15 YEARS LATER, FORD FORECAST LOOKS GENIUS
24.7 concept car, pilloried when first introduced, was a harbinger of change
Fifteen years ago, Ford chief executive Jacques Nasser was fired, in part because he dared tell the assembled automotive industry at the 2000 North American International Auto Show that “horsepower and zero-to-60 times” were dead.
Both he and Yahoo’s chief executive, Jerry Yang, said automotive performance in the future would be measured in megahertz and access times. He even introduced a concept car — the 24.7 — deliberately rendered as a characterless box to emphasize that, to the customers of the future, only the car’s interior and its connectivity to the Internet would matter.
The attempted transformation bombed. The 24.7 was roundly pilloried, Yahoo was eclipsed by Google and, barely 18 months later, Nasser was ousted, on his way to dismantling Polaroid, yet another American icon.
Fast-forward 15 years and one of the most eagerly anticipated reveals at the 2015 Los Angeles Auto Show was Volvo’s Concept 26, so named because Volvo believes self-driving could “reclaim” as much as 26 minutes of wasted commuting time. Hidden under the requisite silk drape, the standing-room-only crowd of assembled automotive journalists anticipated a truly phantasmagorical vision of the future, Volvo being one of the leading lights in automotive autonomy.
What they got when Anders Tylman-Mikiewicz, general manager of Volvo’s Monitoring and Concept Center, lifted the drape, was — spoiler alert — a seat and a dashboard. Volvo’s deconstruction of the automobile into nothing but a life-support system for computerized apps and cellphone connectivity was even more complete than Ford’s. Behold the brave new world, Volvo seemed to say, it doesn’t even have wheels.
Indeed, while the cars released at the actual motor show were a lunch-bag letdown — when Volkswagen’s jacked-up-10-millimetres Beetle Dune is roundly acclaimed as the highlight, you know an auto show was boring — the real highlight was the show’s Connected Car Expo.
For instance, forget Uber. You know taxi driving as a profession is dead when the president of L.A.’s taxi commission himself tells an incredulous audience that the future of inner-city commuting is “taxibots,” tiny Googlelike self-driving runabouts without drivers.
The up side, says Eric Spiegelman, is that taxis will be able to self-drive 160,000 kilometres a year rather than the 80,000-kilometre limit on a human driver. And by eliminating the expense of having to pay a driver — the hardest thing about listening to nerds talk about autonomy is they view human beings as line items — Spiegelman estimates the cost of a Los Angeles cab could be reduced to as little as 25 US cents a mile, a dramatic reduction from today’s US$2.70.
That makes the annual cost of cabbing the 22,000 kilometres the average Los Angeleno commutes every year just US$3,500, Spiegelman says, a long way from the estimated US$7,500 he estimates a Toyota Camry would cost. It would also result in the “democratization” of taxicab service as roboticized cars would have no trouble picking up fares from the “hood” (Spiegelman’s words, not mine!). Of course, this would mean some 3,000 Los Angeles cabbies would be out of work. And for all the UberX drivers gloating at your conquest of the taxi industry (30,000 strong in L.A., says Spiegelman), that means you, too. Even public transportation will be threatened, Spiegelman says, noting that the taxibot will be cheaper than bus fare for rides of less than seven miles.
There wasn’t a single major EV announcement at the Los Angeles show, usually the greenest of shows. Unlike the seemingly stalled electric-car revolution, the rush toward automation is almost out of control. Besides Tesla’s somewhat premature unveiling of Autopilot (owners are already posting scary videos of out-of-control Model S cars), Brian Cooley, CNET’s editor-atlarge and emcee of the Connected Car Expo, noted Audi’s anticipated introduction of Piloted Driving next year, Cadillac’s Super Cruise the year after and a seemingly endless litany of autonomous-driving projects rolling on to 2025.
Indeed, automotive autonomy is such a growth industry in Silicon Valley that there is a shortage of robotics engineers. Uber, for instance, has raided so many engineers from Carnegie Mellon that it has decimated the university’s Robotics Engineering Center and Elon Musk is so desperate for “hardcore software engineers” he recently tweeted that he will be “interviewing people personally.”
Lost in all these disruptive announcements — mechanics may not be needed for future car repairs and updates because they will be done “over the air” or the 100 million lines of computer code in our cars will soon grow to 300 million — there was some comfort for we old fuddyduddies.
Gary Silberg, KPMG’s resident automotive expert, is still bullish on car ownership.
“Calling for the death of cars would be wrong,” Silberg told Connected Car attendees, noting that autonomy might see more “mission-specific” cars and selfdriving will actually see “miles commuted per person” in automobiles “soar.”
Nonetheless, when industry experts need to defend the very existence of the automobile against the intruders from California, you know the motor world is changing. Somewhere in semi-retirement, Jacques Nasser is smiling.