Sarmad, I vaguely remember a Business Week article last year saying that 30% of the cost of a car will be electrics by 2005 [not sure about the year]. Here's the downside of too much electronics too soon...
APRIL 29, 2002
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS
By Christine Tierney
Commentary: This @?#%! Digital Car Won't Drive
Flip through a new luxury-car manual today and you'll discover a mind-boggling array of features. The new $33,000-plus E-Class sedan and $83,000 SL-Class roadster from Mercedes-Benz offer voice-activated phones, headlights that switch on automatically, and sensors that watch for obstacles ahead. Proud owners of BMW's sumptuous new $57,300 7 Series sedan can retrieve their e-mail and adjust suspension settings using the car's iDrive system. It lets drivers access more than 700 options by sifting through on-screen menus. The silver control knob on the console that directs many of these adjustments is so slick that Star Trek's Captain Jean-Luc Picard would feel right at home giving the car a whirl.
But space traveler Picard might have suspected alien interference if he had taken out one of the first 7 Series rolling off the line. On early road tests, the car hardly behaved like an Ultimate Driving Machine. Otto Hofmayer, the chief test-driver at Germany's Auto Motor und Sport magazine, says that when he took this awesome BMW for a spin, the car's electronic sensors went haywire, flashing warnings that the emissions were too high, followed by jerking and a loss of acceleration. "I pulled over to restart the car," Hofmayer says. "It seemed to run fine, and then the same thing happened again."
The BMW 7 Series' teething pains are well-publicized, but BMW says it has identified and ironed out the bugs. And subsequent reports of battery failures were caused by dealers who neglected to recharge them after showing all those nifty iDrive features to prospective customers, BMW says. And of course, a drained battery can't provide the juice all those hungry electronic sensors need.
Yet behind the headlines lurks a bigger question that neither BMW nor its rivals are ready to address in public: Are auto makers rushing too much technology, too fast, into their cars? As anyone with a computer knows, electronics are prone to odd, mysterious, and supremely aggravating breakdowns. Yet car companies are piling them on to provide new features that cannot be built mechanically, such as early-warning safety systems. Says Frederic Saint-Geours, managing director of Automobiles Peugeot: "The Peugeot 607 has more electronics than the first-generation Airbus."
Sounds impressive. But it's risky, too. Europe's carmakers--especially makers of the top badges like Mercedes, Audi, and BMW--worry constantly about spotting the next competitive threat. Well, maybe they should check out the circuitry in their own cars to find it: the threat of the hyper-digital car. After all, drivers who shell out the big bucks want flawless performance, not exasperating experiences on the digital frontier. That's why BMW's rivals are not reveling in Schadenfreude. "[BMW executives] are not the only ones with cars acting oddly," says one European competitor.
All carmakers are grappling with weird glitches. Renault struggled last year to fix a coded card for its $16,500 Laguna sedan. The card was designed to unlock the door and start the car when slipped into an ignition slot. But owners howled when they couldn't start the car. The problem? Some cards were vulnerable to interference from radio and TV signals. Others failed because too many men kept the card in their rear pocket, sat on it, and deformed the wiring.
That little episode should give the carmakers pause. They have to foolproof the technology before the technology proves them fools. Well-heeled customers are already registering their frustrations. Recent quality and customer-satisfaction surveys in Europe show luxury marques such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz slipping in the rankings. Helmut Schmaler, an electronics specialist at the Munich-based German auto association ADAC, says new BMWs, Benzes, Audis, and Toyota Lexus cars are packed with much more equipment than their predecessors. "They have so many new things now--phone, navigation, safety systems--and that can be too much for the battery," he says.
You'd think the carmakers would pause in their digital drive to smooth out the kinks. On the contrary, auto makers are forging on to the next big thing: electronic safety systems to protect passengers when a collision looks unavoidable. Yet as they grapple with the new technology, car manufacturers will be struggling to avoid a collision of their own--between ever more gadgetry and good old-fashioned reliability.
Tierney covers the European auto industry from Frankfurt.
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