Your Next Car Wants To Be Your Best Friend

From Popular Mechanics ^[1]

Behold that bonkers styling-the fluorescent stripes on the floorboards, the avant-garde high-design shell. Toyota's Concept-i certainly looks the part of a hyper-futuristic concept car. But the real star of the show is the ghost in the machine.

Its name is Yui, and it wants to be your bestie. It's not the only one. If CES 2017 is any indication, then the car industry thinks AI personal assistants may be its salvation.

In-Car Alexa

Yui, pronounced "you-E," is the personal assistant Toyota built into the architecture of its concept car for last week's 2017 Consumer Electronics Show. It manifests as a happy little avatar that moves from the outside of the vehicle to the inside and back, giving the Concept-i ^[2] a playful personality.

Those headlights that blink at you, for one thing. Yui also appears on the doors to say hello when you walk up to the car. Climb inside and it moves to the center console, where the AI attempts to cater to your every need. If Yui thinks you're angry, it changes the ambient light and music to something more soothing. If it senses that you're tired, or if it predicts that you'll need to take over driving from the autonomous system, then it tries to perk you up.

In-car connectivity isn't just about syncing up your music playlists to the center console anymore, or taking phone calls via Bluetooth without taking your hands off of wheel. Car people think your next car is going to get to know you, and that you're going to spend a hell of a lot of time talking to an automobile. The cyber personal assistant trend that spawned Siri and Cortana and Alexa is moving from your phone or your house and colonizing your car.

In same cases, it's those same AI assistants you already know and (maybe) love that are hopping into the dashboard. Countless CES gadgets wrapped the Amazon Echo's Alexa assistant into their conversational core, and that includes cars. Volkswagen saw fit have her ride shotgun in the Connected Car concept on display at the show. Ford's working on the same thing.

The advantages are obvious. If you had Alexa in your home and your car, you could control one place from the other. You could ask her to turn on your house lights while you're driving, or tell her to lock the car from the comfort of your own bed. Moreover, everything Alexa has learned about you from kitchen chitchat is right there for use in the in the car. She has access to all your playlists and accounts; she already knows your preferences. BMW, meanwhile, includes voice control with Microsoft's personal assistant Cortana in the future car vision it brought to CES. Same approach, different AI.

With Yui, however, Toyota is taking a different tack-building its own AI to be your new best friend. Mercedes-Benz took up this challenge, too. Merc's take on the world of 2025 includes MercedesMe, and MercedesMe doesn't stay in the car, as featured in a real Maybach on display and shown by a demonstration video at CES.

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You've seen this kind of techno-utopian wet dream: In the clip, a unnecessarily fit bro wakes up in the sort of perfect, sterile gray apartment we'll all inhabit in the future. He's immediately greeted by Mercedes's personal assistant, which displays for him the weather and his to-do list for the day on a display that nods to Minority Report. Like Yui, MercedesMe tweaks the sounds and scents of the car to make the Model Man happy and healthy, but its concern for his health and wellness follows him around everywhere-in the home or in the car, nagging him to exercise if he's been idle too long. MercedesMe is his "vitality coach." "It's a direct relationship with your car," the Merc rep tells me.

Ridiculous? Through 2017 eyes it feels silly to think any real person would give over their life to nagging machine assistant built by a car company. At the same time it feels, at least in theory, utterly believable. Think about how much time people spend in their cars. Think about how much of that time they might spend talking to their vehicles-and getting attached to them.

Love and Carriage

We have feelings for our old, dumb cars. We love them. We're loyal to them. We remember the road trips and the mishaps. How the old beater moved all our possessions into the dorm, or the new van brought the kid home from the hospital. You won't feel the same way about a future pod that ferries you around-especially if car ownership fades away and you're riding in a self-driving rent-a-car. No, the real vehicles of the future probably won't look like the whiz-bang Jetsons cars at CES, but it's hard to imagine you'll have the same emotional relationship with them as with the Jeep Wagoneer you drove to Yellowstone.

These personality-driven personal assistants, then, are part of the industry's answer to this conundrum. Toyota's slogan for the Concept-i shines right up there above the show car at the company's CES display: "More than a machine," it says. "A partner." Toyota could just as easily say, "a friend." They know our cars are becoming gadgets, and that evolution puts their business model-you buying one of their cars, and then hopefully another one-in peril. They need a new way for us to love their product.

Practically, the friendship part of the futuristic in-car experience is superfluous. In many cases, Yui or MercedesMe or in-car Alexa is a chipper veneer on things that are already easily available-the health and lifestyle nags you'd get from a smartwatch, or the day-planning features on your phone. Apple could offer you the same Siri service without the cutesy name and sassy voice. However, the latest round of personal assistants are meant to do more. Alexa and Google Assistant want not only to answer your questions, but also to learn about you and predict your desires. You build up a history with them that makes the relationship better.

There's another side to this, and it's not just about companies collecting all this data about you by getting you to talk to a sweet robot voice. If Alexa becomes your friend with a history-your partner-will you leave her behind when your Alexa-equipped car dies and choose a new ride that lacks her integration? Probably not. We don't want to give up that history. If the future brings us a world after car ownership, will you use only Toyota's rent-a-pods and not Honda's because your pal Yui is there waiting for you?

We used to talk a lot about the tech ecosystem trap. A MacBook plays nicer with iOS devices than it does with outsiders, making "Apple People" ever more Apple People, and making Android People and Windows People increasingly devout as well. Then, it was about how our gadgets talk to each other. Now, we're talking about how we talk to our gadgets-and that includes our cars.

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