You may remember us raving over Citroen's C-Cactus concept from Frankfurt 2007, some time ago. It wasn't just the design we liked though. Parts reduction, light-weight tech and pared, basic simplicity-of-thought got us fired up too. But it was the fact that Citroen said they were actually going to production-ise the thing that really got us excited.
After the marketing-led disappointment that is the DS sub-line (at least in its initial, DS3 form), the production Cactus was what we holding out for from Citroen.
While we weren't expecting the Cactus to make it to market in unfettered form, we'd hoped the principals and ideas behind the concept would win through. However, a report in autocar this week suggests that some of the pared back simplicity of the concept vehicle will now be junked in favour of more kit, and greater complexity for the production version - because the stripped concept was "too radical" for customer tastes:
"The Citroen C-Cactus concept car will reach production in a
different form, after customer clinics questioned the car’s
back-to-basics interior.
Research has uncovered aspects of the
car that potential buyers were not happy with. The lack of dashboard
and the way its instruments are clustered around the steering column
were said to be particularly off-putting.
Citroen is also considering fitting electric windows instead of the concept’s wind-up units, which reduce complexity."
I wonder when car makers are going to give up on these types of customer clinics, which only ever seem to produce 'negative' responses resulting in radical design and ideas rejected in favour of conservatism? At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, to quote Henry Ford: "If I'd have asked people what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse"...
Understanding the customer's needs, aspirations and desires is a critical part of launching a successful product, but if the car industry really wants to inovate; to move beyond the current mess it's still in, then can we politely suggest that they ditch clinicing like this? BMW, Ford and others claim to have. So why are the original innovators - Citroen - still at it?
As we hurtle towards this December's Copenhagen summit, there's almighty global momentum building around how seriously to tackle climate change. And in the end, whatever anyone might say, drastically reducing CO2 emissions implies drastically reducing energy consumption.
I'll be in Bath on Friday, that great Roman and Georgian spa city and powerhouse of British engineering, to talk at a Low Carbon Southwest event on a fairly contentious topic - cars.
We'll be exploring what meeting the energy reduction challenge in the car economy really involves. The event quotes the total number of new cars on the road as having risen by 17 per cent in the last decade.
But let me set this out more vividly, with numbers from the Worldwatch Institute:
The world vehicle fleet is estimated to be 622 million. In 2007, 71 million cars were produced, made up of 52.1 million cars and 18.9 million light trucks. In 2000 (remember, Millennium bug, parties, not long ago huh?) the fleet was 500 million. That's a 24% rise in just 7 years. Oh, and in 1950 the entire global vehicle fleet was just 53 million.
So when does the number of vehicles in the world saturate the market? Well it's already happened in key western markets. Yet the car industry still sees the answer as being to plough on and return to sales growth. Every big auto maker (there aren't any others) needs to see growth of at least 2% per year to survive in their current form. Who'd want to be in auto sales right now?
The first question is can this growth be sustained at the big picture level - can people move around with more and more vehicles on roads, while overall energy consumption from auto manufacturing, distribution and daily use gently falls, if we move to cleaner fuels and engines? The second question is what happens if sales growth isn't sustainable - if car sales are about to tip into permanent structural sales decline?
I'm going to focus on the latter and explain how it wouldn't be such bad news - great alternative stuff can replace those lost sales - vehicles we can use more, not less. Services that let us swing between modes of transport in ways we just can't today visualise. All this is possible with existing technology. And it can all be designed in a way that lowers overall energy consumption dramatically.
Of course, there's a third alternative. Moderately more efficient vehicles, gradual decline in auto industry, which adapts more slowly than society and its customers. Occasional death of car makers. No change. That's the one we need to try to avoid.
There's more details on the event here. It's free if you're a company researching low carbon stuff, if you're a designer or engineer or you are involved in low carbon startups.
The event runs from 9.30am to 12.30pm on Friday 2nd October at The Guildhall, Bath BA1 5AW.
What
were your favourite details from cars in Frankfurt? The vents on the
lower body sides of the VW L1 were far and away my personal highlight,
until I looked more closely at the door handles on the Rolls Royce
Ghost. But back in the real world, I was quietly impressed with the
fold-away centre seat design in the Ford Grand C-Max, a car that
otherwise leaves me quite cold. Aimed squarely at young families, I
suspect it’s a design feature that will not only make people go ‘oooh’
in the autoshow or dealership, but that they’ll really use in
day-to-day life - watch the video below to see a quick demo of how it
works.
To say that the seating layout in family cars is important, is as obvious as saying that cars need wheels. But it’s easy to forget that,
up until the age of about 20, many of us had difficult relationships
with our siblings. Certainly, the idea of sharing a rear bench for several hours
with my younger brother rarely filled me with joy, and there would
often be a spat ensuing before we’d got beyond the end of the
drive! So when the first Renault Scenic (the car that essentially created the c-size MPV segment in Europe) arrived, we’d pestered my dad into
buying one within just a couple of months of its launch – mainly because we
wanted separate, reclinable chairs, fold away picnic tables and cubbies
to keep our own books and walkmen in (no iPods in those days).
Ford Grand C-Max. Pity the name isn't as original as the folding chair design...
However,
the price of all that independent rear chair malarkey was that to fold
and remove them was quite a job (I seem to remember reading each chair
weighed something like 15kg.) – folding and removing them usually
resulting in skinned knuckles. So when Opel moved the game on with the
seven-seat Zafira, it invented a very neat seating arrangement termed
‘flex-7’ which meant you could convert the vehicle into a van, without
needing to take out all the chairs and leave them at home.
Access to that rearmost row of seats in the 7-seat MPV sector
remains something of an issue, however. In the smaller, c-segment
market that the Grand C-Max enters, the rearmost pews are only really
big enough for kids. Yet to get there, they need (and this applies to
most vehicles in the Segment such as the Scenic, Verso etc) to tilt and
slide the outermost centre row seat forwards to access the rearmost
row. Given that the chairs tend to be heavy, and the strength needed to operate the lever mechanisms
which tilt the chairs, this isn’t an ideal arrangement when small
people with tiny fingers are typically the ones trying to scramble into the back.
Now you see it...
...and now you don't
In
fact, it's quite rare that seven full seats are used in these cars,
typically it’s just five or six on the school run. So by allowing the
middle row centre seat to be ‘disappeared’ into one of its neighbours,
small kids can just walk straight through the vehicle to the back row
without needing to get mum or dad to perform chair gymnastics. Ford have spent time designing a centre chair which makes all this possible. As the back tumbles forwards
onto the squab, a secondary part of the backrest folds in, allowing the
seat to be compact enough to fit inside the outer seat squab. The
second device which allows this arrangement to work – and a critical
change from the designs found in the opposition, is that instead of
being secured to the floor, this centre seat is in fact supported by
cantilevering off the outer chair. Once folded away, what’s left is a clear gangway between
the two outer seats, allowing kids to simply climb in and walk through
to the rearmost row.
It’s one of those ideas that gets you thinking ‘why didn’t
anyone think of this before?’ But is a neat, if small, example of
user-research led design, where actually observing how families use
cars and spending time with them as they go about their lives has
resulted in something genuinely useful and new. It’s amusing to hear,
too, that Ford’s engineering and design teams aren’t above playing with
Lego Technic in order to help them work out how the mechanism would
work. We wonder if it was spending time observing kids that gave them that idea too.
Posted by Joseph Simpson on 22nd September 2009
Disclosure: Ford is sponsoring the Movement Design Bureau's research work in 2009
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.
While Ford is busy designing cars (questionably) around a mythical Italian female persona called Antonella, it and other companies need to be adapting themselves to interact with another group entirely.
They may seem virtual, but they're very real, and they come with loyal, influential followers. And they don't wait to be hired - they crave to be hired and have more useful insights along the way than most who already are.
Drew Smith is one of a new generation of commentators, driving conversations online about the future. Subject experts, independent of mind and building their careers around a portfolio - of experience, opinion, connections and commissions. He edits the Downsideupdesign blog.
Amy talks to him below. Listen carefully, because he's exactly the kind of person who is starting to influence how brands are perceived, design conversations happen, and connections are forged. In the past, people either got jobs in an industry or didn't. Once they were in, they got locked behind walls for years, until they got onto a press spokesperson list. Now they can dive into and across industry projects, often hired because they've already articulated problems publicly. They can build their own unique identity, online content and networks of supporters, share their ideas and work together more easily with others than many who work in siloed departments. Many are cross-discipline, combining understanding of product, service and interactive design.
Drew is a vehicle designer and expert in making sense of the future of the autombile and car brands. Check out his views from earlier this summer on the failure of car companies to interest the 'digital generation'. It's important stuff that doesn't usually get talked about.
Drew is unique, but of course he's not - he's one of an emerging group. You might be carving out a similar purpose - in urban planning, product design, social software, interactive design, service design, environment technologies or services. The sky's the limit. If so, we'd love to get to know you.
We've said before and we'll say again, open, networked forms of design and collaboration are going to change how we solve many problems. They'll also shape the future of our cities, towns and villages, how we work in them, the ways we move and interact in them, the vehicles we design and the way they fit together.
Some of this is about cost - build something once, openly and others can improve it. But much of it is about the culture of open source designers and problem solvers.
Here I talk with San Francisco-based virtual reality and hacker god Mitch Altman, inventor of, amongst other things TV-B-Gone, and Vinay Gupta, open source hardware guru and inventor of the Hexayurt open source refugee shelter.
I ask whether these new networks of designers – often in the form of hackers or open source communities - spend too much time focused on arguing about the need to break down existing structures. Is there more happening beyond that? What can those networks be doing now – to create real value? Do hackers and open source networks have an identity and meaning that can defined by what they are, rather than what they aren't?
I also ask whether the hacker scene has started to build its own financial infrastructure yet?
Design Museum, Butler's Wharf, London. 9 July 2009.
I’ve had several conversations recently with people who are either in or strongly connected to the auto industry, who’ve all told me the same thing:
“In the future, we’ll all have two cars – a petrol/diesel/hybrid for long distance, and an electric car for city/local trips.”
This isn’t just interesting because it’s completely different to what they’d have told you two years ago (although that in itself is an important sign of how much the market and mindset has moved). No, it’s that in all straight-faced seriousness, they believe a majority of people will park (and own) two cars on their drive in years to come.
While conversations with people in the industry tend to be a bit abnormal anyway, as they quickly turn to talk of how many classic Porsche’s they’ve got in their garage - due to it being their passion, the stark truth is that in the UK less than 30% of people have access to more than one car, and in urban areas that figure shrinks dramatically. Most people view cars as a convenient, comfortable way of getting direct from A to B – and choose a single vehicle that best suits their need. Their car tends not to be something they’re obsessional about.
Currently, focus, energy and cash is all going into new powertrain development. In many regards it needs to. But there’s an unstated assumption (alluded to by those guys I quote above) that once we’ve overcome the current roadhump, and get workable electric / hydrogen cars to market, business in the car industry will continue pretty much as it did before. People will go down to their local car dealer and choose what suits their needs and desires, every two or three years.
There’s a problem with that though. The average person can afford to run, maintain and often only has space to park, one vehicle. Which vehicle they choose to buy right now depends on what their personal circumstances are and the types of journeys they do. Hence young people living around cities tend to buy small hatchbacks, and middle class families buy large estates or (more recently) SUVs. Both work best within a certain usage envelope, but if needed, can cover every single transport base (what I mean by this is that a city car often isn’t at home on a motorway, but if needs be, you could still drive one all the way to Milan tomorrow).
This cover-all bases approach is one of the reasons current vehicles are so comparatively inefficient. Creating right-sized vehicles with the right powertrains, for a variety of different journey scenarios, therefore makes a load of sense. But it creates a scenario where suddenly, your average one-car buyer is faced with the prospect of buying something that can no longer meet every single journey need. That the car industry’s answer to this appears to be “well, you’ll just have to buy two cars!” makes me feel a little bit sick. Reports suggest that even if we replaced most of the current gasoline vehicle fleet with EVs, the planet would still be in fairly major mess. To quote BP’s incoming Chairman: “The growth of car ownership and airtravel is unsustainable.”
This is one reason we’re seeing start-up car companies such as Riversimple promoting the idea of leasing rather than selling to customers - their argument is that it encourages them to develop long lasting vehicles, without built in obsolescence, which are absolutely optimised for their environment. It’s probably why Daimler are quietly building out a potentially very interesting next generation car club in the shape of car-2-go, and most shockingly of all – one of the reasons we’re seeing Exxon getting not only into electric cars, but vehicle sharing, with the announcement this week that they were behind an EV being dropped into a pilot programme in Baltimore.
Of course, while most customers aren’t as car obsessed as your author or those working in the car industry, they are however, quite accustomed to the idea of owning their own car. It’s a big jump to just having access to one as a means of mobility, one that other people can also use. In the average customer’s mind, this throws up a whole set of doubts and concerns.
There are ways to begin to address this, and I’d argue now’s the time to focus on doing so. Primarily, having recognised automotive brands address the issue and be present in the space is a key step. Not to do a disservice to Zipcar and their ilk who really kick-started and ‘own’ the car-share space right now, but Daimler getting into the sector excites me quite a lot more. They have the name, size and capital to lever mobility on demand/car sharing as a key part of their business, if they so choose. They can reach and communicate to people, that not only they offer such a service at all, but fundamentally, communicate what the hell it really is and why you might want to consider using it. The name, presence and PR machine means that – done wholeheartedly, they could reach millions of potential customers in a way it would take Zipcar years to do.
This leads me to the second key element, which is education. It’s easy to assume that most people now know what someone like Zipcar actually does. But the truth is, most probably still don’t. The name, ‘car sharing’ is confusing, for a start. You don’t actually get in the car at the same time as a stranger – but a lot of people think you do.
I’d advocate a large-scale education programme – which reaches all the way from teaching groups of kids about mobility and the future of cars, as demonstrated very ably by Dan Sturges:
And it should run all the way through existing industry and governmental channels, reaching right up to dealership education programmes. Helping the people in the sales end of the automotive industry not only develop new models of ‘selling’, but to assist people navigating their way through various mobility and transport options of the future may be the key to making this stuff work in a big way.
Done right, the people in the car showroom of the future could offer much more than the ability to simply sell someone a vehicle on a three year finance deal. They could help consumers overcome the misconceptions that currently surround not only diesels, hybrids, EVs, and hydrogen cars, but also car-sharing, leasing, and mobility on demand. Ultimately, the car dealership of the future becomes a one-stop mobility shop; which does much more than just sell cars. In times when many car dealerships are struggling to stay in business due to plummeting car sales, surely it’s an idea that many could embrace?
Speak to most people, and they'll tell you that the real revolutionary area of car design in the next ten-to-fifteen years will be the interior - and more specifically, the interface. J Mays went to great lengths last month to emphasize how important the HMI would be in future, and just how quickly it's changing.
Ford wants to be a leader in this area - and the Lincoln C concept, with its all singing, all dancing future-format of Sync, complete with apps, avatars and assistants, is the company's statement of intent to this end. Ultimately though, digital convergence in vehicles has the potential to be problematic. As Jean Jennings suggested in our recent interview with her "I always say, 'if it doesn't make you drive better, make it go away'". This gives designers and engineers a potential conflict when it comes to a future pointing towards future hybrids, EVs and so forth.
Put simply, three main factors determine how efficient and economical a car will be. Its configuration (size, weight, drivetrain type). The conditions (traffic and meteorological) within which it is being driven. And the difficult one for designers - the person behind the wheel. How the driver physically inputs on the car's controls (accelerator, brake, steering) massively impacts upon its economy - which is why we often see huge disparity in fuel economy figures on a given car. Clubfoots Charmer and Simpson managed a rather pitiful combined figure of 38mpg from our week in a Honda Insight. But Honda have been running a hypermiling challenge which has seen people get up to 80mpg.
It was this issue that a Ford team set out to solve with their Smartgauge system - the instrument panel on the new Ford Fusion Hybrid. The question at hand, in its most basic format, was how to help people get the best possible economy from the vehicle, without distracting or annoying them - and without frightening away those new to hybrids. Jeff Greenberg, project leader on the Smartgauge programme, explained to us how the team developed two guiding principals based on this. The first was the notion of a journey - allowing a driver to progress, learn and develop their driving by growing with the system over time. The second was the idea of a coach - a positive encouragement to help drivers get the most out of their vehicle, as opposed to being lectured and bossed into how to drive more economically. Over to Jeff...
Ultimately, the key breakthrough Ford have made with Smartgauge feels similar to Apple with the iPhone. They have created something simple to look at, which by using just screens (rather than physical knobs, buttons or gauges) can display different information, which is (potentially) infinitely configurable and changeable via software updates. Using two, 5.5' TFT screens either side of the central speedometer, Jeff and his team were able to arrive at four different 'levels' of operation by which a driver could use Smartgauge and interact with the Fusion hybrid. All of which sounds a little daunting before you see it - so the car is set up to be quite simple, and welcoming upon your first acquaintance with it, as demonstrated to us in this video...
While other hybrids tend to feature either a basic setup to indicate how the drivetrain is working (Ford's own Escape Hybrid), or a complex set of show-off graphs and complex diagrams (Toyota Prius), the Smartgauge is designed to make the Fusion Hybrid appeal to all-comers - from those buying their first hybrid, to those who are committed hypermilers who've clocked 100,000 miles in their Prius(es). The driver can choose from four different levels of display, which, as they progress from one to the next, gradually adds extra layers of information to help inform on what the car is doing, and to help the driver extract the best economy. The levels are known as Inform (most basic), Enlighten, Engage and Empower (most advanced)...
But what's it actually like on the road? Having had Jeff walk us through the system at a standstill, we went out on the roads of Dearborn to experience it for ourselves...
What's impresses about the display is its clarity and functionality, regardless of which level you are in. It could clearly appeal to multiple different types of driver. Newbies won't be scared off, while those who enjoy showing off their Prius's fuel economy graphs will love the most advanced levels where you can do things like see how much power drain the vehicle's accessories are creating. Crucially, as it's on the dashboard and in the driver's line of site, Smartgauge really makes it easy to coax the car along in EV mode for long periods (therefore achieving better fuel economy) without taking your eyes off the road. The bright green glowing EV symbol that lights up in the more advanced modes is a great 'corner of the eye' tell-tale to this effect.
The project illustrates the clear benefits that come from new ways of thinking, and greater openness and collaboration in the auto industry. The Smartgauge team worked closely not only with designers and engineers within Ford, but with the most famous user-design/research guys of them all - IDEO, and conducted extensive, ethnographic research - not only with hybrid drivers, but with those who drove hummers, bicycles, and even professional athletes and their trainers. Ultimately, this advanced and comprehensive approach to research, coupled with a simple, but subtle, rethink of how to utilise TFT screens to make most appropriate use of available software - as opposed to hardware - results in a highly impressive, engaging vehicle.
That the car itself is really impressive, needing no excuses for being a hybrid, helps. However, this display is the car's piece-de-resistence, one that will not only help drivers to achieve greater fuel economy than they might on their own, but keep them engaged, surprised and delighted by the car in a way that many vehicles don't once that new car sheen has worn off. Not only does the system make the car more fun to drive, it makes those behind the wheel better drivers. In our view, that means the team behind it deserve the upmost praise and respect.
Posted by Joseph Simpson on 18th June 2009
Disclosure: Ford is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work throughout 2009. We have an independent brief - and want to hear from you if it doesn't seem that way.
