EVs are designed for a sick experience - literally.
There's something about feeling the jolts of stop-and-go traffic in a taxi in New York City. STOP! Sitting in the backseat and gasping for a breath of fresh air. GO! To be fair, looking at your phone screen might not help either. STOP! Okay, breath.
Notice: If you are in a car now, please stop reading. Else, please go ahead moving your eyes smoothly from left to right.
Motion sickness isn't rare. At least 1 in 3 people get car sick. And there are more and more reports of motion sickness among drivers and passengers in electric vehicles. And humans, of course, are blaming the technology. The "One pedal driving" to be exact.
If you have never heard about one-pedal driving: In a nutshell, it lets a driver slow down and stop a vehicle using only the accelerator pedal. What are the Benefits? One-pedal driving recharges the battery and extends the battery life and range. It is also called regen-pedal (regenerative).
Isn't that sustainable? Well, yes. But maybe not for our stomachs, and surely not for mine. Accelerate! Full Stop! Accelerate! It's a little design flaw and engineers sacrificed a smoother driving experience for energy regeneration to extend the range. To make driving smooth, the one-pedal requires a very good driver's instinct. In a recent study, 83% responded that one-pedal driving was inconvenient. And as Won Myung Won, a Researcher at Hyundai Motors states in this study; It seems necessary to change the design of the one-pedal driving.
And since these smart EVs are learning from us humans, the problem of motion sickness caused by humans today might be actually a problem of how the machines will drive us tomorrow.
Professor Spencer Salter, Chief Technical Specialist at Jaguar Land Rover said that his “research suggests that we'll never be as comfortable or productive as these self-driving visions portray without finding a way to combat motion sickness.”
But, I have great news for you: The Warwick Manufacturing Group found in their research that “visuospatial training exercises” can train the brain to reduce motion sickness by more than 50%. These include typical “brain training” exercises such as looking at a pattern of boxes and trying to match it with a rotated version of the same shape.
Ugh. Visuospatial-what? My brain is already rotating.
Let's be honest, training billions of humans to heal motion sickness sounds intriguing. Especially for my nerdy systems-thinking mind. But, it doesn't sound like a scalable and affordable solution.
We learned so far that the design of one-pedal driving and how drivers are using it might not suit everyone's stomach.
As designers, we might need to start asking ourselves how to fix this problem (fast), before it messes up the EV experience of the future. Designing a world-class EV experience means often focusing on:
The ergonomics of how people drive while interacting with screens
The emotional aspects of the experience and outside factors e.g. charging
And entertainment as well as upgradeable features.
These all make sense. And it also uncovers a fundamental problem. The human-centered design approach in today's complex world might not work.
The world becomes more and more a fluent and seamless relationship between humans, and the surrounding environment, including all physical objects and entities.
An answer to that problem: Stakeholder-centered design (SCD). It combines human-centered design with systems thinking in order to create a world-class experience for all stakeholders in an ecosystem. Meaning, design, and engineering consider all relationships between humans (consumers, employees, customers, suppliers) and systems (the environment, machines, data, and objects).
Applying an all-stakeholder-centered approach might allow designers to create solutions that extend the battery range, teach cars to self-drive smoothly, and ultimately don't make us motion sick.
Now, let's apply this to reality: Many self-driving pioneers like Google's Waymo and also Tesla learn from humans how to drive, brake, and recognize objects. The machine gets trained and is one day capable of self-driving. Eventually. However, as we learned, many of these human trainers (drivers) do not know how to use the pedal to create a smooth ride for everyone. There is actually an opportunity.
Ride-share start-up Revel has been operating an all-electric Tesla fleet in New York City since 2021. Applying a stakeholder-centered approach, Revel could start gathering passengers' feedback about motion-sickness and use that data to design visual guidance for its drivers to teach them how to lift and push the pedal more gently, while still recharging the battery. In the future, Tesla, Polestar, Rivian, Nio, and other manufacturers could use all the data points to not just provide a better recommendation for the driver, but eventually, have the pedal anticipate the human input and proactively assist with smoother acceleration and braking. No matter how abrupt the driver uses it.
Imagine, those smooth operators might even save the self-driving car's future. Wonderful.
The beauty in today's world, the model and learnings can be applied to all EVs and ultimately optimize the self-driving car experience. Gently accelerating into the future.
The one-pedal driving is just one example of how technology messes with our stomachs. VR is another one and just highlights how important it is for designers and engineers to tap into a stakeholder-centered approach to design for the vast continuum of possibilities in a more technologist world.
It does not matter what your role is, in order to create world-class experiences for our complex, yet exciting future you should:
Understand the relationship among all stakeholders. Humans. Objects. Machines.
Combine human-centered with systems-centered design
Anticipate technology at the same stake as humans. It can learn and teach, too.
Design world-class experiences by anticipating the best for humans and systems
Conclusion: One-pedal driving might not solve motion sickness alone, but a world of better drivers (humans and machines) might be just an update away.
I hope you had a smooth ride reading this, and please don’t forget: If you vomit inside a cab, you have to pay at least a $60 cleaning fee.