Ford 021C Concept Car (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Ford 021C Concept Car (1999)

marc-newson.com

112 pointsspking72 comments

Looks like Honda actually built something that looks somewhat similar. It's real and available for sale: https://www.honda.co.uk/cars/new/honda-e/overview.html

for sale in Europe and Japan.

I’ve driven it, it’s a very nice car but not very close to this concept. It’s pretty much a “normal” car on the inside, with B pillars, a center console and standard seats.

Apparently production has been stopped, which is understandable given the price (about the same as a Model 3), but still a shame.

Conceptually it feels much closer to my much loved, much missed 2003 Sunset Orange AWD Honda Element.

Suicide doors & no fixed B pillar was awesome.

It looks like the same era of small SUV experimentation that brought the Pontiac Aztec into the world.

Honda? Talk about found on road dead.

So did Nissan in 1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Figaro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Pao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Be-1

I remember really wanting this at the time. Amazing how jarring the design of the radio is in comparison to the rest of the interior. Also, interesting how they didn't think to design their own entertainment system because... cars had third party entertainment systems that's just the way it was!

In 1999 we still hadn't realized the wonder of reading mp3/wma files burned onto a CD. Aiwa was the first brand I remember opening that up. USB slots were next.

Cars should have third-party entertainment systems. Everything about 'infotainment' systems is a terrible idea, because integrating something that changes three to five times in the life of the vehicle is stupid.

Put a nicely anchored 1/4-20 UNC mount in two or three locations, put a USB port that speaks the standard audio protocol next to each one, and connect those to an integrated DSP/amplifier suitable for the car's speakers and microphones. It will be good for three times the life of the car, and make everyone's lives easier.

> Cars should have third-party entertainment systems. Everything about 'infotainment' systems is a terrible idea, because integrating something that changes three to five times in the life of the vehicle is stupid.

In my mind this has been largely solved for the past few years with Android Auto / Carplay. It would be nice if there was a true standard, but at the same time, there's only two phone operating systems so it works.

If you're not familiar with it, there are some huge benefits of the way it works:

* The system updates with your phone, not your car. Applies to both hardware and software.

* Data plans are also tied to your phone, which you presumably have anyway.

* Preferences are personal; my partner and I each get our own music, podcasts, and suggested destinations.

* Personally I love that my music/podcasts follow me around. I can browse and start listening to something in the car, then hours later throw in my wireless ear buds and continue from where I was while I mow the lawn.

There is also some level of upgradability from the car side, too: I recently added a wireless android auto adapter to my 2016 car. It was under $100, plugs into USB, and once I got it paired to my phone, I basically get in and start the car and in a few seconds the UI is there.

What I am skeptical about is that this will continue to be solved for the next few years: there's always that chance that Google will outright kill it, or Apple/Samsung/whoever will become exclusive to a single car manufacturer, or the manufacturers will somehow bungle this up with a subscription model of some sort.

Carplay &co are good right now, but as someone that hangs on to cars for a long time, the trouble is that phones have a much faster lifecycle than a car, and are pretty unlikely to continue to work as smoothly as they do 20 years down the line.

For example, I just junked a radio with a 30 pin ipod connector. It was great and smooth in its day, but now, not so much.

Could be we'll get lucky and the phones of 2043 will work with the cars of 2023, but I think it's more likely that the car will work and the infotainment stack will be a half-functional ghost mall of tech in the middle of the car

CarPlay and Android Auto is just an interface that allows the phone the use the screen.

As long as Apple/Google maintain the ability to use the interface in iOS and Android, it will continue to work.

Also, that would be a reason for cars to come with replaceable head units.

> and are pretty unlikely to continue to work as smoothly as they do 20 years down the line.

This is a fair point... but also just what happens with technology and time.

I assume you junked the radio not because it was broken (that can happen to any gear) but because the 30-pin interface itself is no longer desired -- it's no longer the best way to get the content you want (ie: from your phone).

This isn't really a different situation from a 20-year-old car (CD player), 35-year-old car (cassette deck) or 50-year-old car (8-track).

20 years from now, if there's a market for it and it's technically possible, someone will make adapters to get AA/Carplay units to be compatible with whatever the current technology is -- basically the 2043 equivalent of a cassette adapter.

I think the issue here is largely that automakers don't want you driving a 2023 car in 2043.

     In my mind this has been largely solved for the 
     past few years with Android Auto / Carplay.

I mean, yeah -- absolutely. For all the reasons you say.

But auto companies like Tesla and GM are now working hard to unsolve it because there's no profit in it for them. They want to control the experience and extract sweet, sweet subscription revenue. So, I'm not sure how "solved" it is.

> What I am skeptical about is that this will continue to be solved for the next few years: there's always that chance that Google will outright kill it, or Apple/Samsung/whoever will become exclusive to a single car manufacturer, or the manufacturers will somehow bungle this up with a subscription model of some sort.

Or the manufacturers decide they don't like users bypassing their revenue models:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/gm-confirms-its-droppin...

FWIW, I absolutely love Carplay and paid extra to have compatible head units installed in any of my previous cars that didn't have built in support. It's been fantastic, but I don't trust manufacturers to do what's in my own best interest.

See also the recent Mozilla privacy findings for cars.

Just use a 3.5mm jack. We solved this decades ago.

Not quite, that doesn't allow integration with steering wheel controls.

Sure it does. Even headphones have controls built in to the cable.

That is not standardised across different headphone manufacturers and often doesn’t work. It doesn’t work at all on cars.

Analog protocols are not a good idea for this. Digital with a decent protocol is much more reliable, whether wired or not. In practice, the best option is either wired CarPlay/Auto or bluetooth.

I used to think this. But the quality and integration of the infotainment in new cars, for example Tesla, is so much better than any extern unit I have tested, that now I really appreciate the systems coming with the car.

I used to change the unit, amp and all speakers. Now my new car is just working nicely unmodified.

Keyword being new. What happens in 3 years? 5? 10? Will the manufacturer keep it up to date?

1st-gen Tesla are now 11 years old(first production is 2012). We already have answers and direction of motion; they won't bother engineering replacement screens for decade old cars, and they happily assist you with buying more cars when you think your gigacast has a hairline.

Every cars produced from 1970s until yesterday afternoon have one of that kind of standard mounting, colloquially called 1DIN and 2DIN form factors. It's the shape of old car radios and cassette player front panels. If you've ever wondered if it's actually removable or it's just such an extremely uniform and coincidental choice of aesthetics, it's actually a standard slot. And there are endless aftermarket options. Very few cars lacked support for it, but it's since been de facto deprecated and being replaced by Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

> 1/4-20 UNC

ISO M8.

You need more than "the standard audio protocol". The infotainment system should know a lot about the car's state (e.g., RPM, turn signal activated/deactivated).

No, it shouldn't.

The car can feed media and mixing controls to the amplifier; there's no need to send that elsewhere. Strict separation of concerns. You want to play a "door is a jar" announcement? Tell the amplifier to reduce all the other channels to one-third their current volume and raise the announcement channel, then undo that. No need to involve the phone or tablet or mini-PC or MP3 player or subether radio.

How would the navigation app on CarPlay know whether or not you have turned on your turn signal ahead of a turn? Or know to pause navigation because the car is no longer in gear?

People don't use turn signals in Massachusetts; that's considered giving information to the enemy.

The navigation app has a clock, GPS location, and acceleration and orientation sensors available to it in the phone. If you miss your turn, it will notice and find the next best route.

Why would you want to pause navigation on a gear change? Velocity plus the connection to the vehicle tells you everything you need to know. Zero velocity but still connected? Keep displaying stuff; you might be parking and you might be in traffic. Disconnected but velocity is high? The passenger is going to use you; keep navigation alive in the background. Disconnected and velocity is zero or walking? Go back to powersave mode.

I want the nav system to quit reminding me to turn when it notices that I have signaled. I want to pause navigation when I stop at the gas station or make some other stop (when not in gear, not gear change; the nav system should know when the vehicle has parked). Integration between the nav system and the rest of the car is table stakes at this point. It’s okay that you only want music. Some of us have higher expectations from our cars.

For example, the nav system should know when the battery charge or gas tank level is not enough to get to the destination.

I want the car to provide every bit of information it has to the phone so it can do smart things with it.

I rent a lot of cars in lots of places and I am amused at how poorly some manufacturers are handling this. Yes, treating the phone like an iPod works. That worked more than a decade ago.

(I was amused by your comment about Massachusetts. I am fully aware that Massholes have no respect for each other or the rule of law. Every time I return a rental car to Logan in one piece is a victory.)

> It’s okay that you only want music.

I've only ever known there was music...

What manufacturers do this state integration the best, in your experience?

The sad thing, is that somewhere out there there’s an infotainment PM at an automotive company taking note of every item in your list and saying “let’s implement stuff like that in our infotainment system! It’ll be a (jazz hands) differentiator!”

The auto manufacturers still have this delusion that they’re competing with Apple and Google on infotainment, instead of seeing the truth that better phone integration is not only the technically better solution, it’s something the customers want, and something that saves the company money. But you can’t get someone to understand something when their salary requires that they not understand it.

Actually at the time Ford's in-car entertainment was more integrated than most. Unlike others, they fitted own-brand audio systems which were either non-standard shapes and hard to replace, or they were built in entirely. I think what we see here's just an afterthought that got added late in the design process.

> Also, interesting how they didn't think to design their own entertainment system because... cars had third party entertainment systems that's just the way it was!

This was rarely true in 1999, at least in the US.

They often had ones that were standard DIN or double-DIN size, but they were usually manufacturer-branded and styled with buttons that matched the rest of the car.

But if you google image search a 1999 Ford Taurus interior you'll see that not everyone was even then still sticking to the easily-swappable standard. Compare to 1999 Camry, which had standard size but came out of the factory with a Toyota-skinned radio of one sort or another depending on options.

This is what I would expect to find in the dictionary under the words "nifty", "spiffy" and "cute".

I would totally buy one (cuz I would also expect it to cost under $15k)

I wonder how much this was influenced by Apple and iMacs of the age

There was a short lived 1950s retro revival around 1999 and this looks totally in line with that.

First thing I thought when I looked at the pictures: "Looks like the first iBook" The "clamshell" iBook was launched in 1999, and the orange one looks like if this car was a laptop.

I wonder, had Wes Anderson established his aesthetic by 1999? Because this would fit right in.

Well...the designer of it also designed a minor product Apple built later on called the 'Apple Watch'.

Apple what? Never heard of it.

Even today this could work as a ‘citi’ e-car with limited range. The trunk or boot mechanism is garbage though. No need to mess with that.

Yeah I was trying to figure out what that was all about. It seems it's like a desk drawer? I can only assume it's to preserve the silhouette when the trunk is opened, can't think of any practical advantages

The seat hinges remind me of those early Microsoft Surface multilink hinges, although on second look are clearly different.

The drawer trunk might be an improved solution to the trunk challenge of the Kammback form [1], which often becomes a hatchback but sometimes results in a smallish trunk hatch like the Audi A7. It probably is not as crashworthy insofar as packaging squish-space though.

A big miss is the steering wheel. Reaching through the wheel to the horn seems difficult. It's also been done before on various Citroens. I would have liked to see something more interesting using a mechanism like a Sbarro centerless wheel. [2, 3]

Enter the hinge. Or, as Microsoft dubbed it, the dynamic fulcrum hinge. The connective tissue between the Surface Book’s base and display is an isopod-like piece of aluminum that flexes back and forth thanks to four rotational points. It’s “almost like a carpet that rolls out,” Groene says. [0]

0. https://www.wired.com/2015/10/story-behind-surface-books-cra...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Kammback

2. http://sbarro.phcalvet.fr/technique/roue_orbitale/roue_orbit..., https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Centreless_wheel

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sbarro_(automobile)

As someone who sold their Surface Book Recently...Microsoft said a whole lot of words to make a truly awful hinge with a very compromised design while this makes complete sense here.

The outcome of the hinge int he SB was that the product couldn't fold flat. Part of the reason for the hinge was that allowed less wobble due to their heavy 'clipboard' tablet half, which was caused by a want to have a detached mode. The cost of detaching was massive to the whole product, not only was the hinge bulky and heavy, it also meant the system had to manage multiple batteries and force the CPU to throttle aggressively due to a lack of cooling in the thin frame. Power would need to flow between halves but ultimately the top half needed to charge more often than the bottom as the bottom half could not directly power the CPU, this meant being on power still discharged the battery. Simply put, the choice ruined the product unless you had that specific need; especially when those batteries started to wear. Did I mention that the clipboard had less than 2 hours of battery life? It's no Galaxy Chromebook, but it was a sadly compromised design. I sincerely hope they rethink the surface laptop studio as well. What they really need is to just make a thick Surface Pro that can just do it all.

I've been very happy with my Surface Book, but the batteries are indeed wearing down (after a respectable 5 and a half years; FWIW the detached tablet was advertised as 4 hours of battery and lived up to that when new, IME). What's your issue with the Surface Laptop Studio design? I definitely wouldn't replace my laptop with something without a proper keyboard if that's what you're suggesting.

I had a SB2 15 inch core i7, so maybe a little extreme, but the tablet alone generally performed poorly in battery and Microsoft was always a little optimistic on battery estimates.

The hinge on the studio is a little fragile but also damages the keyboard deck (not the keys themselves) over time unless you are super careful. They also continued compromised choices in favor of the design over the use, the cpu is actually very poor for its class and they seemingly have no interest in updating it. I just wish they would just decide to build a dedicated GPU Surface laptop or a Dedicated GPU Surface Pro rather than halfway steps.

> I had a SB2 15 inch core i7, so maybe a little extreme, but the tablet alone generally performed poorly in battery and Microsoft was always a little optimistic on battery estimates.

That's the same model I have. The things I do with it in tablet mode are pretty lightweight (PDF worksheets and reading Kindle), but I found the battery life lived up at least for the first few years, shrug.

Yeah, the writing for that hinge was on the wall when they didn't retain the design. Maybe it was the wrong system in which to implement it, or maybe it was just bad execution. The work folks are doing in the foldable LCD space show that there is lots of work left to do in optimizing the humble hinge.

Caveat emptor before v3.5.

Reminds me of the Nissan Pivo EV concept from 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Pivo

It has real 1960 Falcon feels.

If it looks like a toy car, it is, it'd be virtually impossible to fit that body onto a modern engineering package.

Yes please to swiveling seats. For when one person puts up the tent while the others shout encouragement.

I don’t like this car, it’s infantilizing. Feels like you’re in a Pixar movie driving this thing.

So, Futuristic Design of 2023 is actually some old used design from the past!

Car designers for a long time have been reduced to plundering their back catalogues for inspiration. What they usually end up with is some akward, bloated parody of the original with elements that are impractical and come at the cost of common sense. Just look at the entire "Mini" lineup.

Watching period British shows had me wishing they'd bring back the suicide doors on cars. Glad to see them here for the rear passengers at least.

Orange is a signature color of Ive and Newson.

The car is actually named after the color code for that particular shade of orange — Pantone 021 C!

Karim Rashid was doing NUMBERS making orange plastic stuff at the turn of the millennium too.

display piece https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/2562

watch https://acmestudio.com/products-watches-wrist_watches/Karim_...

chess set https://chessantiques.com/product/bozart-karim-rashid-chess-...

stacking chair https://www.black-by-design.co.uk/homeware-c2/furniture-c78/...

Wow, look at all those buttons! Yes please :-)

Maybe I’m crazy but I definitely see some of the Bronco’s front end design here.

Shut up and take my money!

I'd roll it.

I'll take it.

This image gallery desperately needs a one-line addition of something like

  > imageElement.addEventListener('click', stopAutoScroll);

I get autoscrolling a gallery of images, but if I click on one or click on some buttons, please stop! I want to look at one specific image for longer than 3 seconds! If I go back manually to look at one, don't override me and go forward again 3 seconds later. I went back for a reason.

I see some irony in a designer who has a webpage that hasn't fully thought out the UX. Maybe irony isn't the right word since it's pretty par for the course.

> The floor, which remains completely flat due to the front-wheel-drive technology, ...

What about the exhaust? I always assumed that's what the bump in the back-seat floor of all my FWD cars was for.

The hump is typically housing the drive train in RWD or AWD cars; the exhaust is relatively small and can be routed along a flat floorpan.

Civic doesn't (didn't?) have a hump.

It's for:

1. If the car is available in AWD, they don't have to make a new floor pan

2. Structural stiffness

3. Exhaust/fuel routing

Interesting! They had the foresight to understand that cars would become uglier, but even they couldn't imagine the idiocy which is non-standard-formfactor entertainment systems.

> Interesting! They had the foresight to understand that cars would become uglier,

Hah!

TBH, I actually like the outer design of this car (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Ford_021... )

very retro take on the iconic Cortina Mk2 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/1967_For...).

Better than looking like a blob of unconstrained jelly, like all modern cars.

I think it looks rad. I'd honestly consider buying one if it were electric. Though, I'd probably go with a different color combo. I love the simple interior. The only thing I really dislike about it is the steering wheel. It's giving me the same "stupid as hell" vibes as the new Tesla steering wheels.

I also love the look of this car. I think the closest thing that's actually on the market might be the Honda e[0], but the price isn't worth it for the limited range imo.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_e

Reply on news.ycombinator.com