CES 2018 Trend 2: New Mobility Concepts Herald the Future of Distribution
This year’s show gave us an evolved look at the power of autonomy, centered around the experience that goes beyond driving itself. We saw the emergence of mobility as a service, underscoring consumers’ increasing reluctance to own cars. Daimler showed off SmartCar’s car2go service, a smart car sharing service where consumers can pick up and drop off a car at the car2go location of their choice, and pay forty cents a minute for usage. Think of it as the Citibike of cars. Car2go recently celebrated their millionth customer.And not to be outdone, BMW launched a similar concept with Msini called ReachNow, with the same pricing and model and, for now, less availability.
And it’s not just about moving people — true mobility involves moving people and things, wherever, whenever consumers want. For example, Toyota unveiled e-Pallette, a mobility concept that doubles as an autonomous retail platform, which consists of a fleet of multi-use vehicles that essentially functions like a self-driving store on wheels in the urban environment. Buoyed by partnerships with Pizza Hut, Uber, and Amazon, e-Pallette shows that once autonomous technology takes off in cars, the supercharged mobility system will bring a paradigm shift to the distribution model of many other industries such as retail, healthcare, and restaurants. When a fleet of self-driving cars are ready to deliver your products to any customer who requests them, distribution becomes a highly modularized and customizable experience that brands will need to manage. Moreover, Ford unveiled a plan to build a similar mobility system powered by autonomous vehicles at their CES keynote.
Moreover, with autonomous technology doing the driving, consumers will have time to pay attention to other things. This CES showed that many automakers are now trying to capitalize on the new media opportunity by building giant infotainment systems and connected screens into the dashboard of many concept cars unveiled this year. It is fascinating to see how each automaker designs the interior of their cars once the steering wheel becomes irrelevant and how that reflects their vision for the future of in-vehicle experience. The PR darling that stole the show was start-up Byton’s experience-driven SUV, but next-gen infotainment systems popped up at many of the traditional car companies as well, from Mercedes’s new MBUX infotainment system to Kia’s integration with Google Assistant and Google Home. Harmon even came out with a concept that puts a screen on the roof of your car.
And what’s powering autonomy? This CES showed us two prevailing technologies: LiDAR and camera-based systems Mobileye, an Intel platform with investment from BMW, debuted its new EyeQ4 SoC camera-based autonomous system. Velodyne, the leader in LiDAR technology, debuted the VLS-128 solid state LiDAR sensor, which is being implemented in fleets of vehicles to be launched later in 2018. Think of the cameras as providing the context (“You are approaching an object”), whereas LiDAR provides the content (“You are approaching another car”). Currently, the majority of manufacturers, with the exception of Tesla, are using LiDAR to power their autonomous driving OS. Going forward, LiDAR technology will complement camera-based computer vision in next-gen systems, combining both technologies to gain a complete data set to help autonomous vehicles make more informed, fast, safe decisions.
For brands, the vision of future mobility on display at CES means that, in tandem with the fight for home platform control, cars will soon become an open battle ground for consumer attention. Whether it is for the passengers inside or a pedestrian it passes by, cars of the future will no longer just be means of transportation — they will become home theaters on wheels, stores on wheels, and even emergency clinics on wheels. Soon, all brands will need a new distribution strategy that takes autonomous cars into account, which some of the innovative brands have already started.
The mobile retail concepts powered by autonomous vehicles that Toyota and Ford showcased heralds an enormous shift in how brands can deliver their products to customers. While “stores on wheels” may be easy to envision, the real challenge for brands lies in how they will develop the software interface to connect with customers in order to deliver the right products to customers whenever and wherever they need it.
