CES Day 1 – Hot, cool & mad.

Byton – Still needs to address the elephant.

• Byton didn’t have new cars but it had plenty of new partners, a production-ready vehicle and some progress on its digital offering.
• The main reason to buy a Byton vehicle over its competitors is its digital offering.
• Hence, it was surprising that when the conversation turned to this crucial topic, a third of the press stood up and walked out.
• Byton’s proposition is the merging of the user’s digital life outside of the vehicle with the user experience when he is in the vehicle.
• This means that the apps and the services that reside on the device have to be integrated into the vehicle user experience in an easy to use and fun way.
• On this Byton was completely silent choosing instead to focus on how its own offerings and partnerships cover the Digital Life of the user when he is in the vehicle.
• There was no mention of CarPlay, Android Auto or even Baidu’s CarLife or of Spotify, Netflix etc.
• What it did do was announce a list of partners who will help bring its massive 48” vehicle screen to life.
• These included:
  • Garmin but why anyone would want to upload their exercise data to view on the vehicle is a total mystery
  • ViacomCBS for content and Access which is providing the software that will enable the delivery and display of the ViacomCBS content.
  • Xperi for digital radio.
  • Aiqudo which appears to be powering voice recognition for the Byton voice assistant
  • Baidu, iQiyi, Apollo for Chinese vehicles as well as a number of other similar Chinese focused partners.
• Byton also announced a developer program which is an obvious move but also highlights the key weakness of Byton.
• If things go brilliantly, Byton could ship 300,000 vehicles per year (Nanjing plant capacity) which is a drop in the ocean in the context to both vehicles and digital devices.
• Hence, the incentive for developers to port their applications to Byton’s admittedly cool user experience is simply not there because the volumes are not high enough to justify the investment required.
• This combined with bringing in the existing media consumption and mapping experiences that consumers love on their smartphones remains Byton’s biggest challenge.
• Its head is in the right place but if it does not pull off the seamless digital integration, users are unlikely to buy the vehicles.

Oxicool – cool by nature?

• Oxicool is a new air conditioning system that uses water instead of hydrocarbons for coolant and does not use a compressor.
• It claims to reduce electricity consumption by 90% as only the pumps and fans consume power.
• The energy used to cool water that then cools air through comes from heat boiling the water, typically natural gas.
• There is no real magic here other than a unit of energy from gas or heat is typically much cheaper than the same energy drawn from electricity.
• Hence, while the overall energy consumption is the same, the total energy cost is likely to somewhere in the region of 40% cheaper.
• In many parts of the US, this is a big deal as AC is a major part of monthly expenditure on utilities.
• This sounds great but the proof will come when this hits the market and its capabilities and cost are compared to the well-established and optimised AC technology that has been around for 50 years or more.
• The system launches to the market this year and is one to keep an eye on as I am always keen on things that have a big impact on the biggest motivator of consumers: their money.

Toyota reinvents the Truman Show

• The maddest presentation so far goes to Toyota which appears to have reinvented The Truman Show with its Woven City experiment.
• On one of its old sites in the shadow of Mt. Fuji, Toyota intends to build an entire smart city consisting of 3 city blocks.
• This is a massive experiment where everything will be connected to everything else and the data used to dream up new products and services.
• Toyota autonomous pods will roam the streets and the homes will monitor every aspect of resident’s lives.
• The mad part about this is that Toyota expects that real people will want to move and live in this city where their private lives will become part of one big lab experiment.
• Furthermore, building a city extends well beyond Toyota’s current expertise and the proposition sounds a lot like the brainchild of someone who played SimCity as a teenager and wants to see it become real.
• Toyota expects to break ground on construction in 2021 but frankly, I have doubts whether this will ever manage to migrate from its current vapourware state to reality.
• Toyota has far more pressing issues to deal with rather than this which I think will soon relegate this to the recycling once they start to hurt quarterly reports.