We ride in Audi’s self-driving AI:ME
Why does the self-driving future never quite arrive? We give chase in Audi’s AI:ME.
One theme dominated discussion at January’s CES tech show in Las Vegas: autonomous cars are driving themselves further into the future, not getting nearer. ‘Two, three, four years ago, when you walked around here it was like, okay, we’re going to have mass adoption of autonomous drive everywhere in two years’ time,’ Daimler CEO Ola Källenius told me. ‘That has been replaced by maybe some realism.’ Audi’s sales and marketing boss Hildegard Wortmann agreed: ‘Everybody has cooled down a little on how fast this can happen.’
Which didn’t stop her revealing Audi’s vision of how an autonomous car will look from the inside. The AI:ME urban concept car was first shown in Shanghai last year, but this was the first time Audi had allowed anyone to ride in it. So, does it feel like the future? And is it a future we buy into?
IT SEES WHAT YOU SEE
The AI:ME has a 55-inch OLED display around the base of the windscreen, and eye and facial motion capture technology which tracks what you’re looking at on it. Audi stunted a scenario in which I chose my lunch from an on-screen menu, each image enlarging as I looked at it, and had it delivered to my ‘home’ (actually a charging point in a Vegas casino car park) just as I arrived. Send your destination and ETA with your order, and the Deliveroo of the future could time the arrival of your grub to match.
Lunch ordered, I donned one of the AI:ME’s virtual reality headsets and took a helicopter tour of China’s spectacular Guilin province, using Audi’s Holoride tech. It matches the VR world you’re viewing to the movement of the car you’re in; turning the image to the right as the car does, for example, thus making you feel more immersed in the experience and less travel-sick.
TIME IS, OF COURSE, MONEY
Both systems are impressive, especially the eye-control system’s ability to gauge exactly where you’re looking by the movement of your facial muscles when your pupil is obscured by sunglasses. But both feel like solutions in search of a problem. Car makers would dearly like to occupy and monetise the time autonomy frees up for you. But their attempts to get your attention – the VR, in this case – are unlikely ever to be as compelling as Netflix
or Instagram or whatever has replaced them by then. The next best thing is to get you to interact with your digital world through the car, perhaps with the aid of big screens and eye control.
SELF DRIVING? I MEAN, BARELY
The plants growing around the AI:ME’s dashboard and sunroof are gimmicky, and the steering wheel which folds and retreats into the dash, leaving a walnut desk, makes for great concept-car theatre, but you’d need to be very certain of your car’s ability to pilot itself before packing away the wheel. A ride around an empty car park wasn’t enough to assess the AI:ME’s autonomous driving chops: it’s a pure, hand-built, one-off concept car so it rides a little crashily, but at low speeds and on a route it was familiar with it steered and stopped itself smoothly.
A CABIN TO MAKE YOUR HOME LOOK ORDINARY
It’s the more subtle features of the cabin that work best and feel most relevant. The cabin is incredibly spacious for a car that’s a modest 4.3 metres long, making intelligent use of the space freed up by the electric drivetrain. There’s no leather, but muted grey cloth borrowed from high-end furniture, velvet (really!) and Corian, a resin-mineral composite used instead of marble or granite for kitchen worktops. It feels fresh, original and calm.
THE REAL WIN IS QUALITY TIME
The seats are my favourite AI:ME feature, and display perhaps the simplest and best thinking. They look terrific: like Eames chairs, or something by Eero Saarinen. Audi’s interior designers figured that a largely self-driven car would proceed more calmly, reducing the need to clamp its occupants in place.
And freed of the need to face forward, you might want to turn to your passengers for a chat once you become a passenger too. So the seats have simply been made broad and flat to allow you to shift in them more easily. Nobody’s going to make any money from it, but having a face-to-face conversation with your family is surely the best way to spend whatever time autonomy eventually frees for us.
At low speeds, on a route it was familiar with, the AI:ME steered and stopped itself smoothly