interview

At some point I think we all realized, grudgingly, that things weren't going back to normal any time soon. Plenty of things have been vying for "theme of 2020" but COVID-19 and social distancing have probably had the biggest impact on our day to day lives. For all that we've been told, repeatedly, over the past few years that machine learning is going to Change The World, can it make navigating a pandemic any easier?

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Designing concept cars is easy. Designing a car that can actually make it into mass production, at a competitive price, and take on both auto industry heavyweights and high-profile disruptors, well, that's a whole other story. With the 2021 Lucid Air finally revealed in road-going form, I caught up with Derek Jenkins, VP of Design at Lucid Motors, to find out why a sedan, why all-electric, and what sets this particular EV apart.

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A world in the grip of coronavirus lockdown probably isn't the easiest time to reveal an aspirational luxury concept EV like the Polestar Precept, much less to bring a mass-market electric car to market. That, though, is the situation in which the automaker finds itself in 2020. Were it not for COVID-19, the striking Precept concept would have been fighting for headlines at the Geneva Motor Show.

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Rarely has "form follows function" been so fitting as with the Cruise Origin, the autonomous taxi pod that the GM and Honda-backed transportation company revealed this week. It's a far cry from most of the self-driving concepts we've seen before, swoopingly futuristic vehicles fit for a sci-fi movie. That's not from a lack of design attention, however: indeed, everything about the Origin is painstakingly intentional.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know Bugatti broke the mythical 300 mph - or 304.77 mph, to be exact - speed barrier in a prototype Chiron. Now that car, presented by Bugatti CEO Stephan Winkelmann at the automaker's 110th-anniversary celebration in Molshein, is called the Chiron Super Sport 300+. It reached a top speed of 304.7 mph around Volkswagen’s Ehra-Lessien proving ground, and Bugatti is only making 30 examples for a starting price of roughly $3.9 million each.

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In 2019, Niantic's got another Earth Day campaign planned. In a manner similar to 2018, Niantic and masses of gamers - Pokemon GO and Ingress included - will head out and clean up the planet. In 68 events and with "countless NGOs" taking part in the celebration, 6.5 tons of garbage were collected - and presumably put into landfills, mostly - but still, progress!* Here in 2019 we had a chat with Niantic's Civic & Social Impact Manager, Yennie Solheim Fuller, to see what the future holds.

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Smart glasses are coming, and since augmented reality wearables need to be closer to designer sunglasses than they are to Google Glass, transparent displays need to raise their game. That's just what smart eyewear display specialist Lumus is doing, bringing along its latest Sleek display prototype to CES 2019 this week to show how AR could have mass-market appeal.

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This week we spoke with one of the founders of LEIA Inc, David Fattal, on the big deal behind the next-gen DLB tech with Lightfield Mode for a new type of 3D. This technology's been in development for over a half-decade, starting its life with Fattal and crew at HP Labs in Palo Alto. Now their display technology's about to hit the market in a smartphone that's set to appear on shelves on two of the country's biggest mobile carriers. This display's about to be in front of thousands if not millions of everyday citizens. What's the big deal?

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Today we had a chat with Sonos VP of Software Antoine Leblond about the company going public. Sonos launched today on Nasdaq with stock symbol SONO, as it did so becoming a public company for the first time. The first and most important question we had for Leblond is the same we've had for every tech company that's hit the stock market in the past decade: How will this change Sonos?

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The Swedes have never been attention-seekers, but there's no denying that, of all the cars at the Geneva Motor Show 2018 this week, the achingly handsome Polestar 1 hybrid coupe stands out. Partly that's down to its new, matte gray paint job, a finish which proved unexpectedly flattering for the design language the car company has inherited from Volvo. At the same time, though, Polestar 1's charm is about more than just design.

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When the "cutting edge" in automotive is electrification, what do you do if you're Maserati and your brand is wrapped up tight with the appeal of gasoline engines? That's the challenge facing the Italian automaker as it continues to carve out a space in the luxury performance high-end, and the question I posed to Reid Bigland, Head of Maserati and Alfa Romeo, this week at the LA Auto Show 2017. As you might expect, the answer is complicated.

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We’ve definitely seen our fair share of concept car designs, ranging from mundane to the almost improbable. The BMW Z4 Concept, which was teased in renders just a week ago, seemed to dance between those two extremes, with a design that is both ahead of its time yet still completely doable. And when BMW finally revealed the real thing, it took us a few moments to pick up our jaws from the floor. Fortunately for us, we got the chance to sit down with Adrian van Hooydonk, BMW’s head of global design and the man behind the Z4, to pick his mind about the thinking that went into such a breathtaking design.

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