Wouldn’t it be great to have a car that adapts to your personality and state of alertness? Isn’t it annoying to have your mother critique your driving even when you’re 30? Meet the Ford Evos Concept. The Evos hints at four Ford directions: personalizing the vehicle on-the-fly, make it more fun to drive, looking after the driver’s well-being, and optimizing the car for performance and fuel economy.
Ford unveiled the Evos Concept this week at the IFA show in Berlin as a precursor to the official unveiling at the Frankfurt Auto Show at mid-month. Ford sees its future cars always communicating with the cloud (and other cars), then adapting to the driver’s personal cloud of information. It knows if you like a sporty or comfy ride and adapts the suspension and handling accordingly. Whatever music you listened to at home or in the office could continue when you opened the car door. Pull away from your house and it would close the garage door. Sneeze and it turns on the air filters.
More intriguing are the Evos features that adapt the car to your driving style: sporty suspension for sporty drivers and a marshmallow ride for those looking for a rolling sofa. Suppose your eyesight’s not so good: the gauges would be digital and twice as big. If there’s an incoming call and you’re approaching a tricky intersection, the call would go straight to voicemail. Maybe it makes a judgment call, so to speak, based on how good you’ve been as a driver over the last year, how alert you’ve been the past 30 minutes — info taken from your personal cloud along with road and traffic conditions from the general cloud. What’s a good driver? Somebody who doesn’t make panic stops, who isn’t setting off the lane departure warning system too often, who isn’t making more jerky steering movements compared to the average of all other drivers on this road today. It would have an algorithm that guesses if your driving pattern suggests you’re intoxicated.
Here’s where Big Brother might come in: Wouldn’t the cops love to know? Wouldn’t your insurance company? Your mom and dad if you’re a teenager? Already a handful of insurance companies offer insurance rates based on simple factors trackable by telematics: miles driven, time of day, where you’re going, how fast you’re driving. Ford didn’t talk about this in the Evos Concept rollout, but the possibility exists. Paul Mascarenas, Ford’s chief technical officer, put it more benignly: “We’re researching how we can use patterns or preferences … to make life simpler. The car gets to know you and can act as a personal assistant.” Right up until Jeeves turns state’s witness.
If the car knows you have allergies, it would crank up the HEPA filters and even, Ford hints, might access air quality info and proactively reroute you via a cleaner route. Since this is a concept car, anything a futurist might wish for, Ford can say, “We’e got an app for that.” Ford’s announcement “foresees,” for instance, custom-tuning the suspension for the road and the driver.
The Evos concept car is a plug-in hybrid (like Chevrolet Volt) and Ford sees how economy and performance could be enhanced via the cloud. Ford says that a connection to the cloud could “enhance performance by selecting the optimum combination of powertrain modes for any given journey.” Although after 30 miles the only choice is going to be: combustion engine. But consider little savings: If you’ve going up a five-mile hill and you’ve got four miles of battery charge left — which the car would know from topographic map data — it could run the battery down at the crest of the hill, knowing it could regenerate that power going down the other side. If the Evos knows you’re a performance type, it might always keep a bit of juice in the battery to provide extra acceleration, more on two lane roads than interstates.
At a pre-pre-rollout last week in Deroit, Ford’s chief designer, J. Mays, offered two tantalizing hints about the future for Evos and Ford. For the personal wellness bit, Mays suggested the driver would sit in a smart seat — perhaps equipped with sensors to measure driver movement, discomfort, and vital signs. Mays also said the swoopy look, suitably modified for production cars, meaning the gullwing doors go away, will be part of Ford’s design going forward in the very near future.
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