Chris Liu is an interaction designer at Mercedes-Benz. He shares his expertise on conceptual and design strategy for products. Follow his reading list on Quibb.
In our conversation with Chris, one thing became immediately clear: cars are now much more than just their physical attributes. Increasingly, the software is what matters most. The entire industry is shifting in ways that you might expect, if you consider cars to be hardware — the car has become a platform.
In the past we’ve looked at cars as physical objects, preferring to focus on performance and visual aspects — the styling, fuel efficiency, and power. But as people and car makers begin to think about cars as their own platform, that’s all changing. According to Chris, soon consumer choice with respect to cars will be all about the car’s technology, the platform and the OS:
“We’re starting to see the paradigm shifting. Obviously we’re not there yet. I think people who buy cars still buy cars based on gas mileage and how many horsepower it has, things that are still the chief criteria for the way people buy vehicles, but I definitely think we’re headed in that direction.”
It’s a paradigm shift to appreciating the experience of traveling in a car rather than the physical object that gets you there. This is further evidenced in the growing industry of ride-sharing (where people care about the interaction, convenience, and cost of getting from A to B over the vehicle itself) and the onset of autonomous vehicles, which will completely change how we view personal transportation.
The lure of a new platform
New platforms are key to building a massive, compelling, decade-defining product, that much was made clear from Apple’s App Store, which fueled growth of the iPhone by allowing third-party developers to build apps for Apple’s users.
These days, it seems, the way to build the next big company of this generation is to build a massive platform. Slack recently announced their new platform approach, and of course since the recent F8 conference everyone is excited about Facebook’s Messenger platform. Amazon Echo, while still a niche product, is getting rave reviews from early adopters and is another potential platform from the e-commerce giant.
A new platform is an exciting thing because it has great potential to change the way we do things, like the App Store did for smartphones. It creates new opportunities out of nowhere for businesses and developers, and consumers benefit.
As the way we interact with and buy cars changes, the software in cars becomes increasingly important. Because of how the industry is changing — towards electric vehicles, self-driving cars, and ridesharing, and away from traditional car ownership — our relationships with transportation changes, and that represents a huge opportunity for those smart enough to recognize it.
Change will be slow at first
You can’t talk about this without talking about Tesla, the first “software-driven” car maker. The way that they have gone about building a car is completely different from any other car company, in that it is a software-first experience. The mere fact that Tesla can push software updates to their cars whenever necessary puts them way ahead of the software capabilities of other automakers.
The main issue with software-driven vehicles is the coupling of the car’s lifecycle with that of the software. The idea of decoupling those two is completely new. People don’t buy new cars very often, and with the slow software update cycle, people don’t yet recognize or expect the software to provide even a fraction of what it’s capable of.
Phones are on an annual refresh rate. They have software updates that come anywhere from six months to nine months, whatever. A lot of cars aren’t even at that point. They’re still far off from that. From one model year to the next there could be hardly any innovation.
Something like the App Store or Messenger is a relatively open ecosystem: anyone can build an app or a chatbot, and once it’s approved, it’s on the platform and ready for anyone to use. Cars don’t work like that, and for safety reasons, likely never will. The auto industry is heavily regulated for safety and accessibility, and any software advancements have to go through rigorous quality assurance and testing.
As Chris says:
The downside of it is things just take a lot longer. There’s also reasons for it taking longer such as, we have government regulations in the automobile industry that an app company doesn’t have to deal with. There’s things like that where it just inherently puts some sort of delay into how long it takes to get a car out to market. When we design, for example, we’re working on basically the next generation systems for Mercedes. When we put all that stuff together, it has to go through all kinds of rigorous assessments for things like checking to make sure color blind people can use it and distraction testing.
This is not a bad thing. After all, cars are powerful and can be dangerous. We can all agree that color-blind and distraction testing are good things when it comes to driving around 1,000 ton pieces of metal. However, it makes for much slower adoption and innovation cycles.
Imagining what the future will look like
It’s useful to look at innovation theory here. It’s quite possible that we’re just starting to climb up the next S-curve of the evolution of the automobile. Once widespread adoption of a software and platform focused car emerges and is the new norm for consumers, we can expect the pace of innovation to pick up, and fast.
Right now, innovation in the automobile industry is focused in three main areas: electric vehicles, autonomous cars, and ridesharing. For the most part these are separate. But when the car as a platform reaches the tipping point, these three areas will converge and completely revolutionize the way we think about personal vehicles.
Ben Thompson has a great post about Uber 2.0, or “human self-driving cars,” that exemplifies the massive shift ahead (he also has a post about the future of cars in general that is definitely worth a read).
These innovations will converge into a new ecosystem — a new platform — that will forever change how we get from one place to another.
Perhaps most exciting, right now we can barely imagine how that will look. As Chris says, “It’s almost like the web 1.0 days, where design is on a new frontier of something and nobody knows what the heck to do with it and so we’re defining all kinds of new and different things for cars.”
But unlike the web 1.0 days, the car platform is a relatively closed ecosystem. There are massive incumbents in the automobile industry, and those pushing the envelope have realized that the opportunity lies in the software. Automakers aren’t traditionally builders of software, and so have been buying up software companies, establishing Silicon Valley-based offices, and funding startups, like GM’s $500 million investment in Lyft.
The future of cars is exciting to think about, and Chris is in the driving seat. He’s adamant about two key points: the future of the automobile industry is software based. And it will change the world.
