Satnav backlash begins

Those criticisms of in-car navigation systems Auto IT mentioned last week are now all over the web. This is a result of a survey by Privilege Insurance, which found 19 percent of drivers who used their navigation system admitted to losing concentration on the road, compared to 17 percent who relied on a map.

It’s not an especially convincing argument - asking people for opinions on such matters is an inexact science at the best of times, and the reports do not reveal the specific questions asked.

Also, experiments with eye-tracking equipment have consistently shown that drivers are relatively poorly aware of what they look at, and for how long, when driving. They are probably doubly unaware of exactly what they get up to when they are behind the wheel and lost. Recollections of hazardous events, such as near-collisions, are also typically distorted by the mind.

Another factor is novelty. Most drivers in the sample probably used their first GPS navigation system in the last 12 months or so. As drivers become more used to automated navigation, the amount of attention they devote to it will inevitably decline.

No doubt poorly used, badly sited and ill-designed systems are a hazard. Sadly only actual accident statistics will give a reliable, dispassionate assessment of the real danger.

Driven to distraction

There have been suggestions in the UK media recently that in-car navigation systems distract drivers and cause accidents. It’s good, therefore, to hear the other side of the argument from the RAC. It points out that peering among the forest of roadside distractions to read old-fashioned road-signs is not exactly a zero-effort task either.

"There are many examples of excessive signage," the RAC Foundation's Edmund King told Reuters. "One junction we have seen has 16 different signs, but psychologists tell us the most messages we can take in at any one time is between three and five."

IEE conference on auto electronics

The Institute of Electrical Engineers is holding a two-day conference on automotive electronics, in London, UK, on 20 and 21 March.

While a lot of the content looks set to be at a level of detail that only an automotive engineer could love (or, indeed, understand), some of the sessions will cater for the kind of broader content that Auto IT’s meagre brain will fit around.

In particular the sessions on the future of road transport look interesting.

Auto IT will attempt to blag an invite.

BMW aims for your brain

You wouldn’t know it from anything the firm has said in public, but neuroscientist professor Steven Rose has spilled the beans: BMW wants to get inside your head.

Actually, to be fair, it only wants to get inside your head if you’ve got (or are likely to amass) the funds to buy a BMW. It probably doesn’t give a monkey’s cuss what happens in your head if you’re in socio-economic segment D or E.

The company – like others such as fizzy drink maker Coca Cola – has set up its own "neuromarketing" laboratory. It wants to know more about what makes us tick so that it can get better and more sophisticated at marketing. These firms want adverts that appeal to us not simply on an emotional or psychological basis, but on a physiological level too.

Today’s best efforts – such as Jaguar’s expensive attempts to polish up its brand – are crude Pavlovian things at best. Flash up images of attractive young people doing sultry things in expensive clothes and shiny cars, repeat the word “gorgeous” over and over, throw in the Jaguar leaping cat at the end. Repeat until “Jaguar” and “gorgeous” are inextricably linked, hopefully erasing associations between “Jaguar” and “retired duffer in tweed jacket”.

According to boffins in the US, up to 95 percent of consumer decision making is unconscious. Studies at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas involved students in brain scanners taking the "Pepsi Challenge". The scans showed that people could express a verbal preference for Coke even if their brain scan showed they got a bigger, more pleasurable kick from slurping Pepsi. The conclusion being that brand preference can be much stronger than we realise – it can tie into the sense of self. If you see yourself as a Coke drinker rather than a Pepsi drinker, perhaps because of the bundle of social associations that the choice entails, then that decision overrules the fact that on a completely rational level you actually have the opposite preference.

Nobody yet knows how to make an advert that will switch your preferences on or off – to make you junk your liking for the hot-selling SLK in preference for the underwhelming Z4, say. But firms like BMW aim to find out if this principle might pan out in practice.

From concept to reality with Steve Jobs

Back in October Time magazine ran a story about Apple and innovation. In it, Apple bigwig Steve Jobs pondered the process of turning cool concepts into exciting production reality, as opposed to turning cool concepts into humdrum production reality.

“You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!
“What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can't do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can't build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

According to Jobs, the solution is to have an egomaniac for a chief executive, just like Apple:

“When we took [the first iMac] to the engineers, they said ‘Oh.’ And they came up with 38 reasons [not to build it]. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the CEO and I think it can be done.’”

Obviously, this set of observations is built on an element of truth. But it also suffers from Jobs’ renowned ability to distort reality. The key difference between most cars and an iMac or an iPod is that buyers never get to see the concept version of the Apple products.

Apple is guarded to the point of paranoia and litigation when it comes to protecting the secrecy of its works in progress. So for all we know the initial iMac design might well have featured a hand-buffed aluminium chassis, saddle-stitched leather keyboard and chrome-plated mousewheel. But we’ll never know, because we didn’t see the prototype four years before the plastic Tupperware-look-alike production model arrived.

Apple also has the luxury of not having to test its products out in the field – meaning no opportunities to spot an iPod clad in bin-bags testing its response to cold-weather cobbled streets.

So obviously a lot of what Jobs talked about is, as ever, bollocks. But the grain of truth is that car companies generally fail spectacularly at one task, at which Apple excels: expectation management.

If you want to keep the punters happy, under-promise and over-deliver. Not many car companies seem able to recognise this principle. In fact, most have it utterly backwards.