Driverless CAR

The first thing you notice about Google’s new self-driving car, unveiled last night, is how friendly it looks: It’s face has ovoid eyes and baby-blue retinas, a shiny button nose, and a straight-line mouth–like a put-upon Pixar character who rallies to save the film’s hero. Awwwww!

This design strategy of cuddly familiarity was a concession to one glaring fact about driverless cars: To a public raised on taking the wheel, the very concept of ceding control is terrifying. So the industrial design itself had to be cuddly, approachable, and, in a word, nice. But by the same token, this isn’t enough of an aim for the product. People have to want it. Friendliness is just part of an equation that must include variables for the real experience of living with such a new piece of technology.

There is a lot of precedent for friendliness in design: From the Chumby to canes for the elderly. But perhaps the most successful example is the first iMac: the initial mainstream triumph of Apple’s current design honcho, Jony Ive. That computer was meant to be dead-simple to use from the very first touch. It even had a handle on the top, to make it easy to pull out of the box and onto your desk. That was a design detail that would maybe be used a half dozen times in the computer’s life–but it made an all-important first impression, telegraphing ease of use.

The iMac’s design was meant to teach you to expect almost no friction in set-up, no hurdles to learning how to use such a potentially daunting device. If you’re having trouble remembering how daunting computers used to be, compare the iMac to the IBM PCs of the time. Designed by Richard Sapper, they looked like the obelisk from 2001, but meaner.

The Google Car does well by that standard: You almost want to hug the thing and protect it from this cruel, cruel world. But it’s also only a blunt solution to some deeper problems with which a driverless car must wrestle. Is this kind of cuteness appropriate for such a break-through vehicle? After all, this isn’t just one out of a line of similar but more daunting competitors: It is the very first of its kind, and as such, it has to solve problems unseen by anyone before.

Autonomy or Control? Both, Please
The great design thinker Don Norman told WIRED in 2012 that the experience of driverless car should be rooted in our intuitions about how the objects in our lives already behave. He argued that a driverless car’s experience should begin with the four-legged vehicle that preceded it: the horse.

Norman thought that horses offered an almost magical blend of control and autonomy: You could urge it in a certain direction, or you could encourage it to go faster, but the path was at the animal’s discretion. Thanks to its own instincts, you couldn’t urge a horse over a cliff. “Even when you’re in control,” he said, “the horse is still doing the low-level guidance, stepping safely to avoid holes and obstacles.”

//TRANSITION// What should the experience of the car be like on the inside? What should it demand of the drivers? How much control of the driving experience should it cede? For now, these questions get only the barest answers. Watch the video, and you’ll see people squealing with delight at the magical experience of being driven while in the driver’s seat. They don’t need a steering wheel, so there isn’t one. Its very absence prepares them for a different kind of experience. But for now, that’s it for the experience: The car is merely a box on wheels.