Auto news on Youtube Apr 23 2018

If you want to hear what automakers really think about the future of the car, it's best

to slip outside the enthusiast tent and listen to them preach the autonomous gospel at places

like SXSW, the music festival-turned-tech culture uberconference.

In the automotive future being narrated to crowds of self-selecting early adopters, there's

very little driving to be found; instead, that future is brimming with "mobility," a

term that remains stubbornly vague but will certainly include the theft of your steering

wheel at some point.

To help explain this transition, there will be events like the Mercedes me Convention.

(The "me" is in fact purposely lowercased—maybe someone thinks it suggests egoism rather than

egotism?)

"The me Convention is about moving Mercedes from a company that produces hardware to a

company that provides mobility," said Dr. Jens Theimer, Mercedes's VP of global marketing

communications, speaking to a gathering of around 40 people at the company's SXSW media

house in Austin, Texas.

Essentially, me Convention is a festival-conference mashup concept that Mercedes takes on the

road, for the right crowd, as a "discourse on topics of the future," as Theimer once

called it.

The statement "moving ... to a company that provides mobility" could be read as nakedly

hostile to the driving enthusiast—the savages at AMG would be mortified—but is perfectly

fashionable at "South by," which was briefly, in the middle of the last decade, a launchpad

for hot apps but has since sprawled across TV and film, music, comedy, and gaming, with

talk titles like, "AI: Transforming Luxury, Fashion, and Beauty;" "VR's Implication in

the Sports Industry;" and "Accidentally Making the Most Popular Podcasts Ever."

It's Spring Break for entrepreneurial tech and culture nerds, where a hard-networking

brogrammer, an anemic fanboy, and a digital marketing agency junior exec stand outside

a bar racing to snag tickets to a surprise comedy show via the fittingly slick SXSW app.

In 2018, Mercedes-Benz marked its second year of official SXSW participation.

The company sponsored Palm Park, a satellite hangout a few blocks from the Austin Convention

Center; hosted talks with executives Britta Seeger, Wilko Stark, and Theimer; created

something called the "Mercedes-Benz@SXSW Connect and Inspire Cube"; and gave rides in a zero-emissions

Smart micro car that rolled around a downtown Austin street inside a giant inflatable hamster

ball.

(As I was being sealed inside the contraption I asked the driver what the whole thing was

about and he said, "It's because, I think, in a zero-emissions vehicle you won't asphyxiate."

I noted that given enough time we would certainly asphyxiate inside a sealed plastic container,

just more slowly with a battery-powered vehicle than one with a gas engine, to which he shrugged

and said "Yeah, I guess," and started rolling the ball forward with two-foot lurches.

"Still Dying Inside the Hamsterball, Just More Slowly" would be a fitting tagline if

Smart ever decides to take a hard turn into nihilism, like Arby's did.)

As expected, much of the automotive conversation at SXSW focused on autonomy.

Something about the way automakers describe the self-driving future rousts my inner sceptic

like a boot to the ear, even though the more I experience the technology itself the more

feasible the wider endeavor seems.

When I heard Dr. Theimer describe autonomous car passengers "acting like they do in a plane—they

will read, sleep, eat, work, maybe watch films," my first reaction was to note that planes

have pilots—plural—who are encouraged to do none of those things, and then I tried

to conceive the blind trust necessary to let go of a steering wheel to take a nap when

that nap might end with whiplash.

But it's become increasingly easy to talk myself in circles about self-driving cars.

For example: commercial planes have pilots because the airline is hired to transport

people, which makes human oversight a cost-effective safeguard against liability; future autonomous

buses likely will have the same redundancy for the same reason, but cars owned by individuals

won't.

Or this: there must be a fundamental, human-centric bias that explains a preference for a New

York City cab driver—an unknowable sample from the wildly divergent range of illogical,

unpredictable, sometimes clinically homicidal human beings—over an autonomous car.

Every livery ride is a gamble against death with a complete stranger holding the cards,

and it's a choice we as a species make millions of times a day, utterly without thinking.

We are all born passengers.

Humans turn mighty docile when faced with overwhelming technological convenience, like

a dog having his belly scratched, whether that means paying ATM fees to access our own

money or letting an integrated home assistant listen to our every word.

This suggests the fight over autonomous cars is not about whether it will happen—it will—but

who will get the money, and how.

This explains the prominent Palm Park signage for Tidal, the streaming entertainment service

now available in new Mercedes-Benz vehicles.

The partnership was announced last year at the first me Convention, in Frankfurt, and

warranted an Iggy Azalea concert; the press release from the event wastes no time in telling

you, basically, the first taste is free:

Mercedes-Benz and global music and entertainment platform, TIDAL, have announced a long-term

partnership – in the next few months, Mercedes-Benz customers that have connected their car to

the Mercedes me Portal will be able to access a complimentary TIDAL HiFi membership.

Customers will be able to stream more than 50 million songs, over 185,000 music videos

and hundreds of carefully curated playlists, free of charge for twelve months in their

vehicles, on their smartphones or on their music systems at home.

When the steering wheel and pedals are gone, a car—even an entire automotive brand—will

likely be defined by features such as streaming entertainment services or gaming graphics

packages or a productivity-focused suite of apps.

Cross reference a vehicle's real-time GPS coordinates with everything being listened

to, watched, used, or interacted with inside that vehicle and suddenly you've got an endlessly

churning supply of almighty Data, the gold with which all roads to future profitability

are paved.

Make no mistake: Mercedes-Benz might sponsor Conversations About Big Ideas at Palm Park,

but the company is also at SXSW to learn how to listen to every interaction with its customers

like Big Tech does.

Which is to say, profitably.

"The future will be funded by surveillance capitalism," sighed a ruffled British man

from the stage of a talk called How to Fix the Future, into which I had wandered at random

towards the end of my last day at SXSW.

"We feel disempowered, we humans," he droned on.

"We've been promised digital paradises, like the Socialist paradise, and the Maoist paradise,

were promised to us before."

The SXSW app buzzed my phone, notifying me that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was scheduled for

a surprise talk, then prompting me to book tickets, then almost immediately informing

me tickets were no longer available—an efficient little three-act tragedy delivered, unprompted,

via push notification.