We received our first reader question, and boy was it a doozy: “What are some upcoming technologies you would like to see implemented in future vehicles that are not available today?”
How about that for a loaded question right out of the gate? Thanks guys.
Because automobiles and technology have been married to each other since time immemorial and in the last few decades the line that divided the two has become increasingly blurred, this topic could get way out of hand. In the interest of not writing a novel here, I have broken the topic down into three subjects: Future technologies I like, future technologies I don’t like, and current technologies I want to see go away.
The Good: V2V Communication
What is V2V you ask?
Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is a way for automobiles (and presumably other forms of transportation) to communicate with each other via a wireless mesh network vital data such as speed location, direction, etc. These messages are omni-directional can be communicated up to 300 meters up to 10 times per second. This sheer number of use cases for this technology is staggering, from accident detection and avoidance, to emergency vehicle recognition as well as occupant safety alerts for EMS, and stolen vehicle tracking and alerting.
It’s not difficult to imagine very specific use cases such as your vehicle alerting oncoming traffic that you are attempting to make a left turn onto the road from a driveway on the blind side of a hill. At the very least the technology could be used to supplement radar and camera-based safety systems whose limitations include not being able to detect the movements further than the vehicle in front of you or limitations caused by inclement weather. Adaptive cruise control, emergency braking, and blind spot warning could all benefit from additional layers visibility afforded by V2V communication.
Other forms of transportation could benefit such as trains, motorcycles, bicycles, those horrible rental scooters that are ruining downtown metropolitan areas across the country, and wearables for pedestrians. The technology could extend to the aforementioned blind hills, blind corners and curves, naturally occurring road hazards through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) systems as well.
Why don’t we already have it?
As with most communication standards (and let’s be real… standards of any kind), deciding on whose design wins out is usually the major hurdle and sometimes the iceberg that sinks technological efforts such as these. Shared technological development initiatives also have to face scrutiny over major issues such as data privacy and funding as well.
Although progress was being made by GM and Toyota to implement an FCC and ISO approved system called DSRC (dedicated short-range communications), Ford opted out and instead announced in early 2019 that it will move forward with its own version of V2V called C-V2X, allegedly starting in 2022. It remains to be seen if the pandemic has nuked that timeline, but Ford’s decision to implement its own V2V system (which uses faster 5G cellular tech rather than wifi) definitely hindered the momentum already created by GM and Toyota for the technology.
While a faster communication protocol like Ford’s 5G-based system sounds like a better strategy, implementing what appears to be a non-compatible system compared to what was already mid-development doesn’t. Fragmentation is bad, y’all. Ultimately, time will tell if Ford’s decision will delay this technology coming to market, if it even appears at all.
This V2V saga reminds me of the phrase, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good,” and a perfect example of why we can’t have nice things.
The Bad: advertisements everywhere
I keep hearing that advertising is dying, but from my perspective it looks like the reports of its impending demise are greatly exaggerated. We already see ads in apps like Waze where gas stations and restaurants are advertised along your route, but I’m referring to (and much more concerned about) about ads that appear in a car’s native infotainment.
General Motors has a what one could consider a precursor to this in the form of an opt-in system called Marketplace in certain 2017 and newer vehicles that allows you to make purchases for gas and food through participating merchants. It’s not too difficult, however, to envision this being a baby step towards much more intrusive practices. Anyone who has seen the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” knows exactly what I’m talking about. In the television show, people live in cubicles and are surrounded by ads 24/7 and must pay to make them go away, even just to sleep.
Just imagine buying a Chevrolet and then being pummeled with ads as a way subsidize the cost of vehicle production or to funnel you into buying a Buick that features a reduced ads atmosphere as a part of its brand-exclusive Quiet Tuning serenity subscription package. For an ad-free experience you’ll need to buy a Cadillac. Except it needs to be one of the big ones, because the entry level Cadillac will have ads too.
Horrifying to think about.
even more Bad: subscription all the things
In the same vein as having ads emblazoned on every screen inside your vehicle, imagine purchasing a vehicle and then having to subscribe to features in order to unlock them. Tesla is doing something similar with its full self driving suite, and forgivably GM offers Super Cruise as a pretty affordable subscription on top of paying around $2,500 for the necessary equipment to make it work.
The real offender, however, is BMW. Back in 2019 BMW offered one of the first wireless implementations of Apple CarPlay. While previously an infotainment software which was once a one-time $300 charge, CarPlay became an $80 per year subscription or $300 for 20 years once a complimentary year-long trial period expired. After your 365 days of sweet, sweet infotainment bliss is up, CarPlay would be remotely disabled until the owner shelled out for one of the subscription plans. Meanwhile Corollas from that era—even the ones with hubcaps—feature CarPlay standard. Forever. With no subscription. Not to mention adaptive cruise control, pedestrian detection, and lane departure alert with steering assist, but that’s another rant altogether.
Eventually BMW caved to the avalanche of almost universally negative feedback it rightfully earned for its subscription stunt, but it hasn’t been completely smooth sailing. A quick google search reveals countless forum discussions about disappearing CarPlay icons in BMW’s iDrive menus, including BMW ConnectedDrive outages that affect CarPlay access, even after the automaker walked back its ridiculous subscription model.
Infotainment woes aside, there are even more perilous concerns regarding making everything under the sun a subscription.
Recently more details about the peculiarly shaped but intriguing electric Mercedes EQS 580 began to trickle across the interwebs. One widely reported on feature will be rear-wheel steering that will be available as—you guessed it—a subscription… although as of yet only in its home country of Germany. Models destined for the U.S. market will have a full 10 degrees of rear steer while German cars will only be available with 4.5 degrees of steer, lest ye loosen the purse strings a bit. Full 10 degree steering for German market cars will cost 489 euros per year or an up front fee of 1,169 euros will unlock full rear steering for three years.
That’s right. The car you’re already paying 110,000+ smackeroonies for will make you pony up more clams to do a thing it is already mechanically able to do. Just not for you. Until you pay up. And then pay up again three years later.
Now I know what you’re going to say… The Merc EQS is a luxury car and will primarily be leased and returned at the three year mark. Fine. I get what Mercedes is doing. But I don’t feel like it’s proper to keep charging every new owner for the experience the first person paid for… especially if there’s not the option to permanently purchase the option to begin with.
Furthermore, what happens when this fancy pants rear steer hardware breaks (which could affect drivability) even though the current owner isn’t subscribed to it because front axle steering is good enough for the off-lease luxobarge-buying plebe? Imagine having to pay to fix a feature that your car doesn’t even have because you didn’t want to rent it in the first place. The value proposition of luxury cars is already hazy and hard to justify at best, but scenarios like these are enough to keep even me up at night. The Germans produce some insanely tech heavy vehicles, but no one can accuse them of having an equal dose of reliability. If cars are going to start rolling off the production line with tons of tech that may or may not be unlocked later, it’s not ethical to charge owners to fix that broken tech when they don’t even have access to it.
Does Mercedes-Benz even have a long term plan for supporting subscription features long after the majority of the cars that use them have made their way to the scrapyard?
Will there be a summer intern or entry level tech analyst whose job it is to keep renewing Mrs. Caldwell’s rear steering or reactivating CarPlay on her 45 year old EQS?
Or at some point does Mercedes just give up and say “Hey this is free now… go live your life”?
Or is the more sinister, most likely scenario that Mercedes decide one day that the server keeping these features in your car alive costs too much to maintain and then poof… half your car goes dark?
Let’s stop this subscription madness before it gets too far along, shall we?
The Ugly: Drum Brakes in the modern age
Drum brakes making a comeback and all I can say is gahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Just about the time I thought the passenger car and truck market was pretty much finished with drum brakes, here they come roaring back. And this time the justification may be just strong enough to make them stick.
Like most of us older millennials and also the Get Xers, the automotive market was rife with rear drum brake equipped cars during our formative automotive years. Five out of my first six cars were equipped with rear drums.
Having grown up somewhat socioeconomically disadvantaged, I often ended up driving cars that were honestly pretty shitty. And one common theme among shitty cars is shitty brakes. While brakes are arguably the most important mechanical system in a car, they are also a maintenance item, and if you shopped within the budget confines that I had you didn’t always end up in cars with the most pristine maintenance history or sometimes even evidence of maintenance, period. Unlike a piece of fine art which is passed from owner to owner with provenance documenting its history, shitty cars belong to the “you get what you get” club.
And what I got, dear reader, was a series of a cars that had trouble stopping, every one of them with drum brakes. So please forgive my prejudice, but I come by it honestly. I just don’t like cars that have rear drum brakes. I don’t care if they stop just as well as cars with four wheel discs. I just don’t like them. They look unbalanced, with a shiny rotor up front and a rusty old drum out back. Rear drums ruin the design of a car because they are ugly, and they are cheap. And when I see a set of ugly rear drums peeking out from the rear of a car I gag a little.
The reason I bring all this up is that gradually in the last decade rear disc brakes had finally trickled down to the smallest and cheapest models in almost every automaker’s lineup. Finally. What a time to be alive. Balance and harmony and symmetry rejoice.
That is, until now.
Volkswagen’s infamous and doomed affair with cheating diesels fueled its headlong dive into the mass market EV segment. The first product of the Peoples’ Car’s renaissance/apology tour/court mandated clean-emissions infrastructure settlement is the ID.4, a futuristic five passenger rear- and all wheel drive people mover that’s supposed to be one of the most important new cars of the decade.
You see, I’ve been super busy with a large project at my real job, and I missed several recent articles by my favorite news rags pointing out that the revolutionary ID.4 has rear drum brakes. Not as a cost-saving measure, but because they work better for EVs in the real world. Or at least that’s what VW spokespeople said and keep reiterating.
The justification is that since since the front disc brakes do most of the work when braking and the rear brakes accomplish the majority of the remaining braking through regenerative means, the mechanical braking required doesn’t necessitate something as robust as a rear disc can provide. Additionally, the brake shoes inside a drum don’t create drag in the same way that brake pads on a disc brake’s rotor can. Honestly it sounds like a weak attempt to justify a less sophisticated rear brake setup to save money. This from the same company that followed up the excellent and dynamic Mk5 Jetta with a dollar store Mk6 while simultaneously ruining the North American Passat with their “cheaper at any cost” mission.
“But non performance cars don’t need disc brakes!” shout the basic rusty drum brake apologists on social media. Fine, I get that. Maybe the Volkswagen ID.4 doesn’t need rear discs because it’s a commuter car from a mainstream brand. How then do these apologists justify the ID.4’s platform mate, the Audi Q4 e-Tron also having rear drums? Audi is a luxury car company with sporting pretensions and luxury brands in general don’t adhere to the philosophy of only doing the minimum necessary. That’s the opposite of luxury.
By the numbers, the Q4 e-Tron is not a Model Y competitor, so while it may not need four wheel disc brakes from a functional perspective, if shoppers only bought what they absolutely needed, there would be no such thing as Audis to begin with. People buy brands like Audi for performance and design and cachet and even if the rear binders on the Q4 e-Tron meet the first of those tenets, it definitely falls short on the last two.
My point is this: Buyers deserve better than just than yesteryear tech. Please leave drum brakes in the past where the belong.
