Design This Day | Episode 11

What it takes to make a car feel magical.

Eric Wood joins Teague Futurist Devin Liddell to talk about software-defined vehicles, designing features people didn’t know they wanted, and rethinking what a car can be. Eric is the Senior VP of Product Experience at 42dot, a subsidiary of Hyundai. He previously served as Head of Design at Rivian.

Eric Wood:
These are major, major rewrites. I mean, they're pretty fundamental, especially for an electric vehicle. Power-modding is as fundamental as it comes. Like here is a product that's already in market, and you're saying whatever we had and it's working, let's shred that and build something that no one's ever done before to chase a feature that no one had really asked for. So that was a big risk.

Here is a product that's already in market, and you're saying whatever we had and it's working, let's shred that and build something that no one's ever done before to chase a feature that no one had really asked for. So that was a big risk.

Devin Liddell:
Welcome to Design This Day, a podcast about the future, the futures we want, and the people working right now to make those futures real. I'm your host, Devin Liddell. I'm a futurist at Teague. I spend a lot of my time thinking about the gap between present challenges and future solutions.

Today, I'm speaking with Eric Wood. Eric is Senior VP of Product Experience at 42dot, a subsidiary of Hyundai. He's also the former Head of Design at Rivian.

Eric has been at the forefront of using software to transform the automotive world, not just in how cars are built, but in how we experience them.

In this conversation, we explore what happens when you stop designing cars around horsepower and steel and start designing them as programmable machines instead. We also dig into the global competition shaping the future of cars and the rare moment when science fiction actually gets it right.

But first, Eric and I talk a little bit about Rivian's camp mode.

Eric Wood:
Have you used it before?

Devin Liddell:
I have not used camp mode. No, no.

Eric Wood:
Okay. So camp mode is a cluster of features that allow you to use your Rivian, whether it's your truck or your SUV, in a campsite or in a camping situation. The feature includes things like the ability to level your vehicle so you can put a tent on it, the ability to use your giant battery as a power source for things like your refrigerator or even induction stoves. It allows you to control lighting and sound in a way that doesn't bother the wildlife or your fellow campers.

Devin Liddell:
And what was the genesis of camp mode? Where did that idea even come from?

Eric Wood:
I suppose successful features have many, many parents, but the way that I remember it is the Chief Engineer, guy named Charles Sanderson, and I were sitting around and he was telling me all about air suspension. I'd never owned a car with air suspension. And he explained that each wheel would independently or the suspension of each wheel would independently move up and down depending on the need. If you wanted to go into an off-road situation, the car would jack up, and if you were trying to be aerodynamic, it would come down. And we started riffing, and I said, "Well, what if each of the suspension heights could be adjusted so you could level off the platform? And the tent that we'd been talking about would be perfectly level." Everyone's probably had the experience of waking up at the bottom of the tent in a pile, so we want get rid of that. And so he's like, "They don't really work like that."

Devin Liddell:
The Chief Engineer, Charles, told Eric that creating this self-leveling ability would require a foundational change in the car's control systems. It would mean having to completely reprogram how the car powered on and off.

Eric Wood:
So with camp mode, the first really big challenge that we faced was in power-modding itself because up until that point, we had basically followed either Tesla or even some ways that vehicles operate in internal combustion engines. You turn the car on, the power comes on, you turn the car off, the power turns off. And in camp mode, that's not the way things work. And you would have to essentially rewrite the way power is managed or the way power is routed, the timing in which power turns on and off. And these are major, major rewrites. I mean, they're pretty fundamental, especially for an electric vehicle. Power-modding is as fundamental as it comes. Like here is a product that's already in market, and you're saying whatever we had and it's working, let's shred that and build something that no one's ever done before to chase a venture that no one had really asked for. So that was a big risk.

Devin Liddell:
Saying this was a big risk is an understatement. Rivian had already, not just sold, but delivered thousands of vehicles to customers at this point. So people were already driving these cars and Eric's team was proposing they push a software update that would rewrite the car's core systems.

Eric Wood:
There was one point where we were convinced it was going to be dead on arrival because you have to over, these are vehicles that had shipped already, right? We're one year into delivery, and we are saying all the vehicles that we've ever shipped and all future vehicles are going to get this feature.

Devin Liddell:
But Charles and the engineering team found a way. They managed to level the car using the suspension system.

Eric Wood:
He came back a few days later, and he's like, "Look, I talked to the guys and we think we can level this out." So they figured out how to do that, to flash all these different electronic control units that would allow us to run this algorithm to level the vehicle. That's great. And then we did all these other use cases like, "Okay, well what happens if you want to camp outside the vehicle? So you want the vehicle to be in a low power mode, but level, and then maybe you wanted an outlet on so that you could, whatever, run your refrigerator. And what if you wanted to camp inside? So you wanted the power on, but you needed to have it air-conditioned." And so on and so forth. And so we created this switch panel of different options and the integration people came back and they said, "You've just created an n factorial number of test cases for us. We cannot do this."

And so it was test, and then the power people came back and they said, "Look, you can't do this." And to his credit, the Head of Software, a guy named Wassym came back and said, "Look, I'm going to talk to the team. We're going to figure out a way that we're going to generalize this problem." And so two weeks later, they came back and they had completely redefined how they define power modes, and it became a la carte.

Devin Liddell:
This meant that the design team was now free to offer myriad new features, car wash mode, tire change mode, pet mode. But really the team at Rivian hadn't just unlocked new features, they had re-imagined what a car could be.

Eric Wood:
I think the largest takeaway I have as a designer is that working with engineers, working with testers and product managers, if we are unified on the passion for what the product is, everything becomes a much easier conversation. It's because they have pride in their product and they want to do something groundbreaking. And I don't know if that would work on a product that isn't groundbreaking, but certainly does work in the work that I'm doing.

Anything is possible, especially in this day and age where technology really isn't the barrier to entry. It's really about prioritization or willingness.

Devin Liddell:
The automotive industry still has a lot of work to do when it comes to changing how it approaches innovation. Most legacy car makers are still wired to think hardware first, horsepower, luxury trims, heated steering wheels, but they're missing what happens when software becomes central to the experience. And that's where Eric sees the real frontier, not just better cars, but a different way of thinking about what a car can be.

Anything is possible, especially in this day and age where technology really isn't the barrier to entry. It's really about prioritization or willingness.

Eric Wood:
I think we're just at the beginning of this curve of understanding how cars can operate differently. And if you take, I think Hyundai is a very good example. They're a pretty open-minded company. They're pretty high-tech, but yet what they haven't really encompassed yet is a shift in mindset between what a car is today and how it's built and how it's put together and how that influences the type of experiences you can get out of it and the sort of open-endedness of a software-defined vehicle where everything is just a programmable part and the limitation is what do you dream of doing in it? And there are going to be cultural shifts, cultural differences, even between markets, between economic classes, between vehicle sizes, and there are hundreds and hundreds of use cases that they're just laying on the ground. You just need to do a brainstorming session with them and come up with a cool feature, something that you could see in a car commercial or that someone would find really useful and then start prioritizing.

Devin Liddell:
Interesting. When you think about the relationship between software and hardware, there's one vision of software, I think, this is sort of my take on it. There seems to be one vision. It's slightly dystopian I think in some regards, some vision of software where you have a software-defined vehicle and it sort of creates this world of, from a hardware standpoint, boxes, they're just boxes. So the software is doing all of the heavy lifting in terms of creating the experience that people might want out of it, but that at the end of the day, it is a box with wheels and so forth. There's another version, of course, another vision that is the opposite of that, which is like, no, a software-defined vehicle actually unlocks even more diversity when it comes to the hardware experience. Do you have a sense of where that will go?

Eric Wood:
Yeah, I strongly fall in the latter camp there. So let me give you an example. The best example I know is the Rivian. So it is a software-defined vehicle, and there's nothing about that vehicle from a behavioral standpoint that wouldn't make it a good race car. It's got a special suspension system that keeps it level around the most extreme corners. It lowers itself for stability and speed. It's got certain modes that'll put extra juice into the cables, even though it'll overheat if you use it for a long time, so it's called launch mode. The point though is that it's an off-road vehicle because we chose hardware that's off-road. It's got giant wheels, it's got a suspension system that is meant for off-road and arms on those vehicles. It doesn't catch on things when you drive over them. So although it is a software-defined vehicle, the part that defines it as a adventure vehicle is really the hardware.

But you could change that same software into a sports car and the same motors and the same headlights and all those things, but because it's a jacked up adventure vehicle with bulky tires, that makes it a truck. And then you see that the difficult part actually is the traditional part, sourcing and stamping metal and assembling and doing it in something that actually allows you to make money. I mean, the fact that you can buy a vehicle for so little that'll last 10 years with virtually no maintenance and start every morning depending on if it's minus-forty or plus-forty is unbelievable. Think about any other industry. Imagine a rocket that could do that or a boat and those things just aren't as reliable.

Devin Liddell:
Yeah, it's true. Yeah. I mean, that's one of those scenarios where we probably don't give the industry enough credit for what it's done.

Eric Wood:
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's only available when you have absolutely high production. Without economies of scale, you can look at how much it costs, look at a Bentley or look at a Rolls-Royce. Those are bespoke coaches, and those are sometimes millions of dollars.

Devin Liddell:
Yeah, exactly. By the way, do you have a particular vehicle that is no longer manufactured that you particularly lament like, "Oh, I wish they still made the blank."

Eric Wood:
I always joke with my wife that I'm going to buy her a Chevy Nova. That's going to be the, and she's like, "God, no." Because that was the car growing up that the Motorheads always had it, and they always had long in the back, short in the front.

Devin Liddell:
Mullets going. Exactly. There was a kid in my neighborhood who I really looked up to who had a Chevy Chevelle.

Eric Wood:
Oh, Chevelle. Nice. Yes.

Devin Liddell:
Yeah, the Chevelle. I was like, sometimes I could actually even kind of hear that noise still, it made kind of a gurgling noise.

Eric Wood:
Right. So a lot of the work that I do in cars is try to eliminate annoying behaviors or things that are unnecessary, but there is a point at which operating old things which are unnecessary becomes a hobby. And that's fun. So I don't want to get rid of those. It's just that's a hobby, not going to work.

Devin Liddell:
Well, this actually, this whole topic, that point has actually come up a number of times on this podcast that there will be things that we look at and they seem anachronistic for their era. And there is a precedent for this. When you think about what we used to use horses for, there was a very pragmatic use for a horse. Now, horses are very much the domain of people who are just horse...

Eric Wood:
Lovers. Yeah.

Devin Liddell:
Yeah. They're horse lovers.

Eric Wood:
Absolutely.

Devin Liddell:
So they earmark a lot of money for the care and feeding and maintenance of their horse, and you would go to a farm, or we've done as a family, we've gone to ride horses and so forth. But there might be the same thing where you end up with a muscle car park that you go to a racetrack.

Eric Wood:
It's called a track.

Devin Liddell:
Exactly. Yeah, totally. And then you experience the gurgle firsthand, right? That's what you do.

Eric Wood:
Absolutely. Well, I think this is going to bring about a whole new league of features that harken back to that anachronistic, as you put it, feeling. So I recently got a ride in one of my colleague's IONIQ 5 N. And this is a crazy cool car. N is Hyundai's sort of equivalent of BMW's M, right? So it's a tuned vehicle, but this is an electric vehicle, so it's got crazy horsepower. It's like 600 some horsepower for a vehicle that's like the third the weight of the Rivian, which only has 800 and change, or at least the early ones did. And so it'll rip up the road. And what they did is they tuned the audio to sound like a five speed transmission, and it's really convincing. Not only did they tune the audio, they tuned the power output. And it is fun. I made fun of it until I tried it, and then I tried it, and then I'm like, "You know what? That's really fun."

Devin Liddell:
That's awesome.

Eric Wood:
And yeah, you can fool your friends too. There's a ton of YouTube videos out there of people trying to fool their friends that this is a gas car. And they're like, "Oh my God, this car rips."

Devin Liddell:
That's amazing. Well, there's got to be, maybe in the resurrection of the Chevelle, there'll be the gurgle mode. Maybe that'll come back in.

Eric Wood:
Yeah. Retro, futuristic car.

Devin Liddell:
It's clear that old ideas about what a car should look like and sound like shape what we expect from vehicles today, but not every tradition is worth holding onto. In fact, some features were designed out of existence for good reason. Here's Eric with an example that might take you back a few decades.

Eric Wood:
So in the old days, you managed two dials, fan and temperature. And so fan was obviously managing the voltage of this fan, and it would spin faster or slower. And the other one was this flap that took engine bleed air, which was hot, and then mixed it with cool air. And if you turned it all the way to the red, then it would be coming off the engine block, hot air, and it's really hot. And then if you turn it on cool, it would be like none, right? And so as you're driving along, you had to manage this air all the time and suddenly in the sunlight, and now you had to turn the fan down or the heat. You had to decide, so you're managing this. This is a task and this is something that needs to be designed out of existence. Because no one says when they get in their car, "You know what I really want to do when I drive? I want to manage these two knobs." What they want to do is drive and get to somewhere or enjoy themselves on a Sunday drive with their family.

We went from a task which is operating flaps and voltages to a goal, which is I want to be this temperature. That's a goal. And so we've designed out of existence this task of managing temperature in flaps and voltages that only existed because of the limitations of the technology of the day.

And so now we have a closed loop technology that you set the temperature 72 degrees, 21 Celsius, and you say, "Look, this is comfortable for me. You manage it." We went from a task which is operating flaps and voltages to a goal, which is I want to be this temperature. That's a goal. And so we've designed out of existence this task of managing temperature in flaps and voltages that only existed because of the limitations of the technology of the day.

Devin Liddell:
Interesting. What camp mode brings up is that there's clearly an interest, by the way, in sort of reacquainting, and there's some irony of course wrapped up in this about using technology to reacquaint ourselves with nature.

Eric Wood:
With the wilderness.

Devin Liddell:
Right, exactly. I want to go into nature, it's very important to me.

Eric Wood:
But be comfortable.

Devin Liddell:
But I would like for my vehicle to self level when I do so.

Eric Wood:
Yeah, exactly.

Devin Liddell:
But you can actually have all the good things of camping and actually just remove that thing that I'm sure there's some crunchy Gen X like myself saying, "Oh, well, it's not real camping unless you wake up at the bottom of the tent." But really we should remove that problem from the experience.

Eric Wood:
I mean, you just have to recognize that we rely on technology every day. And where do you draw the line, right? At a certain point, language is technology, right?

Devin Liddell:
Oh, totally.

Eric Wood:
Or a pocket knife or a wine bottle opener.

Devin Liddell:
I enjoy that wine so much more when I actually have to bust the top of it off.

There's always a little grumbling that technology makes things too easy. But in cars, that's often the point. AM radio, key fobs, and manual parking brakes are already on their way out, and more changes are coming. It's not hard to imagine side mirrors giving way to cameras and digital displays, and eventually, most drivers will disappear entirely in an autonomous vehicle world. The car of the future might look very different from the car as we know today. And competition to build that car has always been global, usually based on razor-thin margins. But the balance of who's leading and who's catching up is starting to change.

Eric Wood:
So 10 years ago, I was working for a company that had a major presence in China. Still does. But my introduction to China was that they were out iterating Silicon Valley, which is where I live. And that's something that was a real shock to me because we pride ourselves here in Silicon Valley of fail early, fail often, and you want to be able to do that iteration. And iteration is everything. It doesn't matter how good your product is, if you iterate faster, you will always win over any lead. All you need is iteration and time, and you will win. And that's what happened with China. They iterated twice as fast or even more than Silicon Valley would, and they did it over a period of 10 years with government support, and they won.

It doesn't matter how good your product is, if you iterate faster, you will always win over any lead. All you need is iteration and time.

And unfortunately for the US, they also have the manufacturing prowess that we have lost. And so you combine those two things and they're a really formidable source of competition for the US. So your question though is around what can the US do or what place will the US hold in the future? Certainly software. We do have great software engineers. We have great trained professionals around innovation and sideways thinking that can get us the next innovative product. I do have a hope in that we do have manufacturing prowess. It maybe needs to be invested in and nurtured, but I think we're better off than in Europe. I think Europe has fallen back purely on craft, which is also something that's very important. But I think Europe in general has a higher level of craft in their work. However, that can be imported. And you see that by major OEMs in Asia, China included, hiring Europeans to head their design studios, and you get that level of craft.

Devin Liddell:
Yeah, right. Interesting. Yeah, I remember being in, I was traveling direct to China quite often, probably around 2015 or 16, and someone said, "If you want to know what China will be in 10 years, look at Korea now."

Eric Wood:
Interesting.

Devin Liddell:
And in a lot of ways, that's actually come to bear in terms of the maturation of a lot of those same forces that you just mentioned.

Eric Wood:
Yeah, I think Korea would feel very honored for that because I think now Koreans look at China and go like, "Okay, what can we learn from China right now?" They consistently have bucked the tradition and just sort of asked why and built it. I think it's a long, I don't know, some kind of cultural heritage in just trying random things. I think there's something about having a billion people in your country and you can sell anything, and it doesn't matter. As long as you get one person to try it, you can repeat that again a billion times and be a billionaire. Right?

Devin Liddell:
Right. That's true. Yeah. Sometimes I think we fall into the trap of thinking that when it comes to features or things that people will want to buy, that logic is involved. And there's lots of examples, of course, probably, maybe even most examples that are completely illogical. I mean, this is actually sort of the human condition. So we are not actually a coolly rational species necessarily.

Eric Wood:
No, no, no. I mean, I remember my father-in-law bought a Porsche when I was a younger lad, and I was working at a German company, and he came up to me and he's like, "It's really strange. I love this car, but it doesn't have cup holders." And I was like, "Wow, that's really strange." So I thought this was an interesting story, and I was in Germany and I said, "It's really strange. My father-in bought a Porsche and it has no cup holders." And the guy looked at me at the completely straight face, "But why would you want cup holders? You are driving." Right? And so I'm like, "Oh, I see."

Devin Liddell:
Yes, exactly.

Eric Wood:
That's the logical side talking and it's like, "Yeah, why would you? You're driving." But of course, we want cup holders.

Devin Liddell:
Right. Totally.
All right, we should make sure we have saved time here for this lightning round. So I'm curious, what is your take on the most over-hyped technology?

Eric Wood:
AI.

Devin Liddell:
Okay. And for what reason?

Eric Wood:
Well, so I think a lot of people think that AI is going to solve the hard problem when what it does is just predict the next word, or it has weighting that looks at probabilities, so it doesn't actually solve problems, but unfortunately it will disrupt people's jobs.

Devin Liddell:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's a fraud subject for sure. And it does tap into sort of the human tendency towards anthropomorphism in a lot of ways. We want to see human-like qualities in the things around us, which is why we have faces on trains in Thomas and friends. But it's also why we maybe infer a level of sentience or a level of intelligence that's actually maybe not even there and we shouldn't.

Eric Wood:
Yeah, it's so easy to do. I use please when I talk to ChatGPT, right?

Devin Liddell:
I'm heartened to hear you say that you still say please and thank you to ChatGPT.

Eric Wood:
I'm Canadian. I can't help it.

Devin Liddell:
All right. At the other end of the spectrum, what's your take on the most under-hyped technology?

Eric Wood:
AI.

Devin Liddell:
Oh, interesting. Okay. So both. Yeah. That's fascinating. I love this.

Eric Wood:
Yeah, I think that if we can solve the labor problem, which is we're going to displace people who had meaningful jobs and give them something else meaningful to do or have a world in which everyone gets to participate. And I'm hoping for a Star Trek-like future where people work because they want meaning or they believe in something and not because just need to pay the bills and make sure the heat's on.

I'm hoping for a Star Trek-like future where people work because they want meaning or they believe in something and not because they just need to pay the bills and make sure the heat's on.

Devin Liddell:
Yeah, exactly. All right. Is there a book or a show that you've either recently read or you're reading or you're watching or you finished watching that's influenced how you think about your role as a designer or an innovator?

Eric Wood:
Yeah. Anything science fiction. I'm a huge science fiction fan. William Gibson I would say is probably the number one. I don't know if you read William Gibson, but he's consistently 10 to 20 years ahead of everyone.

Devin Liddell:
Well, and to your point, if you read Neuromancer, it's amazing how much he actually got. I mean, it's extraordinary. Yeah.

Eric Wood:
Neuromancer, Virtual Light, All Tomorrow's Parties, the Pattern Recognition, geez, there's just so many series that he just called it. And now I just reread Pattern Recognition, which is set in like 2001 or 2002, and it happened. They're trying to share a video, and if only we had some mechanism to share a video.

Devin Liddell:
The equivalent, by the way, there was one scene in Neuromancer where an AI is essentially kind of haranguing one of the characters, and the AI rings all of these payphones.

Eric Wood:
Love that scene, love that scene. Arm hair on my arm just all stood up, and as he walks by, each phone successively rings.

Devin Liddell:
Exactly. It's such an awesome scene. But of course then you take a step back and say, "Well, but payphones."

Eric Wood:
Yeah. But still.

Devin Liddell:
And now the AI just calls you up.

Eric Wood:
Exactly.

Devin Liddell:
That's it for today. Thank you for listening to Design This Day, a podcast by Teague. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next episode. And if you have a complex problem that needs solving, we'd love to hear from you. Visit us at Teague.com or send us an email at hello@Teague.com.