Core77

2011 Dodge Charger "Future of Driving" commercial: a cautionary tale

By Michael DiTullo - April 30, 2011

in Featured Items

As designers, we often engage in many of what we call "future of..." programs, for both clients as well as for ourselves. These projects often remove some of the constraints that exist in our current product developments cycle to focus on larger macro trends in human behavior and technology to try to look forward into the future. Cynically this is sometimes called crystal ball gazing, but it often it can reveal insights that can help us to course correct more production oriented programs. Hollywood has picked up on how amazing these kinds of future explorations can be in many movies over the past 50 years, such as the way HMI is portrayed in Minority Report (UI which is already looking old) and Iron Man (CAD interface).

These types of explorations have been going on for a long time in R&D departments, the pages of magazines, and as part of promotions. Sometimes they were amazingly close, and sometimes they are hilariously off. They are our best educated guess of what comes next after next. For a look at the history of such predictions, check out one of my favorite blogs Paleofuture.com

In these kinds of projects we often abstract existing behaviors to manifest a vision of where we think technology can take us. I LOVE this new Dodge commercial shows how that abstraction can quickly become irrelevance, annoyance, and even cause an outright backlash.

There are a lot of things that technology could do for us, but the question is, what do we WANT it to do for us and HOW. As software becomes ever more advanced, will it manifest itself in ways that feel genuinely mechanical? A nice example of this are the fly-by-wire systems in commercial aircraft that work hard to reproduce the feedback of mechanical linkages to pilots. Another example are tunnel mounted stick shifts in automatic cars. The gear selection in an automatic car could be a dial, a switch, or a touch screen, but we seem to prefer the large mechanical lever that emulates the mechanical shifter on a sports car. Is this longing for the more understandable what is behind retro styling and Steam Punk? Is the embrace of mechanical interfaces merely a transitional affordance or is it how human's prefer to interface?

I don't have the answers to any of those questions, but continue reading to see the bonus "Slippery Slope" commercial that pokes fun at Google's attempt to drive your car.

Originally found on autoblog

o

Favorite This
Q
10

Comment

Comments

mila

13 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

dont you remember the good ol' days when people werent too lazy to dress themselves, or walk their dog .. or open a simple fucken door knob on their own...video is sickening
!Report as spam
M4RK

13 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

Very thoughtful and enjoyable article!
!Report as spam
emanster provolone

13 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

All other arguements aside, what I find particularly amusing is a car company, once again, using a badass looking concept car to sell their sh*tty product!
!Report as spam
ryan

13 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

To MEP,

You started with "I hate driving". Dodge isn't targeting this towards you. It's for people that love driving a powerful muscle car. Having a computer drive for you takes the fun completely out of driving and would make it horrible. That is what dodge is saying.
!Report as spam
octo

13 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

"Is the embrace of mechanical interfaces merely a transitional affordance or is it how human's prefer to interface?"

Slot machines have a "stick shift" too - but who uses them?
!Report as spam
thomas

13 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

Oh but they will.

Robots will take over our driving.

It's inevitable...

!Report as spam
MEP

13 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

I hate driving. I hate traffic. I ride the bus precisely because I don't want to drive the car (also it's faster, costs less and is more socially responsible). I see more and more people around me making the same decision every day. I know people who wish they lived somewhere closer to a transit station so they could make the same decision.

I think Dodge is missing the point. No one gets to drive flat out through a tunnel in a muscle car. We sit in traffic, underground sometimes, smelling everybody's fumes and watching the guy on the bicycle ride past us. We spend hours of our lives commuting at a snail's pace while the people who have made different choices from ours play with their kids (because they got home faster) or at the very least, read a book on the bus.

Dodge is trying to use fear to sell cars, fear that we'll lose our independence. But we already lost it when we sold it to the auto industry and the oil industry.

So yes, I WANT technology to drive to work for me. It will do the job better and leave me FREE to do other, more important things. I don't like it when a device tries to think for in most cases. I like to choose my own food, pick out my own clothes and do all the other things that commercial depicted as being turned over to robots. But the one thing I DO actually want is to stop driving.
!Report as spam
David DenHerder

13 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

I think the main issue is not quite so much about whether we understand how something works or not, but how intuitive it feels to operate. A mechanical device is analog while an electronic device is digital. The way we humans process is very much analog, thus a purely mechanical device feels intuitive. The people at Apple understood this when they made a finger operated GUI that feels "stretchy" and scrolls at a variable rate depending on the velocity of the flick of your finger. Early computers didn't have the processing power to simulate an analog effect, but now they do, which is why your airplanes can simulate mechanical feedback. And feedback is the key here. When we operate a device our senses are continually taking in a flood of physical information and our body uses this to decide what to do next. If you push a button, how do you know if it worked if there isn't a noise, or a light, or resistance, or the actual result?

Another, secondary, issue is choice and control. I HATE it when a device tries to think for me or to anticipate what I'm going to do next. I hate auto-correct while I'm typing. I drove a car once that cut the power to the wheels if it sensed they were losing traction (which I HATED because I was driving in the snow), etc. You get the picture.
!Report as spam
dfunk006

13 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

Is the Dodge Charger trying to mock the Vokswagen Passat?
!Report as spam
John

13 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

True, I guess. Except maybe the irrational assumption here is that some form of a 'car' will always exist. Ironically the car is just another robot we "control".
!Report as spam