Goodwood Festival of Speed: Alive and Kicking

Contrary to popular belief, the motor industry is alive and well… and Goodwood Festival of Speed once again proves this point. 

This annual automotive extravaganza isn’t an out-of-touch bubble of petrol-headed enthusiasts descending on Lord March’s estate – it’s proof that there’s hope for an extraordinary industry.

I’m the first to talk about the future of the business, where incredible technology will deliver a safer and more efficient transportation network, but I’ll always counter this with a need for brand individuality and a personal love of driving. Give me autonomous commuting, but hands-on engagement for those twisting back roads. I want to see alternatives to fossil fuels, but silence isn’t always golden so deliver the sound of the future, not merely the vision.

I’ve written enough about Goodwood to avoid repeating myself again, but this incredible event is a sell out every year. Attendees of all ages reminisce about past racing glories, touch the supercars of today and marvel at the concepts for the next generation of characterful transportation.

You won’t find bottom-of-the-range city cars – this is about realising potential and dreaming big and it’s how the brands with panic in their eyes can best educate future audiences to the benefits of driving and ownership.

From a stunning show, I’ve chosen my top 4 cars and the best luxury and volume brands…

4 > Renault R.S. 2027 Vision

A stunning realisation of the future of F1 racing, from the company already bringing us Formula E racers and their own F1 efforts. I hope Formula 1 reaches this level of design thinking before 2027!

3 > Jaguar XE SV Project 8

Jaguar’s smallest offering (until the I-Pace arrives) on steroids. The SVO team has injected 200mph and 600PS into this saloon to deliver 0-60 dash in 3.3 secs and a great looking car. I love the honeycomb face.

2 > Aston Martin Valkyrie

Bringing the hyper to hypercar, this automotive project with RedBull Racing looks more like a fighter jet for the road. It’s hard not to appreciate the aerodynamic superiority and unashamed nod to the future. Very nearly my number one but the green centre stripe loses a point. It works on a Ford GT, but seems unnecessary here – even if it is a nod to the racing team.

1 > Robocar

Top spot goes to a car encompassing design, innovation, technology and the future of autonomous racing. This vision of supremely talented British designer Daniel Simon is driving its development alongside the Formula E racing series and ticks all the automotive boxes.

Top Luxury Auto Manufacturer > BMW

This sporting marque brought the beautiful 8 Series Concept to Goodwood, alongside the hybrid i8 supercar in some adventurous liveries. These halo models continue to filter their design inference down to the rest of the range and push technological development without sacrificing driving pleasure.

Top Volume Auto Manufacturer > Renault

A great show for Renault! Not only hitting my top 4 with their R.S. 2027 Vision, but also bringing some EV madness in the shape of their ZOE eSport Concept and the Alpine compact supercar. I just wish the Zoe had been equipped with a stunning sound generator for the hill climb. Something to consider for Formula E where everything sounds like Scalextric cars when it has the potential to emulate Star Wars!

Here’s to Goodwood Festival of Speed 2018. We don’t need to wait to be excited though, these cars are amazing 365 days of the year!

IoC: Internet of Cars

What’s the biggest auto show in the world? Geneva, Paris, Frankfurt, Detroit? Nope, with 180,000 attendees spread over 2.5 million sq ft, it’s CES in Las Vegas. Isn’t it full of robots, drones, augmented reality, touch screens and IoT? Yep, and so are the cars.

I’m not about to write a preachy outsider’s view of the automotive future or an insider’s defence of the industry – rather uniquely, I have feet placed firmly in both camps and a tattoo across my skull that reads ‘petrol head’.

OK, the tattoo’s on the inside and I actually like electric propulsion as well as exhaust sniffing. It’s a good job too as the main headlines at CES were all made by cars fuelled from the wall, not the pump.

Faraday Future made a triumphant return to the Nevada stage with their FF 91 at a glitzy live-streamed event. Last year they revealed a concept resembling the Batmobile, twelve months later, it was a far more practical SUV.

For all the glamour, slick branding and live theatre, the focus was on a record attempt – could the new FF 91 beat the Bentley Bentayga, Ferrari 488 GTB and Tesla Model X from 0-60mph? It did, by 0.01sec, hitting the mark in 2.39 sec. I’m not convinced many in the audience bought into the line that someone torn between the Ferrari and the FF 91 would choose the SUV over the supercar based on a straight line dash. Show them both a series of twisting corners and see who emerges at the other end with a smile on their face and who has their half-digested lunch in their lap.

Speaking of smiling faces, that’s exactly what I’d had earlier the same day as I spent quality time with the team from Lucid Motors – another EV startup focused on disrupting the automotive industry. Their forthcoming ‘Air’ also makes a fast dash from 0-60 but the story behind it is one of driving dynamics, rather than straight line bragging rights. Lucid’s CTO Peter Rawlinson, formerly Chief Engineer at Tesla and Lotus, put forward a strong case for his passionate team of 300+ employees and why they’re convinced driving and design appreciation will be just as important as battery range and autonomous tech to the Lucid audience.

Rawlinson believes their battery, developed in partnership with Samsung SDI, is a genuine differentiator in a new world of range anxiety. “It’s not just about distance, but sustained range. The breakthrough cell density is resistant to battery charge depletion usually experienced with repeated fast-charging.” The automotive industry faces many of the issues we already encounter with our personal technology, such as connectivity and mobile phone batteries caught in a recharging memory cycle of decreasing shelf life – not something we’ll tolerate when spending $100,000+ on a luxury car.

VP of Design, Derek Jenkins, former Director of Design at Mazda and VW told me he’d relished the creative challenges when starting with an automotive clean sheet. Sensors for autonomous driving need to be integrated, rather than added to a familiar silhouette and the interior design maximises the space around the electric drivetrain, rather than one inherited from the mechanical components of a traditional combustion engine.

It’s Rawlinson’s engineering appreciation and Jenkins’ design skills that brought the aforementioned smile to my face as we headed out onto the dusty Vegas roads in a development prototype. Peter eagerly hanging the back end out at every opportunity, putting that passion for driving into action!

Lucid now needs to start work on their $700M Arizona factory. This has been previously misreported as a similar model to Faraday Future’s, with funds coming from their own Chinese billionaire – not so, as Rawlinson stressed “this is an American company.” Despite their intentionally understated message, they seem to be heading in the right direction at the right speed as the Air is slated for production in 2019, with first year projections of 8-10k units, rising to 50-60k.

Although Lucid seems to be on track, Faraday’s FF 91 still lacks one important ingredient – money. Vital funds need to be released by Chinese backer, Founder and CEO of LeEco Jia Yueting so work can resume on their Nevada factory. Many keep referring to Faraday Future as the ‘Tesla killer’ as if this is a good thing. It’s not, and Elon Musk has frequently said the industry needs many EV-first players to shake up the competition, not kill it!

So where does this leave everyone else? Ford, Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes and others had CES concepts to show off their latest vision for the future of vehicle connectivity – inside and out – and how they’ll all drive themselves, but BMW took out the most real estate.

Here I put my cards on the table as I drive a BMW, but it’s a petrol model and I haven’t made the jump to hybrid or electric yet as I’m still addicted to their turbocharged straight six. However, this doesn’t stop the Bavarians from trying to tempt me into an ‘i model’ every year at CES. In 2015, I piloted BMW’s petrol-electric supercar around the streets of Vegas. This year, they drove me to the ‘Speed Vegas’ desert racing circuit in an i3, then let me loose in an i8 around the track!

Compared to Faraday Future and Tesla’s unnatural obsession with straight line speed, this track session was a superb way to demonstrate the benefits of a car that is just as comfortable in the corners as the straights – and that’s a fun vision for the future!

And that future isn’t all about speed and performance. All manufacturers need to connect – with devices, the consumers that use them and the world around us. We already have a reasonable expectation that our phones will talk to our cars and in doing so, will add functionality. When our cars become fully autonomous, the safety restrictions fall away and we’ll demand entertainment, office functionality and more.

More? Well, I spoke at FutureFest in London last year and Cindy Gallop was on stage before me, talking about the statistics for sex in cars. It’s higher in countries where larger families share smaller houses as the car naturally presents an intimate space – but auto manufacturers continually fail to recognise this. Imagine the potential to relieve the boredom of a long autonomous journey with some connected sexy times. Auto brands take note, if the car is rockin’ time to come knockin’.

The very public message from the car companies at CES was “we’re in control”. This is true to a point, but it’s mostly tinged with an air of panic as they all know the future can’t be delivered overnight. Many believe their music and movie-streaming audience will no longer wish to drive or own cars and this is increasingly the message from industry analysts. But this is mostly educated guesswork and the future isn’t predetermined so the automotive business needs to give its customers a reason to love their products, want to drive them (when not having sex) and make them their own.

The only way to do this is to connect to the future audience – the ones who currently have no concept of car ownership and have never even gripped a steering wheel. Don’t neglect existing customers, but enlist their help as they’re the drivers, owners and brand advocates that can help to share the reasons we choose a Union Jack roof for a MINI, spec 20” alloys on an Audi, tick the box for red stitching with black leather on an Alfa, and take a deep breath of ‘new car smell’ when we drive away from a dealership.

I’m a petrol head for life, even if we replace the petrol with a plug socket, the dashboard with an iPhone and the dealership with a VR headset.

#CES2016: Social Shockwaves

Well, CES 2016 delivered what it always delivers. It was amazing, enlightening, exhilarating, mentally and physically exhausting in equal measures. I'm rejuvenated and broken at the same time.

Although I’ve mentioned VR and connectivity in previous posts, this year’s event wasn’t really about one thing in particular, and that’s because the overarching banner of ‘IoT’ covers a multitude of sins. When so much is connected, mobile devices, home appliances, wearable tech and cars are all spoken about in the same breath.

For me, this year was big for Twitter, Vine and Instagram again, so I’ve summarised the CES 2016 headlines via my own social channels. From wearable airbags to Zombie Smart Fridges, I still believe effective social broadcast is an art form. I’m never likely to resort to mere retweets or regurgitating a news feed. If you follow me, you get cutting edge insight, divisive opinion, original content and irreverence in equal measures.

And actual conversation.

Human Airbag

Connected Development

#CES2016 kicks off with #FaradayFuture's #ConnectedCar, #IoT & #AI: Connected Development https://t.co/SupFUDyZwD pic.twitter.com/3CmTAMlnBW

— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) January 5, 2016

Zombie Smart Fridge

#CES2016 Breaking: Samsung announces #WalkingDead Limited Edition of its #SmartFridge. Keep that Walker fed! #IoT pic.twitter.com/kKWOiCpo75

— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) January 5, 2016

The Year of VR. Again

#CES2016: The Year of VR. Again https://t.co/jk9W48tUg7 #VR #VirtualReality #AR #WearableTech #OculusRift #SonyCES pic.twitter.com/lMrlBSmW5L

— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) January 6, 2016

Hoverboard Meetings

This > All meetings at #CES2016 pic.twitter.com/r1PmYroNRD

— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) January 6, 2016

Pimp my 7 Series

Loved my @BMWUSA #7Series ride to #CES2016 this morning. Just wish it could take me everywhere! #BMWCES2016 pic.twitter.com/1rrWMdQ7e5

— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) January 7, 2016

Spyderman

The @BMWUSA #7Series was stunning but the #BMWi8 #Spyder was a work of art! #CES2016 #BMWCES2016 @BMWiUSA pic.twitter.com/cfpewGiFx7

— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) January 7, 2016

The Future’s Bright, The Future’s Faraday Future

Speaking of stunning #CES2016 cars, #FaradayFuture #FFZERO1 is one of those... @FaradayFuture @CES pic.twitter.com/VnIjhE4pkq

— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) January 7, 2016

Walking the Light Fantastic – Orphe shoes

The full visual journey is covered on my Instagram feed.

Connected Development

Start a conversation about Artificial Intelligence and you evoke Hollywood’s vision of the future, full of killer robots, time-travelling cyborgs and sentient machines. That’s a fun, if apocalyptic, view but we’re closer than you think. To the AI, not end of days.

Thanks to our increasingly rapid efforts to connect the world around us, your car will soon drive you to work whilst teaching you Swahili, ordering milk and cheese for your fridge, reminding your significant other you’ll be home late because you’re having an affair with a robot shop assistant, taking a DNA sample from the steering wheel and poking you in the buttocks during your virtual porn session.

CES is once again revealing a selection of crazy devices many of us will never need but the message is the same – they should all talk to each other.

The machines don’t get to hog all the conversation as we’re already used to talking to the digital partners in our lives: Siri, Google, Alexa, Cortana, our cars. The idea works in a home or personal space where we’re all comfortable with a bit of digital banter, but it comes unstuck when we’re expected to talk to our devices in a social situation, wandering down the street, on a train, in the supermarket. This interactive tourette's didn’t help Google with its Glassholes image and I’m not sure this will change with Glass 2.0. It’s all still a bit weird – and noisy if we’re all doing it at the same time.

Speaking of cars (or to them) the tech and automotive worlds really have collided at CES this year. The convergence has been happening over the last decade but there’s never been as much infrastructure in place to genuinely make one relevant to the other as there is this year.

Ford announced its partnership with Amazon to connect their cars to Alexa, operating IoT devices such as lights, heating, A/C and garage doors. In home, the same tech offers status updates from your car via Echo. Ford also displayed their new smaller autonomous car sensors and announced their plans to become beyond an auto manufacturer in 2016, becoming a mobility company.

Major announcements have been timed to coincide with CES by big players such as BMW and Ford but it’s a new arrival that has grabbed some of the brightest headlines – Faraday Future. This new kid on the block plans to set up local operations right here in Vegas, with design and production of their first electric vehicle planned to start in 2017.

They revealed their FFZERO1 concept last night and it’s a truly stunning piece of design, not just from a physical product perspective, but also the well considered internal digital design and augmented reality and how this and the experience will translate to our personal devices. They're a young team that prides itself on rapid turnaround and they've designed a connected car from the ground up.

The concept of the connected car doesn’t just refer to a phone and a dashboard, it’s also the communication with the surrounding environment and how this awareness will eventually deliver the first credible autonomous vehicles. You’ll know of my love of cars and an unhealthy fascination with technology so you’d be forgiven for thinking I’m all for self-driving cars. I’ll sit on the central reservation here as I’ll happily hand over the controls on a motorway commute as long as I get the wheel back for the twists and turns of a challenging country road.

For me it’s an unwillingness to hand over the whole experience because I still love driving. For many others, it will be a trust issue as they’ll expect it all to go horribly wrong, or have all their travel data sold to the highest bidder (Google is building a car after all).

Our intelligent connected world holds great promise for things like interactive storytelling (I hinted at this in Mark Peising’s recent article for Publishing Perspectives) or making life simpler when travelling the globe. We’ll also have to wade through a pile of connected crap on the way as manufacturers and designers still seem hell-bent on adding ‘smart’ to everything they make.

It’s only a matter of time before a tabloid headline exposes a man caught having virtual sex with his SmartFridge.

“Siri, write another article about CES”.