It’s not new, cars have stolen the scene of the most important technology fair in the world, CES in Las Vegas, for some years now, relegating PCs and televisions to a secondary role. But why? Because technology is able to amaze as long as it can make us dream and this ability has now been lost by the old rulers of CES.
Televisions have been the same for some time (they are becoming more and more beautiful, but without revolutionizing anything) while PCs are now a commodity in the working world, supplanted in many fields by smartphones and tablets, despite some attempts at innovation by manufacturers.
The car, on the other hand, is the undisputed queen of the science fiction dream. The ones we can buy today are beautiful, sure, and full of technological gadgets, but the ones of tomorrow promise voice control, clean electric propulsion, entertainment at all times, unbridled convenience and screens. Huge screens, screens that go from door to door, entertainment screens in the front seats facing the rear passengers, screens for the rear view mirrors, screens that show everything around the car and beyond … in short, in the prototypes that we saw here at CES (Sony/Honda, Qualcomm, BMW, Stellantis and so on) in cars what was expected for homes is happening, but which the arrival of smartphones has swept away: a proliferation of monitors that leaves no way out for the eye and which, thanks to the modern sensibility for beauty, become decorative motifs for interiors. The refined materials, but always the same once chosen by the dealer, will no longer exist. Depending on our mood, the interior of our car will be a forest, the heart of a black hole, a coral reef, an abstract work and a thousand other things, without ever straying far from our garage.
And then there’s BMW, with its iridescent bodywork: a car that changes color or even colorful patterns as it moves. Imagine a computer or a TV that can change its appearance while you strut around driving it? No, only a car can inflate a person’s ego to the point of bursting and this feature alone would be enough to understand why four wheels fuel everyone’s dreams, but that’s not all.
Electrification platforms, for running without making noise, and on-board entertainment are multiplying and the heart of one of the most popular platforms at the moment, the Snapdragon one, comes directly from the world of smartphones, bringing with it the power necessary to control dozens of screens, use artificial intelligence and keep the car constantly connected to the large Internet. A network that will be used to feed the screens we have talked about with content, intended to entertain passengers who will look out the window less and less (unless this does not replaced by a screen too) and increasingly to films, TV series, documents to be finalized for work, colleagues in videoconference or points of interest along the way. And then there’s the last frontier of monitors: the ones you can’t see.