TEN THINGS WE LEARNED FROM JLR’S TECH FEST 2017
1. Every Jaguar and Land Rover launched from 2020 will be electrified. Ralf Speth, the company’s Chief Executive, announced this commitment at the event, and electric models from Jaguar’s past, present and future were all on display.
2. What is our future? Cyber Utopia or Cyber Dystopia? According to Anders SormanNilsson, futurist, innovation strategist and author, “our future will revolve around combining the best of the analogue past with the best of the digital future, where tradition and technology play together.”
3. In 2015 machine power trumped the brain power of a mouse. In 2023 it will surpass the brain power of a human being. Meanwhile, the cost of industrial robots is one-twenty-third what it was just five years ago.
4. The author Douglas Adams came up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies. Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 30 is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; anything that gets invented after you’re 30 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be all right really.
5. A panel discussion about the future of mobility revealed the (not so) startling fact that Millennials (those in the 22-35 age range) get just as excited about cars as luxury items that say something about who you are and what you stand for, as private and personal spaces to be customised and enjoyed, and as a pleasant way of making a journey, as we do, as our fathers did and as our grandfathers did before them. And no, they are not too struck on the idea of carsharing! Needless to say, an electronic vote from the journalists present on the question “has car ownership reached the end of the road?” came out with a resounding “no” from 77 per cent of the audience.
6. Women form around 11 per cent of JLR’S overall workforce today, but recent intakes are around half and half between male and female.
7. Robots are traditionally the bad guys in popular culture and are presented as a clear and present threat to humankind (think Terminator), but they have already taken over repetitive and menial tasks in various walks of life. In manufacturing they are faster, better and more consistent than the humans they replace. Over time, though, we will apparently learn to live with them and see them as liberating, but they will never be able to take away from us the true experience of living life as a human being and they will never be able to make judgements involving imagination.
8. “Diesel is the Devil” according to Simon Birkett, founder and director of Clean Air in London, and he would like to see all diesel vehicles banned from the city. Thankfully, there were more reasoned folk on the panel who pointed out that modern diesel vehicles built to the Euro6 standard are sufficiently clean, but there was still a strong opinion that diesels built before 2008 without filters should be banned.
9. Owners of diesel cars have had £35bn wiped off the value of their cars as a result of the recent paranoia in the media, and a single cruise ship emits in one year as much pollutant as one million diesel cars, according to Quentin Willson, who argues for a more pragmatic and holistic approach to the problems posed by diesel emissions.
10. JLR is the only motor manufacturer to have successfully launched a new diesel-powered vehicle in the United States since the VW dieselgate scandal.