle butts'

Bangle's new approach first appeared on the 2001 BMW 7 series, yet it wasn’t the panel surfacing which stole headlines, but the car's ‘trunk lid’ – the boot, which appeared ‘stuck on’ at the back of the car. He suggested they had to make it look like this to package the trunk space required for the car, but a facelift later tried to address the look. Yet the damage was done, and the term "Bangle Butt" would from this point forward, be forever associated with contemporary BMWs.

Picasso Moment

It wasn’t until the 2003 BMW 5 series though, that ‘Bangled’ BMWs really shook up the automotive world. Here was BMW, that most conservative of German car makers, going utterly wild with arguably the most important model in its range. I remember having a 15 minute-long stand up row with a colleague in Manchester when we came across our first 2003 5 Series on the road. Did it work? I admired its daring, challenging set of surfaces, details and shut lines. My colleague, a BMW driver, reckoned the brand had lost its mind. It flew in the face of BMW's core design language, laid down 40 years earlier by Paul Bracq - an era that eschewed frivolous change or ornamentation. Stephen Bailey, in his recent book described it thus:

"In the conservative world of car design, this was disruption that may be compared to Picasso's creation of Cubism"

At the time, I remember speculation about how risky a strategy this approach to styling was, and how BMW’s conservative customer base wouldn’t possibly accept it. Yet despite this, the 5 series, and most of Chris Bangle’s other designs such as the X5 and Z4, sold in vast numbers. Testament surely to the quality of Bangle’s work is that the same 2003 5 series still looks fresh and striking six years on. It's received minimal facelifts during its life and will be replaced next year, yet still looks – I'd argue – more dynamic and modern than the current Mercedes E class or Audi A6. Want proof that Bangle was influential? See the form of the current Mercedes S-class (Bangle butt included) and the increasing 'ornamentation' (particularly in detail) on modern Audis.

Audi A1 concept features 'eyebrow' that Audi now claim as a design signifier. But this idea originates from BMW.
 
In recent years, Bangle moved ‘upstairs’ into a more supervisory role, leaving Adrian Van Hooydonk - who now becomes director of design, in charge on a day-to-day level. Van Hooydonk has evolved the first generation of 'Bangled' models (X5, 7 series) into second generations that right now seem much more palatable than the Bangle cars initially did, but also more boring. But Van Hooydonk also shows signs of stretching things - he takes credit for the recent CS concept and M1 Homage, so those hoping for a complete return to classic BMW-ness may be disappointed.

Van Hooydonk's X1 concept at Paris was as disliked as many of Bangle's previous designs.

I hold my hands up and cry I'm a huge Bangle fan. The man's work and thinking was largely responsible for me deciding to switch from Architecture to Car Design five years ago, and while I'm sure many will disagree, I think it’s sad to see one of the true superstars of the car industry depart. I wrote last year that the industry needed more characters like Bangle, and I stand by that. A secretive, introverted industry could arguably do with more characters that are household names - people like Bangle - who at times, seemed more interested in what was happening outside of the car world than within it.

For me though, Bangle’s biggest contributions to BMW and the industry at large weren't the cars he designed, but about culture. When he first arrived at BMW, he reputedly took almost the entire design team out of BMW's Munich HQ, to a Chateaux in the south of France for three months, in order that they could gain inspiration from nature, and escape from the input of engineers who he believed were limiting the imagination of stylists too early in the design process. He enchanted Art Center's Summit in 2007 when talking about cars as 'avatars'. But if you want to understand what the man is really about, and why I (perhaps) come across as upset about this – I strongly recommend you watch this TED video of Bangle talking about how “Great cars are Art”.

"A secretive, introverted industry could arguably do with more characters that are household names - people like Bangle - who at times, seemed more interested in what was happening outside of the car world than within it."

Whatever the case, having seen Bangle speak on a couple of occasions, met him briefly in person, and him having designed one of my favourite cars of all time (the Fiat Coupe), I wish him the best of luck in whatever he does next. If he can shake up whatever that is as much as he changed the auto world, the world will be a more exciting, better place.

Note: Some of the anecdotes and stories in this piece are not referenced in our normal way, as they were picked up from conversations and discussion with figures in the auto industry over the past four years, so don't exist in online or published journals to reference. Interpret them as views of the author, rather than as referenceable facts.

Images - all Joseph Simpson (may be republished under a creative commons license)

Published by Joseph Simpson on 3rd February 2009

Welcome to 2009... a brave new world?

Looking back at the past year, and seeing what you predicted for it right back at its start is always a fun game. If you want a chuckle, check here for what I was thinking about this time last year. Back to the here and now, what about 2009? It feels very brave-new-world out there, with the effects of the credit crunch, auto bailout and the imminent inauguration of Pres. Elect Obama all making themselves felt. So here’s some ideas on what might, or might not happen in the next 12 months – and some things we’ll be tracking along the way…

Autos

Much of the auto industry had a terrible 2008. And while most are predicting things will get worse in 2009, I’m watching for things to pick up. People pretty much stopped buying cars at the end of ’08, but people don’t just change the habits of a lifetime, so I believe we’ll start to see an element of 'pent-up-demand' take effect. Suddenly, after two months of nothing, there's a rash of 58 plate (new cars registered from September 08) all over south-east England. And with schemes such as Hyundai's, designed to give customers peace of mind that if they buy a car on credit and then lose their jobs, that there is a way out, I think customers will be buying again before ’09 is out…

We could see SAAB bite the dust in '09 - a shame, Anthony Lo's team look ripe to turn things around, styling wise

SAAB may not be so lucky though. Word is that GM can’t find a buyer for the brand, but despite the Swedish Government saying they’ll step in to help, SAAB’s days may be numbered. We sincerely hope this doesn't happen - SAAB is a truly great brand, with currently unrealised potential - my hunch says, that given just a little longer, Anthony Lo's design team might turn it around.

Watch for a brand that you’ve heard of before, but not for decades seen emblazoned on the front of a car as a brand in its own right – Pininfarina – make waves with their ‘B0’ electric car, developed in collaboration with French group, come battery maker, Bollore. If it looks as good as the concept in Paris, it’ll be a winner with consumers in Europe who are cost conscious and still up for eco-flavoured cars. Fingers crossed Pinifarina innovative on the selling and recharging network side of things…flogging them from the back of a Fiat dealership just won’t cut it folks.

Pininfarina B0 could be a big hit in 2009; was certainly a star of the Paris autoshow

Although Hybrid sales are currently falling off a cliff in the US, European buyers still seem keen on effective auto efficiency. America’s appetite for Hybrids appears on the wane thanks mainly to cheap oil prices – but there are predictions that won’t last forever, either. Watch for a second-wave of hybrid mania, spurred by a new Prius (in Detroit this weekend), and two possibly even cleverer new hybrids in the form of Honda’s new (bargain?) Insight and Ford's hyper-efficient Fusion hybrid.

Aviation

Three carriers now fly the Airbus A380 superjumbo in and out of Heathrow, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed. With Air France, Lufthansa and others due to get their first double-decker planes this year, the A380 will be a key selling point differentiator… Do you want to spend 20 hours in the back of a 20 year old 747, or in a brand new, uber-quiet, Marc Newson-designed interior, with on-demand entertainment, snack bar and extra legroom?

Qantas are making the A380 a big sell in the UK and Aus now, Heathrow improved in 2008 with Terminal 5

Speaking of Heathrow, watch for the proposed third runway to finally hit the buffers this year, as Labour MPs vote against their own party, due to sustainability concerns. Much is being made of a potential high speed rail-link to both northern England and continental Europe, instead. Watch to see how that develops as an alternative.

Boeing will finally get the 787 Dreamiliner airborne this year, not that it will go into commercial service until 2010. But the big question is whether they can surpass 1000 order for the plane (currently at 900).

Mobility

Watch for a rise in on-demand rental systems for vehicles, and for the rise to prominence of the mobility service provider. While Better Place project stole the headline in 2008 for their proposed electric car charging networks, others will come to the fore this year, as smart phone and 3G broadband penetration grows, and the number of people able to quickly and cheaply access information on the move increases.

Zipcar hasn't made a profit yet, but such services could come into their own in 2009

The drying up of VC money with recessions has doubtless not done a lot to help this future transport sector, and the fact that Zipcar still hasn’t turned a profit might mean things don't look rosy – but one senses that companies such as this, along with Dan Sturges’s Intrago – are due their moment in the sun. Consumers fearing the big money vehicle purchases, and increasingly questioning the running costs of private cars, might find this year the ideal time to try out renting transportation on demand, particularly in developed cities... Or they might just find all sorts of random things to try out on new rental site eronto.

Support for this theory comes in the form of the first Auto-maker backed car share/mirco rental scheme, in Ulm. Mercedes has been notable by its absence from the auto-meltdown headlines, and experimenting with an idea such as car2go, which instead of leaving unsold cars in fields, puts them on the street for customers to use on a by-the-hour basis, seems like a potentially smart move. Rumours of Merc being in bed with Tesla – despite the San Carlos company’s up-and-down 2008, is probably pretty smart too.

Speaking of which, have you heard that one of the customers on the waiting list for a Tesla Roadster is purported to be one Porsche A.G? Apparently the company that has just swallowed VW was non-too impressed with the performance of a prototype electric 911 (e-RUF) developed by RUF, and has decided to take a closer look at the Tesla themselves. Obviously, this doesn’t mean Porsche are about to produce an electric car, probably far from it, but it’s an interesting development from one of the most powerful, influential and profitable car companies in the world. So we’ll be watching that space too…

Finally, city-based vehicle networks should get a further boost (in publicity, if nothing else) from Paris’s ‘autolib’ system, which will be the most advanced micro-rental system for cars yet seen. Could it do for the genre what the city’s ‘Velib’ bike sharing network did for city bike rental, now on the agenda in cities around the world – including New York?

Fuel

Some analysts now believe oil is underpriced, and in recent weeks, its fall in price seems to have leveled off. Watch for it to rise again in 2009, and for one of Obama’s first ‘unpopular’ decision to be the introduction of a higher gas tax levy – we recommend reading Darryl Siry's and Autopia's well-argued pieces to understand why this matters.

Networks + Technology

Twitter – the online micro-blooging site, which gripped us throughout 2008, will go (if it hasn’t already gone), mainstream. Witness it being tipped as one of the sites to watch for 2009 by all and sundry in the press, at present. But as more people join, the ‘fail whale’ already seems to be returning, and the big question could be whether twitter ends up going the way of facebook – dominated by irritating people you thought you’d left behind at high school..! Our hope, and suspicion, is not. Incidentally, if you’d like to follow us, we're @JoeSimpson and @Charmermark, or click through the widgets to the right.

Tweetdeck has helped make Twitter a powerful, manageable tool for me

Geo-tagging is one of the things we’ll be exploring in much greater depth in 2009. While many have been utilising the feature for some time (it is the addition of geographical location data to media such as photos), we haven't really utilised its potential and usefulness yet, so we’ll be getting to grips with it, and make the most of it throughout 2009.

Cities and locality

As the recession bites in the UK, cherished high-street names such as Woolworths, have disappeared. So does this mean an increasingly homogenised world, with high-streets full of Tesco locals, and little else?

The start of 2009 saw the end of British high street favourite, Woolworths

We hope not, and have long talked about the different undercurrents and trends in each city, which we believe are critically important and of increasing influence in the field of design. With the help of our extended network, and as we move around the world in 2009, we’ll be doing more deep-dive, trend-based research in certain cities. Ultimately, we think there’s value in monitoring and trying to understand how small, subtle changes are affecting large cities around the world, and what trends are emerging where.

And above all…

Without wishing to sound twee, above all we want to critically engage you, our readers, with what we’re doing throughout 2009. Rather than mere broadcasting (which is admittedly what this feels like...) We’ll be focusing heavily on areas like video, and social media tools, to try and have a multi-way conversation – between those we meet who are shaping the future of how we move around, ourselves, and hopefully you, as the reader. We want to know what you think, and what you want to know. So we hope you’ll jump in whenever you like. Suggestions, criticisms, thoughts and ideas all welcome. Comment on the blogs, DM tweet me here, or mail me here.

Welcome to the brave new world, and happy new year!

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 8th January 2009

Images - Joseph Simpson and Mark Charmer on Flickr

Disclosure: Ford is sponsoring our Design Research Work throughout 2009. Joseph Simpson leads research on automotive and city-related topics at The Movement Design Bureau. He is also an associate at Car Design Research, a contributor to CarDesignNews.com and a visiting lecture in Vehicle Design at London's Royal College of Art.

Boom, Bust and the Revival of Detroit

I've spent the last five days staying in the world's first airport hotel. It was completed in 1931. The interesting thing is, it wasn't built by someone called Marriott or Hyatt. it was built by someone called Ford.

During the 1920s Henry Ford, overseeing one of the world's dominant industrial companies, got increasingly into promoting air travel, as he sought the next big transportation revolution to sit alongside the automobile. He built a hotel in Dearborn, Michigan, close to his factories and alongside a company airfield. It was intended as a flagship location to stay when journeying via plane between one of the world's most important industrial cities and the rest of the world.

Today the modernity of 1920s Detroit floats like a ghost over the vast, sprawling metropolis that has suffered so much depopulation and changing fortunes as boom and bust cycles have hit its leadership role as an industrial powerhouse of America and, by implication, the rest of the western world.

The Great Depression meant even Ford's deep pockets could no longer support this expansion into aviation. The company, which had been manufacturing the Ford Trimotor, pulled out of air travel. Otherwise, tonight I might have been stepping onto a Ford jet airliner on my journey back from Detroit to London.

Busted flush

Today, as Washington's political leaders debate whether the automobile industry deserves upwards of $30 billion of taxpayer support, it's easy to feel that somehow we are seeing the humbling of a once all-powerful manufacturing industry.

The crisis, however, isn't what it seems on the face. This isn't about a failure of the auto industry to cut costs, or even to reform the relationship between 'management' and 'employees'. Instead, it's about our inability to absorb the products of mass production on the scale that the technology makes possible.

This winter a lack of financial capital has made it harder for the auto sales networks to provide finance at the volumes and cost needed to incentivise people to replace cars that they don't necessarily need to replace. That same lack of capital makes it harder to maintain investments in the product line refreshes, and the advertising, that are so important to motivating sales in a mature market.

I've written before about the extraordinary sums the US auto industry spends on advertising its products - $19.8 billion was the figure in 2005. With our focus on design, I tend to think that the perfect design process creates a product that is absolutely of its time – it gels with the era, uses the latest materials profitably, and attracts buyers itself. Of course, ask an ad person what they perfect product is, and you'll get a different answer.

We put these issues yesterday to someone who has amassed surely the world's largest automotive history collection. Joe and I spent time yesterday with Bob Casey, curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit.

A highlight of the discussion is the clip below.

Casey's comments include these:

"Cars have gotten so good. When people ask me, what's the golden age of the automobile, it's today. The cars today are the best they've ever been. They're the most reliable, the most comfortable, the safest and easiest to drive. They actually get the best mileage. They're terrific devices. But you can drive them for 100,000 miles and they won't rust up on you, and the engine won't seize up. There's not a good reason to replace every two or three years."

"We've been relying on expanding populations to take up some of the slack, but when the credit crunch hits... we think maybe I can let this car go for another year, 'cos it's actually pretty good."

I'm not sure whether mass producing cars is the panacea. But mass producing things we want has plenty of life left in it.

Maybe Detroit's been short of innovation recently. The city has depopulated, it's been harder to attract talent with big ideas. But don't, ever, write this city off. Industrial mass production remains one of society's greatest achievements. It's not our ability to produce that is the problem, it's our ability to produce the right things. Producing things that people want, or never dreamed they may be offered, remains the challenge.

In a new, connected, flexible society, coming to terms with a new mass production age is surely our greatest, most exciting opportunity. Those with the power should be careful not to repeat history, and let a financial collapse lead to an industrial collapse. And perverse as it may sound, they should consider Casey's assertion that "the golden age of the automobile is today".

The question is what to sell next.

Mark Charmer is CEO of The Movement Design Bureau.

Meeting Ford's 'Bio Babes'

Joe and I were privileged to meet the ladies of the Materials Research and Advanced Engineering Department at Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, today.

We filmed Deb Mielewski, Cynthia Flanigan, Angela Harris, Ellen Lee, and the marvellous Christine Perry, the celebrity chef of advanced materials research. She grew soy foam in front of our eyes. The team explained how they research ways to incorporate natural materials into car components. This can reduce the amount of petroleum involved in car manufacture, make vehicles easier to recycle and produce more interesting, attractive, lighter-weight and environmentally sustainable materials than we've ever seen before in cars. Bill Ford kicked this programme off in 2001 and it was the first of its kind in the world.

You can see photos of our time by clicking on the montage below.

Updated: Videos of our time with the team can be viewed here.

Photo: Christine Perry, formulation chemist, Materials Research & Advanced Engineering Department, Ford, Dearborn, Michigan.

Disclosure: The Movement Design Bureau has been commissioned to follow Ford's sustainable design work. We aim to snap things with an independent take. Tell us if you think we don't.

BusinessWeek, Joseph Simpson and the RCA

Great to see Joe's hard work highlighted on the BusinessWeek website.

Nice one, Joe. I'm hoping he'll tell us more about it here at Re*Move sometime soon. Now you know what's been keeping him quiet.

Posted by Mark.

Segway COOLWALL – 23 April 2008

We spent the day with Intrago Mobility president Dan Sturges - the three of us riding around London all day on Segways. Suffice to say that we had a total riot - we wizzed around the south bank, met with MPs interested in overturning the ban on Segways, and stood in front of countless crowds in awe of how this machine magically 'self balances'. Incredibly (and pleasingly), almost everyone we met thought they were 'cool' - particularly teenagers and school kids.

We'll post more on this over the next few days, but for now click on the Segway Coolwall pics above to access the full set of photos. The images are available for use under a creative commons license - please credit The Movement Design Bureau and link to this page.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 24th April 2008

Related reading: The Protocol in Pasadena.

Welcome to COOL WALLS

Those of you close to us - especially those who follow us on Twitter - will know we're working on the launch of our city-based trend research network in early summer.

I can't share the details yet but suffice to say we're going to throw out of the window many of the assumptions that hold Think Tanks back - number one being that most spend their time producing boring reports that noone reads.

We're rejecting what Dominic Campbell and I describe as the tendency to become the "Centre for Obvious Research". Obvious stuff which is expensively commissioned because decision-makers can only do intuitive things if they have a detailed report to prove it's true. Things like this report that proves towns in Northern England like Blackpool and Burnley need to forge better links with nearby cities such as Liverpool and Manchester. Well go figure.

A new generation of designers, policy people and entrepreneurs working on movement, cities and interaction are looking for something much more open and useable. And we're basing it around photography as the starting point.

How it works

Our trend team will maintain a network of global Cool Walls. For now we're focusing on MOVEMENT. There are just three rules:

1. You must have taken the photos yourself.

2. Each must be captioned with the date and location it was taken. You can add long captions if you like, but that's your call.

(and this is critical)

3. You must set the licensing to Creative Commons.

We encourage people to keep a Cool Wall of between 20 and 30 images. About 24 is optimal. For now, we're finding Flickr is the best place to host your Cool Wall.

In early summer I'll explain how the best trend watchers will earn money watching trends that they communicate via photography, rather than earning money selling photography. This is quite a leap - but an important one. In the meantime we won't be earning money directly out of your photos. That I can guarantee.

For now, if you want to get involved, email me (with the subject COOL WALL) to sign up to follow the beta programme. Or better still participate by just setting up your own Cool Wall on Flickr and then email me the location. As a trend watcher, you can be as public or anonymous about your identity as you like. If we think it's a Cool Wall, we'll promote it. Even if you tell me who you are, I promise not to pass that on without your permission.

You can follow mine and Joe's Cool Walls for inspiration. I expect yours to be better.

Posted by Mark Charmer on 15 April 2008. Mark is director of The Movement Design Bureau, a global think tank.

Driving the Prius (finally)

By Joe Simpson.

'Our' Prius - in a fetching shade of Blue (hmmm)

The Toyota Prius hybrid car. This is the car that could show the way forward for auto industry, or represents everything that's wrong with the current environmental debate. It depends on your opinion, but if you're interested or aware of sustainability issues and the auto industry, then the Prius is a vehicle that is hard to ignore, and one we've talked a lot about in the past.

I'm ashamed to say though, that we'd never actually driven one before - something I always felt slightly uncomfortable about. (Would it be fair to say that it is a foolish man who criticises or raves about a product without experiencing it for himself?)

Simpson drives the Prius down 'the 5' towards San Diego

While in LA though, we finally got to drive one. This is interesting in itself - the fact that the Prius has now appeared in Alamo's rental section either means that there's massive demand for this green product in LA (possible), or Toyota are now into a world of oversupply and large discounting to rental fleets with this car, as it heads into its twilight years (equally possible).

So what's it like? Well, strange and totally normal in equal bouts. Allow me to expand. Firstly, starting-up the Prius is a wee bit different to a normal car. Get in, slot the 'key' in the dash and press the 'power' button (this only works if you have your foot on the brake as with most automatics - as Mark discovered to his consternation in LAX when he couldn't get it to move!). This is where it gets weird. Having pressed 'power', the car cycles through a kind of 'check' process, before 'ready' appears in the display. But (assuming the car isn't flat cold) there's then no noise. The engine doesn't 'start'. The car's running off battery electric power - and this can be a tad disconcerting.

The view that greets the driver in the Prius. Gear knob described below is under the airvent to the right of the steering wheel. Speed, gear etc appears in the thin array directly under the windscreen.

You then continue as you would in any normal car - except where a manual or auto shift gearlever would normally sprout from the floor, here there's a massive bin and set of cup holders. The gear selector is a kind of knob on the dash next to the steering wheel. You move it across and down to put it in 'drive', and across and up to 'reverse'.

Pootling down the road at a few miles an hour, there's still no noise - as the electric motor powers the car at low speeds - but accelerate, or get beyond about 15 miles an hour, and the petrol motor now kicks in - pretty seemlessly it must be noted - and powers you down the road. Slow down, and the engine cuts out again - energy from the brakes being 'recovered' to charge the battery. But there's an extra trick here, which after a while gets quite addictive. If you pull the gear knob directly 'down' from it's normal resting spot you put it into an extra mode - 'B' - which activates full 'regenerative braking'. This improves the amount of energy the battery can grab back, and has the effect of slowing the car down an awful lot - in the same way that engine braking does in a manual gearbox car but multiplied. It becomes quite a game to see if you can read traffic, or predict lights, and actually manage to slow down just in this regenerative mode, without touching the foot brakes at all.

Central screen in 'regeneration' mode. Displays little 'cars' for every 50 watts you regerate, and bar graph shows fuel consumption over the last 5,10,15,20 minutes - higher bars are better.

Coupled with the dashboard display which shows fuel consumption, energy flows, state of battery charge, and how much you're managing to 'regenerate', driving this car become a game: mostly to drive as economically as possible, but (when one gets fed up, or the red mist descends) to drive as un-economically as possible! Driving like a yob reveals that the Prius has quite a decent turn of speed... but appears to have an egg-whisk fitted under the hood. Floor the throttle, and the CVT transmission being controlled by that dashboard gear knob means that there's no sense of kick-down, or stepping of ratios - instead you get what might best be described as a loud 'mooing' noise coming from the motor up front.

The central screen in 'energy' modes:

Electric power only, either at a stop or at low speeds

Petrol power only, feeding power to charge the battery

Petrol motor and electric (drawing from battery) work together under hard acceleration

Regenerating - energy from braking captured to charge the battery

Other observations? The batteries, which reside under the boot floor noticably intrude on the boot space - the boot floor is really high. This raises the question as to how forthcoming electric cars like the Chevy Volt, and Shai Agassi & Renault/Nissan's project will package the batteries in their vehicles - particularly as they are talking about swapping the whole unit in and out. The Prius suggests that - done badly - lots of batteries have the potentially to take away space and utility in the average car, which could put consumers off.

Overall though, the Prius - it pains me to say this - is very impressive. It's a technical marvel - and asks for very little compromise of its driver and passengers. You can sense that technically, this is a hugely complex machine, but that doesn't translate in the driving experience. Instead, two things dominate. Firstly, that display makes you acutely aware of how your driving style is affecting how much resource you're using - and I suspect it unobtrusively 'eggs people on' to drive more economically. But a 'game' is perhaps the best way to describe the Prius, in that you are also totally removed from the experience. That the technical gubbins is all tucked away and disguised for you is admirable, but totally removes you - the driver - from the action. The Prius is like driving an appliance, actually 'driving' it isn't 'fun' in any way. I'd really like to believe that the future of driving and cars will be a tactile, involved experience - where skill and precision from the driver can result in a truly satisfying experience being had - and that's not true here.

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. Sure the Punto is smaller, and the comparison not entirely even - but the Punto achieves what the Prius is vaulted for (fuel economy) in a far, far simpler way, is quicker and just as comfortable for two. It's a hell of a lot more fun to drive too.

Related articles:
Prius, Prius everywhere... here's why.
Sign by the 'X' for Toyota's next hybird
Toyota - ready to redefine mobility at last?

Images: Joseph Simpson and Robb Hunter (who is a transport track, Industrial design student at University of Cincinnati, and all round top guy for sorting so much out on the west coast) for the Movement Design Bureau. Photos are available for use under a creative commons license, please reference this page.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 15th February 2008