“You wouldn’t download a car!”, is a parody of an infamous anti-piracy ad once mused. Preposterous, yes, but less funny now that you can download car software.
In fact, today’s cars are looking more and more like our phones. Remote ‘over-the-air’ automatic updates, improvements, and fixes to the software are the norm in many new vehicles. A Mercedes S-Class has a huge number of electronic components to support its ‘infotainment system’, driver display, driving assistance, and lighting systems. Many cars even have built-in Wi-Fi to download large data to the car’s systems.
This means the imperatives and criteria for driving brand loyalty with car buyers are going to start looking a whole lot like they do for phones. The decision people make about whether to stick with any mobile device platform – be it Android or iOS – largely depends on that platform’s compatibility and integration with third-party app ecosystems, how well they synchronize digital life functions (e.g. health and workout monitoring) across multiple devices, the level of personalized experiences they offer each customer, etc.
To retain customers, car manufacturers will have to worry about all the above. How customers interact with their cars – right down to the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) – will become a much bigger deal over the next few years. And the evolution of Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) will be critical to success there.
Enter the Human-Machine Interface (HMI)
Automotive have experimented with HMIs for years to seamlessly provide drivers with useful information without them having to take their eyes off the road. Some examples of these distraction-free experiences include in-car touch screens and buttons, swipe and gesture controls, and speech recognition. However, for years, HMI design prioritized pure function and preventing accidents. It was this whole separate entity slapped onto the car as a value-add. Now, it’s part of the whole vehicle’s design.
There’s significant hype around 3D graphics for enhancing the visual appeal of our cars and building a superior user experience is significant. You might even say HMI design is starting to resemble video game design philosophy. Video games are all about immersing players in a visually captivating world that conveys feeling, whether it be calmness or excitement. HMI design isn’t so different today. It’s experimental and playful; designers now see the potential of 3D as a way of giving the driver experience a new lease of life, whether through AR heads-up displays (HUD) or advanced driver-assistance systems.
Many OEMs are even collaborating directly with game engines, especially because of the visual effects they can add to digital cockpits. The other big reason behind this is that many consumers are already familiar with the quality of visual design and graphics as seen in video games.
And all this pressure to make the car experience more visually ‘exciting’ must at the same time be balanced against ongoing pressures to make driving safe and intuitive, in addition to easily updatable car software. The need to deliver on all these counts has no doubt incentivized OEMs to seek new ways to increase productivity and shorten time-to-market, hence their continued investment into software frameworks that allow them to scale and reuse code across the entire fleet, complemented by 3D graphics to enhance the overall driving experience.
Great(er) Expectations
Of course, I’ve heard some ask, ‘Why would an HMI truly need bells and whistles beyond safety and function’? Well, consumers, today have much greater expectations.
When you think about the advancements that have happened over the years in the tech people use in their daily lives – whether it’s their smartphone, virtual assistants, VR headsets, or more recently, the AI-powered ChatGPT – this isn’t surprising. The challenge now is for car manufacturers to implement their own robust branded digital assistant that deeply integrates with the vehicle’s services and allows multiple in-car passengers to use natural language to speak to and control the vehicle.
In the same way that consumers expect software updates that provide cool new features and security upgrades for their computers and mobile devices, they want the same for their cars. With that comes the need for personalization – cars adapting to their owner’s needs and driving styles. Car manufacturers will need software platforms that support individualized profiles and adapt the vehicle accordingly, along with ancillary personalized digital services around that profile. This will require those manufacturers to truly own the software stock and be in control to develop the services on top, including potentially leveraging AI to better understand owners’ usage and preferences.
What does the ideal HMI experience look like?
Unfortunately, in-vehicle digital experiences fall short of user expectations. It’s why we still see drivers reaching for their smartphones or tablets to satisfy infotainment needs, instead of the in-vehicle screen. Why? Because the experience just isn’t convenient.
Some of the failed experiments we’ve seen in automotive digitalization include swapping any and all physical controls for touch screens, ignoring that not everything necessarily feels better and distraction-free to control from touch screens.
Some OEMs are still adding displays by introducing additional domains like rear-seat entertainment and switching side and rear-view mirrors with displays showing a video stream of the vehicle’s surroundings, eliminating blind spots. By contrast, there’s a strong effort in China to experiment, like making numerous screens look like one big screen, while consolidating UI functions for things like infotainment, and heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) controls.
Henry Ford himself said “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, a faster horse!’” Steve Jobs once elaborated on this by saying, ‘People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
There’s perhaps an element of this at play in Chinese OEM’s desire to out-compete rivals by differentiating their own brand and experience enough to stand out. Whether the audience actually wants that yet is a different story, but history has shown that creating demand by being different leads to far more successful and revolutionary products than yielding to existing demand.
The automotive industry is, no doubt, experiencing its own ‘eureka’ moment as momentum builds for software-defined vehicles. To make that transition, automakers can’t think about what consumers currently expect from cars. They need to show consumers the digital experience they didn’t even know they wanted.
This will inevitably force automakers to adopt different principles for how they operate that are more akin to how a tech company works. For example, tech companies prioritize shipping software quickly and frequently, which sometimes means creating instant delight even if that software isn’t feature-complete yet.
On a more granular level, automotive HMIs will have to be clutter-free. In the same way that video games these days only show context-sensitive information the player needs to know for the situation at hand (e.g. player health), automotive HMIs should also only show features suitable for the moment (e.g. additional information when the car is parked or reduced distractions when driving fast or in traffic).
Above all, a driver shouldn’t have to read a manual before interacting with the car UI, much as most people don’t need a user manual to interact with the iPhone after picking one up for the first time.
For the idyllic car UX to become a reality, the traditional car development environment must change. Designers focused on creating amazing 2D and 3D graphics, and software developers creating the backend code that makes it all work, must be allowed to work in parallel without interfering with each other’s work. Tools decoupling UI from backend logic help here, letting designers create immersive experiences with state-of-the-art graphics without impacting the code, and vice versa. This synergistic relationship must be maintained through design, development, testing and deployment.
There is no doubt that the automotive industry will continue to see significant changes in technology, business models, supplier relationships, and customer expectations. One thing is certain, though: future vehicles will be connected, automated, shared, and electric.
And much like people don’t just want a functional phone anymore, they won’t just want a functional car. Just like people deliberate on whether to buy an Android or an iPhone based on the user experience, so too will people deliberate about which car they buy based on the immersiveness of the experience therein.
Uma Rajagopal has been managing the posting of content for multiple platforms since 2021, including Global Banking & Finance Review, Asset Digest, Biz Dispatch, Blockchain Tribune, Business Express, Brands Journal, Companies Digest, Economy Standard, Entrepreneur Tribune, Finance Digest, Fintech Herald, Global Islamic Finance Magazine, International Releases, Online World News, Luxury Adviser, Palmbay Herald, Startup Observer, Technology Dispatch, Trading Herald, and Wealth Tribune. Her role ensures that content is published accurately and efficiently across these diverse publications.