http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/09/how-car-companies-are-trying-to-make-car-ownership-attractive-to-millennials/379377/
By David Zax, September 2, 2014
Volkswagen's Ewald Goessmann and Chuhee Lee line up a selfie at the carmaker's Electronics Research Laboratory.
BELMONT, Calif.—"Smile!" says Korina Loumidi, snapping a selfie of the two of us on her iPhone. In the past hour, I've wandered through a Silicon Valley office building with all the trappings of one of the hot tech companies in the neighborhood: Google, Facebook, Apple. I've seen whiteboard walls scribbled on with marker, pool tables and ping-pong tables, a cluster of 3D printers, and an Xbox-equipped TV. Each room throngs with young employees, who like Loumidi are mostly in their late 20s, exhaling the entrepreneurial energy that hangs in the Northern Californian air.
Only I'm not at a tech company—and certainly not one that was recently a scrappy startup. I'm at a research outpost of Volkswagen, the 77-year-old German car company, and the iPhone on which Loumidi has just snapped our selfie is mounted to the dashboard of an "iBeetle," a new VW model that was designed in collaboration with Apple. The iBeetle app she's demonstrating—which, on top of a specialized selfie feature, integrates with the owner's Spotify, Facebook, and Twitter accounts—represents the latest attempt of a major car company to win back the attention of the next generation of would-be car buyers, many of whom are far more interested in the specs of the next iPhone than those of the next VW.
Research bears out the suspicion that Millennials, the generation born between the late 80s and the early 2000s, are less interested in cars than their parents were. People between the ages of 16 and 34 drove 23 percent fewer miles on average in 2009 than in 2001—"a greater decline in driving than any other age group," per U.S. PIRG. According to the New York Times, the Federal Highway Administration has further found that only about 46 percent of potential drivers 19 and younger had driver's licenses in 2008, down from about 64 percent in 1998. Trend pieces trot out variations of these statistics every few months, but the upshot for car makers is always the same. "We have to face the growing reality that today young people don't seem to be as interested in cars as previous generations," Toyota USA President Jim Lentz has said. Or, as U.S. PIRG's Phineas Baxandall has put it, starkly: "Millennials aren't driving cars."
There are all sorts of reasons why Millennials might be less interested in driving. Most simply, the recent recession dampened the purchasing power of many young people and their parents, and cars are expensive. It's also true that Millennials have a growing affinity for cities, where alternative transportation options are rife.
But a third trend underlying Millennial disenchantment with cars, according to many, has to do with the rise of online life. One recent study noted that Internet users, in particular, were less likely to have driver's licenses. A Zipcar-funded study found that about 40 percent of Millennials would rather lose access to a car than to their smartphone or laptop. Young people today are more excited by the latest product announcement from Apple than from Ford. The gleam is off the car and on the iPhone, which has automakers scrambling to get it back.
Though overrun by twenty-somethings like Loumidi, at ERL my main tour guides are Ewald Goessmann, the lab's executive director, and Chuhee Lee, its deputy director. At 49 and 38 respectively, Goessmann and Lee are uncharacteristically old as far as ERL employees go, and there's something of the feeling of a pair of college professors wandering among their students as we progress through the lab. Both have a youthful energy, though, and wear stylish fitted shirts that would make them at home among startup founders. Goessmann has only recently assumed this position, after years working for Audi (a VW-owned brand) in his native Germany. "Even two months here have been inspiring to me," he says of the move to Silicon Valley. "Every week you get new ideas."
A Wonka-esque energy infuses ERL. On one floor, a group of young researchers contemplate new ways to connect drivers to events in their area, scribbling notes on panels of frosted glass that double as a whiteboard. On another, a roomful of 3D printers hum, ready for rapid prototyping of ideas as they come to engineers. On another, social scientists tool around on a pair of driving simulators—one made from the sawed-off front half of an Audi A7, propped in front of a triptych of widescreen TVs—preparing to test a new in-car interface they hope could reduce distracted driving among Millennials. They won't show it to me, alas, since car companies are notoriously secretive about products in the near horizon.
In a ground-floor garage, though, a 31-year-old engineer named Michael Buthut shows me a more distant-horizon ideas, something more research than development. Buthut is tasked with responding to trends in technology; one of these, he notes, is the fact that we are all generating increasing amounts of data, more than we know what to do with. We have less trouble recording moments of our lives, but more trouble sifting through them and retrieving the important ones.
This may seem unrelated to driving, but in fact we generate data everywhere—and sometimes unsafely. If you've given in to the temptation of snapping a photo while on a particularly scenic drive, you're not alone (and distracted driving is particularly prevalent among Millennials). But what if there was a way to focus on the road, Buthut asked, while your car took your pictures for you?
Another idea Buthut and his team are working on is called "smart accessories," which envisions a future where your valuables are embedded with Bluetooth chips that communicate with your car to prevent theft (among other uses). In true Silicon Valley fashion, Buthut wasn't entirely sure what would come of this idea; he just knew that it was cool. Nevertheless, he did show me one "use case," in the tech world's jargon: handing me his Pebble smartwatch, he grabbed a chip-embedded surfboard from the Golf's roof rack and made off with it like a bandit. Once he reached a certain distance, the car's lights began to flash, and the Pebble watch pushed me a message: "Alert! Your surfboard is missing!"
But if most brands seem to be focusing on Millennial marketing for now, there’s still no shortage of eye-popping, futuristic design ideas like the kind VW is playing with. The question, though, is how many of these ideas will actually make it to market. Back in 2011, Toyota presented a car at the Tokyo Motor Show that it called the "Fun Vii." If other car companies were interested in integrating vehicles with iPhones, Toyota's design, originating at its Calty design lab in Newport Beach, California, seemed more like an attempt to turn your car into an iPhone.
The Fun Vii is a vision of a sleek car that has all the design appeal of your smartphone. The exterior and interior of the car itself are composed of giant, illuminated display panels; you can actually change the color of the car with the press of a button. The Fun Vii excited wide swaths of the press, garnering coverage in outlets that usually overlook car news. "It struck a pretty cool chord with the general public," says Alex Shen, Calty's studio chief designer.
The only problem? You can't buy it. There was one copy made
for the auto show, but it wasn't even designed to be driven safely on public streets. It was what the auto industry calls a concept vehicle, which Calty's Andrew MacLachlan loosely defines as a car company's "dream of what could be." Any given concept vehicle is typically a suggestion of what could be on the market in 10 or 15 years. Though that time horizon may seem distant, that's actually when many Millennials may come into their own financially and be more willing to buy cars.
"It's kind of guesswork," says MacLachlan. "No one can tell five years from now what events will alter who we are, or our culture. But there are elements you can look at that don't change so much."
In fact, it seems that one of the smartest things car companies can do when trying to appeal to Millennial tech habit is simply to design their cars in a way that makes them accommodating to the innovations of other companies. The lifecycle of a car design is five years, but Tim Cook takes the stage every year or so to tell us about the new iPhone.
With this underlying reality, I found myself most impressed by the innovations that enabled VW to simply accommodate the rapid waves of the consumer electronics industry. Lee and Goessmann explained, for instance, how VW is designing its next wave of cars with the on-board computer as a separate module, making it easier to introduce new hardware through the five-year span of a particular car model. Previously, car and computer were so intertwined that someone buying a car in 2010, say, might be stuck with the same in-car electronics as someone buying in 2006.
For all of the frantic effort of car companies to reclaim coolness from Apple, they seem at their best—and most Millennial-savvy—when they come to a Zen-like acceptance of the tech world's ascendance. Which is why when Loumidi snaps our selfie in the iBeetle, it's the first time that I (an admittedly old Millennial, at 30) see an innovation that actually stimulates my appetite for car-buying. It's less the selfie feature I find alluring—though that's fun—and more the elegance of the underlying iPhone integration: a basic dash-mounted dock; an app whose elemental features (music, social media, the ability to time my drive) are designed with jumbo icons I can take in easily with the briefest glance from the road.
And it's this innovation that lingers in my brain as I pull out of ERL in my rental car, struggling to hear directions my iPhone barks at me from the cup-holder at my elbow. It now strikes me as barbaric to have a car that doesn't integrate with my iPhone so seamlessly. For VW to have tapped into that hallmark of the tech industry—the ability to create dissatisfaction with products merely a few years old, even if they work passably well—it must be doing something right.