Greetings to you all on this fine Friday Junior morning. Today, on The Autopian’s still as-of-yet-un-renamed morning news roundup (I need someone to make a damn decision about this so I can move on with my life) we have dispatches about Mercedes making it easier to #influence behind the wheel; Lucid’s gloomy 2023 outlook; the winners in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s tough new tests; and some notable news about lithium. Let’s get started, we have a lot to cover today.
Mercedes E-Class Gets On The Apps
We covered this yesterday, but it’s worth doing more detail here: At last—at long, long last—Mercedes is giving us the one feature we’ve demanded from its modern cars for years now. No, it’s not buttons. It’s better! Provided you love TikTok, anyway.
The forthcoming all-new 2024 E-Class gets a raft of changes to its interior and technology suite, namely the sweeping digital dashboard from the electric EQ models (minus the digital gauge cluster, which stays the same) and native app integration with a selfie video camera. As I said, it’s about to be easier than ever to #influence from behind the wheel.
Writing for The Verge, here’s friend-of-the-site Daniel Golson to explain what’s going on inside the new E-Class:
Streaming video content is available on the passenger screen, and depending on regulations, it could be allowed on the center screen in the future when Mercedes’ Level 3 Drive Pilot system is activated. What will be available at launch on the new E-Class are third-party apps that don’t require smartphone mirroring through Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.
Depending on the car’s equipment, a selfie and video camera is mounted either in the gauge display or on top of the dashboard, and the E-Class will offer both Zoom and Webex by Cisco video conferencing, the Vivaldi web browser, and even TikTok. Also part of the E-Class’ tech suite at launch is the Zync portal, which includes over 30 different streaming services encompassing live sports, news, gaming and other content.
In-car gaming, native app integration, and a “software-defined” driving experience; this all definitely feels like the way many higher-end luxury cars are going. As Golson notes, it’s especially interesting that this is debuting on the E-Class, which is always objectively one of the best cars in the world but exists in the middle of Mercedes’ range.
(Should we put TikTok in the Mercedes we’re building? Does Bill Caswell even know what that is? Honestly, he’d probably be amazing on that platform.)
But why add TikTok here, specifically? Besides becoming one of the world’s most popular social media apps, the answer is, as is often the case these days, China. Here’s Mercedes’ CEO being quoted in TechCrunch:
“It is highly, highly relevant,” Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius said about TikTok in Asia. “Let’s not forget that the average age of an S-Class owner in China is around or below 40 years old.”
“When we choose all these different apps, we go market by market or region by region,” he added. “We look at what is the most used — music or film [and] so on — and we tried to go down that list.”
Emphasis mine there, because shit. We American mid-life crisis millennials feel like we’ve struck gold when we stumble upon a sock sale at Old Navy. In China, they’re all driving S-Classes. Love that for them!
Anyway, that’s the interior of the new E-Class. Expect to see the rest of the car later this year, and yes, the wagon lives on—for now at least.
Also, if you film car TikToks and this causes you to do something astoundingly stupid, please make sure to send any links or footage our way. We need that #content as much as anybody.
Lucid Doubles Down Despite A Tough Year Ahead
I’ve used this quote here before, but as an industry analyst I trust likes to say, “Everything’s good until the factory opens.” Basically, making cars is hard. It’s especially tough right now for EV startups, who are racing to beat the same kinds of production challenges that dogged Tesla in much of the 2010s while building scale and trying to beat the legacy automakers who are doing the exact same things. (See the Mercedes news above for an example of how everyone’s trying to get the edge on tech right now.)
California-based Lucid has had its share of challenges lately. The Lucid Air is a supremely impressive electric luxury sedan; it’s also super expensive, and the new “base” model certainly isn’t much better. As good as the Air is, demand for it has been a little soft lately. It’s even had to cut prices lately to stay on pace with Tesla.
Here’s a rundown of Lucid’s challenges, yet again from TechCrunch:
Luxury electric vehicle maker Lucid Motors missed Wall Street estimates for fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 revenue, as well as 2023 production and delivery goals, causing the company’s stock price to tumble almost 10% in after-hours trading.
That’s a particularly rough outcome for a company that’s been battling supply chain issues and has had to slash production targets in the past. Lucid had just been on the up after producing 7,180 vehicles last year, exceeding its own production guidance of 6,000 to 7,000 vehicles. Of those vehicles, 4,369 were delivered in 2022. When the company announced this success last month, shares popped briefly.
On Wednesday, Lucid set 2023 annual production targets of 10,000 to 14,000, which is roughly half of the 20,000 to 22,000 deliveries analysts had expected for the year.
Lucid’s revenue also fell short of expectations. In the fourth quarter, the company reported revenue of $257.7 million, which is quite shy of analyst expectations of $302.61 million, per Yahoo Finance data. Analysts had expected $661 million for full-year revenue, but Lucid delivered $608.2 million.
In other words, Lucid’s got its work cut out for it this year as it seeks to ramp up sales and keep demand going. There have also been rumors swirling lately that Lucid could be bought out entirely by its majority investor, the Saudi Public Investment Fund. (Lucid’s doing some really interesting stuff with mobile energy storage and vehicle-to-grid energy, basically turning its EVs into rolling batteries; now you understand why the Saudis, who don’t want to be dependent on oil forever, are so interested here.)
I wonder about Lucid sometimes. On one hand, the car is excellent and the talent there is top-notch. CEO Peter Rawlinson is probably a genius; he’s always struck me as the guy Elon Musk pretends to be on social media.
On the other hand, does the world need another six-figure EV luxury sedan? Rivian has its own challenges and they’re not dissimilar, but at least that company has the value proposition of breaking into the nascent EV pickup truck market. We’ll see how this year shakes out for Lucid, but I hope they make it just because I’d love to see what this company is capable of beyond the Air.
Mazda, Toyota, Honda Win Big In Safety
There are the federal safety standards every new car sold in America has to pass, and then there are the safety tests done by IIHS, a nonprofit organization that does its own crashworthiness ranking and testing. And IIHS’ tests are generally tougher. It seems like every few years, the IIHS comes out with some new safety test that baffles automakers. That front small overlap test? That one’s a real bastard. Safety improvements like these are part of why modern cars have become so incredibly robust in crashes, but getting the top IIHS award is an increasingly difficult feat.
In fact, the number of cars earning the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s Top Safety Pick+ award for 2023 actually dropped from 65 to 28 year-over-year, Automotive News reports. Honda, Mazda and Toyota did the best this year. From that story:
Now, it’s worth noting that as safe as modern cars are, the focus really has been on occupant protection. Traffic deaths hit a 20-year high in 2022, thanks to a big climb in pedestrian and cyclist deaths. It would be nice to see more of a focus on people outside the car, especially as the self-driving stuff continues to spread despite being often bad and utterly confounding to use.
Why Lithium Stocks Crashed And What It Means For The EV Market
Finally, let’s close out with the real reason you all come to The Autopian daily: to talk about raw materials futures. I know it’s what we’re all really enthusiastic about.
All kidding aside, this is an important story that kind of flew under the radar, but Barron’s (subscription required but you can find it on Apple News) has a good explainer on the lithium stock crash that happened last Friday. Now we know why: it’s because Chinese company CATL, the world’s largest battery supplier (and the one teaming up with Ford at that new plant in Michigan) changed its pricing strategy, leading to a $6.6 billion wipeout in value among several lithium mining companies. What the hell?
The battery maker, according to J.P. Morgan and Citi research, will price its batteries on a lithium price-linked basis, with 50% of the batteries embedding a price of 200,000 yuan per metric ton, or about $30,000, for lithium carbonate, the benchmark price for lithium products. The rest of the batteries will embed the spot market price of lithium carbonate.
Spot prices right now amount to 428,000 yuan per metric ton, or $64,000, and are up about ninefold over the past few years as the growth in EV demand has stressed the global lithium supply chain.
CATL’s move amounts to a big discount for batteries. One reason that the company can effectively discount is because it mines some of its own lithium. Essentially, CATL is accepting lower earnings from its mining operations to sell more batteries. CATL mines less than 10% of the world’s lithium supplies.
A Citi analyst in that story sees two big problems ahead for CATL this year, particularly in China, its home market and the world’s biggest EV market: one, the EV sector there is growing faster than demand is (there are only so many people to buy all these cars) and batteries are still expensive.
Now you also see why so many automakers are trying to buy up, or invest in, lithium mines and operations in the U.S., especially as the Inflation Reduction Act incentivizes local production. Either way, as the auto industry goes electric, lithium supplies and prices are something we’ll all need to pay attention to.
Your Turn
Let’s talk in-car apps! What’s good? What’s bad? Do you care about any of that? I recently tested a Polestar 2 (review coming soon here) and was super impressed with the native Spotify integration on the Android Auto OS. I can’t say it’s the reason I’d run out and buy the car, but it was good.
As for TikTok, I had to look up whether that company’s name has a hyphen in it or not (it doesn’t) before I wrote this blog, so that should tell you what kind of power user I am there.
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At this point, just call it The Morning Something. Or T M Whatever.
Maybe, That Morning Thing?
That’s fine, but what I really need is to access my AOL account on my dashboard. I’d like to be able to send emails while I drive, I could type them by using the buttons on my steering wheel! The problem is, new cars don’t have CD players anymore, so I’m not sure where to insert my free AOL disc that I got at the grocery store.
And since AOL has a record of never getting hacked (-insert tiktoc self-hacking comment here-) it’ll be completely safe!
Can’t wait for the Tic TOC videos of mercs crashing because they were making Tic TOC videos, while watching Tic TOC videos.
Is that Xibit?!
Yo dawg herd u liked Mercs and Tic Toc…. We got you fam!
“Why Mercedes Is Adding TikTok Integration”
Does the answer have anything to do with living in an increasingly grim dystopia?
Does Mercedes Streeter have a TikTok? I think she’d be good at that format, and then my various TikTok-oriented peeps could watch fun motorcycle/plane/car/train content.
The only TikTok I want in my dash is a damn analog clock!
And you kids get off my lawn!
So, is the OEM Tiktok app integrated into the black box and OBD?
this is beyond idiotic. why would you ever want to be tied to the car’s hardware or app store?
the app selection will be very limited, you will be stuck with what Merc is willing to pay to have supported and the apps will stop being updated in ~3 years, at which point your giant LCD is a brick.
Android Auto/Apple CarPlay are going to be around for a long time and every app supports them and will continue to do so.
+1 came here for this
TikTok in a car seems about as useful as email on my refrigerator.
I think they might have that now, too, for some baffling reason
Are auto manufacturers so bankrupt for ideas that this is the new definition of luxury? I know building a higher quality vehicle is harder than just adding sequins and fluff, but come on. What happened to “the best or nothing”?
I believe this falls under the heading of “adding crap just to add crap.” There is no valid use case for any of this. “Influencers” (I hate even typing that term) already have their damn phone, probably provided for free from whoever they’re whoring themselves out to this week; I don’t want or need to know they now own a luxury sedan that does the same thing.
And video conferencing? If your business can be conducted via video conference, you don’t need to be in the car. Stay the hell home or in your office, and don’t endanger me by trying to concentrate on two things at once.
Oh boy you can drive your Merc with the same ten seconds of that damn Miley Cyrus song playing on loop.
“Also part of the E-Class’ tech suite at launch is the Zync portal”
How long before Ford files a lawsuit for “Zync” being too close to “Sync,” and why would they want to use a name so close to something Ford has used for over a decade?
My guess is Zync is a shady 3rd party gobbling up user data
I am no luddite, but I am somewhat skeptical of in-car integrated apps simply because of the unique way in which they must be implemented and the typical lifecycle of a car.
My car features in-dash navigation, but it doesn’t work as well as Google Maps on my phone. The maps themselves are frozen in time back when the car was made (going on 10 years old at this point), it takes a while to start up, entering addresses is a slog, and it doesn’t include information like traffic and speed trap warnings. Still, I use it because I like that the turn-by-turn audio directions come through the car speakers and the text directions appear right next to the speedometer, allowing me to keep my eyes on the road. It also has features for finding gas prices and movies times, which I have never used (I’m pretty sure those features don’t even work anymore after the telcos shut down their 3G networks).
While I am not a TikTok user, I don’t see a good case for integrating it into the car’s OS. Is the point to have the car record videos or just for passengers (hopefully not drivers while the vehicle is in motion) to watch videos? Either way seems pretty clunky when compared to just using your phone.
And I have no use for video teleconferencing in a car or even outside of a car. My job requires me to participate in a lot of virtual online meetings, and no one ever uses their camera. There’s just no need for it. Screen sharing is vitally important, but I don’t get any benefit out of watching Jake from Contracts picking his nose during the financial review meeting.
A good navigation app and music streaming app would be useful, but really all I want is to be able to get what’s on my phone on the dashboard. The cell phone companies have already figured out how to keep those phone apps working, so why would the car companies try to do it as well? Just stick Apple Carplay / Android Auto in the car and be done with it as far as “infotainment” goes.
That said, I’d be interested in building some more “smarts” into the car that will allow it to give me more information about itself. Why do I still have to plug a code-reader in to figure out if the “check engine” light indicates a loose gas filler cap or that the engine is about to explode? With all the processing power currently in cars, there’s no reason not to provide all of the information right on the screen.
Toyota should seriously look into purchasing/ acquiring lucid. It’s market value has bottomed and it’s largest issues will probably be manufacturing related. Toyota can keep it’s hands off like Subaru (20% ownership) or Mazda (5%), and just allow lucid to be the way it is with a healthier support system. It would allow them to share platforms with a new Lexus or Toyota flagship, or to develop the technology for a cheap platform
Are the Saudis selling? They can wait out a couple lean years too….
“WHY is Mercedes adding TikTok integration?” – is the correct headline.
I feel the same way. Especially since Congress is working to ban TikTok in the US anyway.
The only good built-in apps are those you need for driving – nav, gas station/hotel finders, etc. The rest? Give me access to my phone which gets updated a lot more often on the off-chance I want something else. And I like having built-in nav – sure the phone apps get more frequent updates, but built-in nav has all the maps on the car. I was in Chicago once on my way home when Apple Maps decided that the servers were down today, thank you. But I was able to get out of town with my built-in nav. Once I’m out of town I can navigate the freeways just fine, but in a city I don’t know it can be a problem finding my way to the on ramps.
Yeah—I prefer using a car’s built-in nav for in-town stuff. On longer drives, sure, Waze me up so I can be warned as to where the speed traps are, but in town, a car’s native nav is good and works well enough for most stuff. I’ve got a fun test truck for the week I’m looking into taking on some of the regional overland routes, so like, a car-native .gpx-friendly app would be cool, but that’s really all I can think of that’s missing. Audio service integrations are neat so long as they work with physical buttons and controls that I can hit without looking.
I don’t mind all the “entertainment” apps for passengers—hell, I’ll even make the case that these are Good, Actually, when you’ve got bored passengers on a longer trip. Chrysler throwing a whole Fire TV setup in the back seat of the Pacifica is hella sweet, for example. However, there damn well needs to be a block on them appearing on the main screen while the car’s being driven.
I’ve been hoping for TikTok to just die off for long enough, but I guess it’s here to stay. I just get incredibly stressed out and anxious anytime I hear one of the ten songs that is used on every freaking video or those creepy ass robot voices. If those sounds start showing up while I’m driving, I cannot be held responsible for my reactions.
Gosh, preach. It’s so damn repetitive. Everyone using the same SpongeBob voice filter just fills me with rage, too. Your real voice is fine, folks!
“The forthcoming all-new 2024 E-Class gets a raft of changes to its interior and technology suite, namely the sweeping digital dashboard from the electric EQ models (minus the digital gauge cluster, which stays the same) and native app integration with a selfie video camera. As I said, it’s about to be easier than ever to #influence from behind the wheel.”
Thanks, I hate it here. Feel like an old curmudgeon at age 30 but like damn. Can’t cars just be… cars? Can’t we drive somewhere without takings stupid “video selfies” or just take them on the damn phones that we already have? TikTok/Influencer culture is garbage, and I hate that everyone is trying to pander to it now.
Just who are the billions of people randomingly watching other people who they do not know videos, pictures, meals ect? And why is what someone with no life likes matter? I think all this likes, followers ect is BS and Trolls.
Today, on The Autopian’s still as-of-yet-un-renamed morning news roundup (I need someone to make a damn decision about this so I can move on with my life)
Fine, it stays the Morning Dump and The Flush is reinstated.
I probably don’t count as “someone,” but I wanted to help.
Yeah the gimmick of agonizing over this extremely meaningless thing is wearing pretty thin.
I’m definitely more annoyed at the constant kvetching over the name than PG is over the name in the first place.
Agreed. Morning Dump is just fine. We all take one, might as well have something to read whilst doing it.
This is all the fault of the US government that legislated backup cameras. Which in turn required putting a television screen in the dashboard. Sure, that was optional in some models before backup cameras, but once that screen was required in every make and model by law, manufacturers couldn’t be helped but to add other features to the screen. Some good, some bad, some awfully implemented.
It’s the fault of Ralph Gilles who ushered in the tiny-ass window trend with the LX 300.
Soon after, everyone else copied the no-visibility trend, and since you can’t see out, you need a fucking camera.
Given the location of the window in question, it’s acceptable to call it a tiny ass-window, too!
https://xkcd.com/37/
In-car apps, in my opinion, should be used to make the driving experience better. Video apps, teleconferencing apps, and games are gimmicks. Allow an input cable from a phone to an entertainment screen, maybe, but integrating apps into your infotainment seems like a recipe for problems.
But I am also not a fan of integrated nav, since the updates to Google Maps and others are faster and more accurate. Integrated music apps are fine, but I would not want to rely on them entirely, since the internet moves on and things get abandoned all the time.
Anything in the car that requires me to take my eyes off the road to use is terrible. And anything that doesn’t have a button, a knob, or a switch that I can reach out and manipulate by muscle memory requires me to take my eyes off the road.
Ban it all, go back to knobs, switches, and dials.
“I need someone to make a damn decision about this so I can move on with my life”
Doesn’t your title give you the power to make an Executive Decision of this magnitude? How the hell is this held up in committee?!?!? Aren’t there only 4 of you? (Excluding Beau, Mercedes and Thomas)
I’m just a freelance/part-time editor here to advise, consult and offer operational and spiritual guidance. All the expertise, none of the responsibility. That stuff’s David’s problem. It’s actually great (for me, specifically.)
Looks like you’re all doing well as a start-up with a relatively small number of people and doing a good job of dealing with the challenges thereof. No start-up is ever perfect. While I’m just a sample of one, I can say that this website is my primary go-to for online automotive journalism.
As for “The Autopian’s still as-of-yet-un-renamed morning news roundup” one could do worse than “Morning News Roundup.” A bit generic, perhaps, but succinct.
“Morning Sip” might be apt given that some of us read this website with our morning coffee (I know I do and I see enough comments about cleaning spit-take coffee off the screen to know I’m not the only one.)
“Morning Brew-A-Kvetch” is a bit silly, ha, but encompassing in that it’s about things to ponder while brewing coffee or drinking thereof and also things to gripe about.
“Morning Aggregator” would be a bit of a blast from the past of the early 00s.
That’s all I got for now, need more morning coffee.
Mornin’ Bitchin’?
My vote is still for “The Warm-Up,” to tie in with Cold Start. But my opinion counts for even less than yours…
Ooh, I like that! Please just do it already.
“The warm up” gets my vote.
Rip the bandaid off already.
“Morning Dump” is pretty great, though.
Given the Luddite attitude of the commenters, this should be an interesting discussion.
In this case though, I agree with them. There really is no need for video conferencing or social media apps in cars. Distractions at best.
As for Tik Tok itself, I have very few absolute deal-breakers when it comes to buying new cars, but giving my data to the CCP would be one of them. That app cannot be banned quickly enough.