Cars
Posted January 10, 2012 @ 9:37 am
Listening to NPR on the way to work this morning, two auto-industry guys were talking about the car-related tech being unveiled at CES. More access to social networks. Entertainment. Connectivity. These are the things that are going to, as one of them put it, turn cars into smart cars in the same way that mobile phones transitioned to smart phones.
Bullshit.
Cars are for transportation, and transportation is inherently unsafe. Human error coupled with 2,000 lbs. of metal and plastic moving with a tremendous amount of momentum is dangerous enough that I can hardly believe people find it an acceptable risk. But for some reason, these hurtling, oversized pinballs need Facebook and apps and TV screens?
The only sea-change in automotive technology will occur when the car ceases to be necessary. Until then, adding Twitter to someone’s dashboard is going to do nothing but cause more accidents. It’s bad enough to distract drivers with useless navel gazing, but when you couple that with the traditional UX anti-patterns that most car designers follow, you’re entering a world of pain.
The solution to traffic and the awfulness of being locked inside a vehicle while commuting can’t and shouldn’t be solved by finding myriad ways to distract ourselves from the fact that we’re wasting hours of our lives staring at tail lights while being subjected to the dangerous, often angry, selfish behavior of others. Traffic, as a problem, should be solved by eliminating traffic. Strike at the head, three more grow back; strike at the heart, and you’ve got a chance at killing the beast.
Cars need to die. They—like the dumb phones that came before the iPhone—need to be done away with in favor of something so superior that no one can imagine going back to what we had before. That’s not an electric car. It’s not a car with three televisions in it. It may not even be a car that drives itself from place to place.
To be clear: the iPhone and phones that have followed in its footsteps are not phones—they’re full-blown computers. It’s a total rethinking of how we approach mobile communication. In the same way, the thing that up-ends the car industry won’t be a car with more features. It’ll be something completely different.
