Latest BMW commercial – guy in the car is singing this insipid little tune when the phone rings. It’s the BMW lady asking if he’d like to schedule an oil change.
“How’d you know I need an oil change?”, idiot asks.
“The car called us up and told us.”, BMW lady replies.
It's hard to even enumerate all the ways that this is stupid.
If I were driving along and my car dealer called me up (while I was driving!) to try to hook me up with some overly expensive dealer servicing, I would rip the phone and instrumentation out of the car on the spot and smash it to bits with a tire iron. How can this possibly be perceived as a selling point? Even in the commercial, the guy is worried about what else is being sent over the phone link.
This is a total misuse of technology. Several hundred dollars of electronics take the place of a two dollar idiot light on the dash.
An oil change is their best example of the technology in action? Unless BMW is far more advanced than I think they are, there’s no sensor that measures the viscosity or amount of crud in the oil and decides it’s time for an oil change. You change the oil every X thousand miles or Y months. And there’s a pretty big window of flexibility there. So BMW could accomplish the same thing by simply calling the guy three months after he bought the car and suggesting servicing.
So what other egregious uses of technology have you seen lately?
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was cheaper than the idiot light. Consider that the vehicle computer already keeps track of oil changes, and already linked to a wireless network for requesting roadside assistance. It’s just a software modification to make it call for assitance when due for an oil change. Whereas an idiot light is an additional light bulb (or LED) that needs to be wired to a computer. That costs money.
I think it’s meant as an example of “attention to detail”, i.e. how they take care of even the most mundane and trivial aspects of car maintenance. Similar to some other auto maker’s ad about the automatic wiper - how it saves you 2/5 of a second, and showing you what you can do with that extra 2/5 of a second.
I recently came across an article about some technology in development. I’ve forgotten the specifics, but it was basically a fancy mobile phone which monitors your daily routine, then double checks if you do anything abnormal. Imagine the MS Office Paperclip brought to life.
Yes, somebody actually thinks this is a good idea, and somebody else is ploughing money into the endeavour.
I prophesize the emergence of a device which will “Replace the time consuming and often difficult process of thinking”:
…Using it’s GPS receiver, iBrain will lead you wherever it wants to go. It also monitors how long it has been since you last ate, and will occasionally direct you to a nearby fast food chain and order a meal for you. iBrain’s inbuilt camera will allow it to perform tasks such as informing you whether to push or pull upcoming doors. Furthermore, it also comes with instructions that enable it to guide you through 1000 common tasks, ranging from cooking breakfast to wiping your ass. However, its most revolutionary feature is its ability to generate conversation for people around you based on your daily routine…
Okay, the slope might not be that slippery… but you do wonder.
Especially the doors thing. Except that it would probably tell me “Push!” and while I was trying to remember whether “push” is the where you lean into the door, or the other one, I’d end up standing there yanking the handle and looking like an idiot like I always do.
The only problem with that ad is that you’re not saving any time at all due to that feature, because you’re in the car driving whether the wipers come on by themselves or not. It just saves you the physical effort of turning the wipers on, not the time it takes to do that.
Sorry for the hijack… I hate advertisements that don’t make sense.
BMW is far more advanced than you think they are. In fact, LOTS of car makers are more advanced than you think they are. Most new GM cars these days, for example, have oil monitoring systems. While they don’t check the actual cleanliness of the oil, they do use data points such as how much stress the engine was put under, how long your trips are, engine operating temperature, etc. to determine the optimal times to change your oil. So, it’s not just “every 3 months or 3,000 miles” any more.
A BMW saying that it’s time for an oil change is scarcely any different than a laser printer sending out a message through the network that it’s low on toner. Some can even be configured to initiate an order, and you have no idea the printer’s low on toner until a cartridge is delivered to the office. The sensing mechanism is already there. The communications method is already there. As long as the printer doesn’t go nuts and order up ten toners, most office managers would probably say “Eureka! One less thing to pay attention to!”
Perhaps it would be less annoying if BMW sent you an email, instead of calling?
On the marketing side, it’s not vastly different from how Jiffy Lube sends me a postcard every three months with a coupon for an oil change - they assume I drive 12,000 miles a year, they want to sell me an oil change every 3,000, so every three months, they shoot off a postcard. It’s just an assumptive schedule and a different communications method.
OTOH, proactive maintenance sensing done right is a blessing. Our servers test themselves now and then, and when something’s not quite right, they’ll send an SOS call to Sun, and Sun drives up with a drive/processor/etc. to replace the one that’s starting to develop errors before it fails entirely.
That’s actually moderately impressive. Still, unless the computer somehow knows about the quality of the oil (and a few other imponderables), it’s still only a best guess. It still seems like an overly complex alternative to simply increasing the recommended interval to 10K miles and saying, “do it more often if you take a lot of short trips or drive in dusty conditions”, words that appear in every auto manual I’ve ever seen.
At least GM does the sensible thing and just flashes a message on the dashboard. My major complaint with the BMW approach is the whole Rube Goldberg nature of hooking the sensor up to a phone that will call a BMW representative who will then call you and ask if you want to schedule a service call. (Now if they had a service whereby they’d creep into your driveway in the middle of the night, do an oil change, stitch together a few shoes, and then steal away again, that would be different.)
The oil reporting thing is pretty cool. Step back and think about it for a minute. This technology basically means our cars spit telemetry at companies that then process it and give you advice on maintenance. If that improves the reliability of cars and lowers maintenance costs for those who take better care of their vehicles, great.
This is just the start of car-aware networks. There are privacy implications which we should worry about, but ultimately it will make us smarter. Perhaps one day our cars will use their onboard GPS to transmit their position to traffic control software that will dynamically adjust stop light durations and give you directions for optimum-speed routes through congested areas based on traffic flow.
Or something perhaps a little closer down the road - a car company collects profiles of oil usage, pressure, and other measures of engine performance, and uses it to dynamically select out vehicles that are behaving abnormally and call them in for preventative maintenance before something breaks.
Now, if you want to talk about a BMW technological failure, how about iDrive? Whoever thought that people would want to use an input device to navigate through menus on a screen while driving down the road, just to change radio stations or the temperature, is an idiot.
You did hear the end of the commercial, where they said something like, “Of course, we aren’t too serious about it.” IOW, they were joking about the “benefits” of the automatice wipers. I found it to be quite humorous, although it was a failure as a commercial. I could remember the gimmick, but not the product, until I googled it. (The Toyota Avalon, btw.)
I’d be concerned with car technology run amok but for the cash issue.
By the time I’ll be able to afford a car with these features, the computers will likely have already decided the most efficient way to go about existance is to take humans out of the equation entirely.
The way I see it, within two decades I’ll either be annihilated in some awfully logical and time-saving method or leading some subservient half-life beneath the all-weather tread of our automotive masters.