Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
The Future Of Cars Is Car Karaoke
Chrysler will debut a two-seat car today with no steering wheel, no doors, no roof, no motor and no wheels. Technically, this is because the Chrysler Synthesis (great name!) is just a technology demonstrator meant to show off the brand’s cabin of the future, but it gives you a good idea of where the industry is heading and where its focus is at the moment. As far as infotainment systems go, the “smart cockpit” looks much like other modern designs with a massive 37.2-inch screen that serves both the driver and passenger. It’s not going into a production car so it’s a little sleeker than what you’d find in a Mercedes EQS and more dynamic than what’s in a Tesla Model X. The setup is created to operate with “Level 3 autonomous driving,” better known as nonsense garbage. The promise of Level 3 does allow Chrysler’s new system to use AI to plan your day. They call this MyDay. Here’s how they describe it being used in their press release: It is quite possible this is the future. It’s also quite possible that most of what people do will continue to be through Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. Vehicle Welcome – Delivers a “welcome” via virtual personal assistant based on biometric recognition Driving – Vehicle operates with Level 3 autonomous driving, allowing the driver to multitask and access a suite of productivity-based activities, such as video conferencing; recommends lunch locations with convenient parking and charging options; returns home at end of day and performs a smart home “wake up” upon arrival Chill/Zen/Fun Modes – Creates a sensory experience, including in-vehicle fun and wellness experiences (meditation, karaoke, DJ game), while the vehicle is stationary or driving autonomously. The demonstrator will feature the Synthesis Music Experience, which allows customers to create and synthesize their own music Of course, saying something is “the future” and basing it on CES is a little self-selecting. Obviously, no one is going to bring a bunch of muscle cars to Las Vegas. ::Touches earpiece:: Oops. I was wrong. I’m just hearing that Dodge is going to have a “Last Call” performance festival in Las Vegas to celebrate the Last Call models and introduce a “final 2023 Dodge ‘Last Call’ special-edition model and also highlight Dodge brand’s drive toward an electrified future.” From what I can see in the press release it’s not clear what that Last Call model is. I assume it’s Challenger-based, but perhaps we’ll get the Dodge Dart SRT4 the company teased and never built. They should have done it during CES! Still sounds like a cool party.
The Future Of Cars Is Fewer Chips
The average new car has more than 1,000 semiconductors (or chips), with some featuring as many as 3,000 of them. This adds power requirements, cost, and complexity to the creation of a modern automobile. This complexity has resulted in a massive decline in car production and feature offerings due to the global chip shortage. Chipmaker Qualcomm’s solution? The Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC (System-on-Chip) product family. Basically, Ride Flex SoC aims to combine a bunch of major features into one chip. You can read their press release to see how excited they are about this. That is a lot of acronyms and terms thrown together to basically say (I think) that a bunch of systems that once worked semi-independently of one another can be combined into one environment. Their graphic is actually quite helpful to see how all the disparate systems that fit together.
The Future Of Cars Is More Cars
The auto industry had another bad year. Even as things began to improve in the second half of 2022 it wasn’t enough. Here’s the first look at the scorecard from Reuters: Hyundai-Kia were the biggest winner as the company was able to get cars delivered faster than pretty much everyone else at a time when its product portfolio is as good, or better, than most of the competition. The biggest hit by global shortages were the Japanese automakers, with Toyota likely losing its sales crown to GM this year. Inventory shortages, caused by surging material costs and persistent chip shortage, spilled into 2022, hobbling production at many automakers. Tight supplies kept car and truck prices elevated, even as auto inventory improved in the second half of the year. Car companies will keep reporting sales throughout the week and we’ll keep updating as we have the info.
The Future Of Cars Is Autonomous Trucking
This isn’t explicitly a CES story, but it fits in nicely with the theme. According to Reuters sources, Microsoft is going to invest in autonomous trucking startup Gatik. Ford and VW bailing on Argo AI hasn’t slowed down Microsoft, which also invested in GM’s Cruise. Something autonomous is coming and Microsoft wants a piece of it. Trucking is also the environment where this makes the most sense and Gatik is focused on the “middle mile” of B2B.
The Flush
How long do you think it’ll be before you can buy a car without a steering wheel? Will you ever buy a car without a steering wheel?
Even CarMax’s CEO Thinks Used Car Prices Are Too High The Volvo XC40 and Escape are the only two SUVs that did well on new IIHS test Chinese Car Companies Had A Huge Year In Europe And They’re Just Getting Started McLaren’s V6 Artura Already Recalled For Fire-Causing Loose Nuts Here’s What You Need To Know About Tom Zhu, Tesla’s New ‘Number 2’
Got a hot tip? Send it to us here. Or check out the stories on our homepage. Photos: Qualcomm, Stellantis, Gatik Given enough time, I can even build you, on my own and from scratch, a car with no steering wheel that could be successfully demonstrated by transporting you between some places. But making that a general use product that will work as reliably and safely as the human-operated vehicles that we currently have is not going to happen in our lifetimes. The only reason that people think it’s plausible is that we’re EXTREMELY bad at understanding exponential changes. We have made immense progress towards autonomy relative to where we were a decade ago. And we’ve barely scratched the surface of the problem. Anything any of us ever use that resembles a car but doesn’t have a steering wheel is going to be a glorified Disney World monorail that happens to no longer need a physical rail. I have mixed feelings about this… I guess it’s technically simpler? Simpler is usually a good thing, except this is the form of simpler that means if one part breaks, the whole thing breaks, and that’s a big problem in the auto industry these days. On the other hand, at least that makes the technician’s life easier because, “Oh, there’s an electrical problem? I guess it’s a problem with THE SINGULAR CHIP! Ah yes, the chip is fried! That’ll be $2,000 to replace THE CHIP.” One chip where the vendor is Qualcomm is definitely a bad thing. The big problem with chips right now is mostly that the chips have a single supplier. Fewer single points of failure is an improvement. But it’s still bad.
