A Hello Kitty you can drive
The future is pregnant with friendly, mood-sensitive cars. Fasten your seat belt, it's going to be a really, really cute ride.
By Douglas Cruickshank
Oct. 24, 2001 | From an early age I've strongly favored appliances that talk, teapots that walk, chairs that jitterbug and automobiles that flirt by batting the eyelashes over their headlights. I've had an unwavering commitment to topiary ever since I can remember. I've always been a staunch supporter of anything that enables the inanimate to become animate -- from Silly Symphony cartoons to Gaudi's architecture to select pharmaceuticals. It's a stand I took in my youth and I will not step away from it now.
You can imagine, then, how thrilling it was to hear that a car has been developed that wags its tail, cries and tries to relax you when you're tense. It also lights up with a warm glow when its owner approaches and glows blue (and displays teardrops) when it gets a flat tire or runs out of gas.
This Saturday at the Tokyo Motor Show, according to Reuters, a new vehicle developed by Toyota -- in collaboration with Sony -- will be shown to the public for the first time. They're calling it the "pod." Depending on your state of mind, it's either a fabulous or frightening invention and your response may range from joy to annoyance to psychosis. Some among us will think the pod is merely cute -- a response that is probably the most significant from the manufacturer's standpoint: cute sells more cars than psychosis. They would like us to think of it as a Hello Kitty with a 1.5 liter engine, an Aibo that'll get you and three friends to the grocery and back.
Information released by Toyota effuses: "This concept car explores the potential for communication between people and their vehicle." Well, it's about time. Our internal combustion powered beasts of burden have been ferrying us around for over a century and our ability to communicate with them (and vice versa) has remained utterly primitive; the car-driver relationship often commences when the thing receives a swift kick in a soft, vulnerable spot (its tire) from the prospective master, and things get worse from there. The Toyota/Sony pod promises to change all that -- at a time when relationships are more important than ever.
To begin with, the four-passenger pod has a face -- headlights where eyes would be, side mirrors in place of ears and expressive curved mouthlike grooves that light up when the vehicle is happy or sad. There's also the aforementioned wag-capable tail (a rear-mounted antenna) and, as the report points out, the pod takes photos of its passengers "when the tone of the conversation indicates it is a happy one." What's more, it bids you farewell when you park and turn off the engine. A physical intimacy option is not part of the standard package, but some enterprising after-factory outfitter will almost certainly correct that oversight. (And once they do, spending the evening -- parked -- will become America's favorite solitary pleasure.)
Not since "My Mother the Car," NBC's prophetic 1965-'66 Jerry Van Dyke sitcom in which the star's automobile was the reincarnation of his mother, has anthropomorphism swerved so decisively into the fast lane. (Some will cite "Knight Rider's" K.I.T.T. and Batman's voluptuous, obedient coupe, but those were specialized law enforcement vehicles. You have to agree that the populist Toyota pod is, if anything, conceptual kin to Van Dyke's mom-machine; Mr. Ed minus the stall cleaning.)
And it's no coincidence that the machine-as-friend trend is shifting into high gear now, as the race to eliminate the planet's nonhuman creatures is accelerating. Indeed, if we stay busy, we should be able to do away with most of those messy, noisy, disorganized animals by the end of this century, but we must start planning today for something tidier, less troublesome, but equally companionable to take their place -- a notion Japanese companies seem to have understood for quite some time.
