Why this is interesting: in the headlong rush to integrate virtual personal assistants in to cars, history holds some valuable lessons to smooth their adoption in the West.

Judging by much of the English-language reaction online, BMW’s i Vision Dee and the videos that launched it don’t make a lot of sense.

Nowhere to be seen is a reverence for the Ultimate Driving Machine for which BMW is renowned. Nor is there any love shown for the skilled driver and the joy they derive from their mechanical connection to their car.

No, the star of the show is a disembodied voice, a virtual personal assistant—or VPA for short—also known as Dee. She presents herself as an emotional peer of the driver, their companion or even, she suggests, their soulmate. And supported by a suite of technologies—voice synthesiser, embedded displays, scent generators and seat vibrators—she offers to immerse her human friends in virtual worlds while they move through the real one.

And what of the car itself? Little more than a pleasantly-proportioned sedan, it's reduced to the stage on which Dee performs her role, and the theatre for her audience.

Coming from a driver's brand like BMW, it all seems like a bit of a mindfuck.

But why?

The Western Lens

In Western automotive culture, cars are subordinate to humans. They are tools of our self-direction and expressions of our individuality. And while we might say that our car has a personality, if it does, it's by dint of its quirks and curiosities, not because it speaks to us as if it were a friend.

A few years ago, I conducted some research with a cohort of European customers on automotive VPAs. The participants were unanimous in their view that their car should never engage in any kind of dialogue beyond the clarification or confirmation of a specific command. And it should never, ever possess any kind of in-built, confected personality.

Yes, people agreed, a car can be a means of escape and emotional fulfilment. But cars support these states by responding to our physical commands to change the scene outside our windows. We feel the road pass beneath our feet. We hear our favourite music on the stereo. In these ways, cars give us a sense that we retain control of our destiny. Cars are also private spaces. They give us room to argue, scream, cry and laugh, undisturbed by others—real or virtual—who might listen in to our deepest emotional expressions.

But again, the car is never an animate friend. If it tries to be one, I learned through the research, it would fall in to the same uncanny valley that sees humanoid robots perceived as objects of terror, not tenderness.

To understand why we Westerners feel this way, this lecture given by Dr. Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist, is instructive.

She talks about how in the West we believe that what makes us human is our capacity to think and to feel. She points out that any piece of technology that threatens that belief—be it an automaton like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the Terminator, or an artificial intelligence like HAL 9000, or ChatGPT—is immediately rendered an object of fear. As Bell says:

The fear is about objects that might replace us, and objects that threaten what makes us distinctively us. Nearly 400 years ago the stake that we put in the ground — at least in the West or at least in the post-Enlightenment period — was that what made us human was our capacity to think. As the machines get closer and closer to thinking, the anxiety ratchets up.

With this in mind, let's take a look at some of Dee's dialogue from the presentation:

Host: Say, are you trying to sound like me?
Dee: Question back: how do you like it?
Host: It's cool! It's like talking to my bestie!
Dee: Okay bestie, let's hit the road!

Or this:

Host: But what about the emotions?
Dee: Oh if I could I would hug you right now!
Host: Don't be silly you're a car! You cannot hug me!
Dee: I can digitally hug you!

Dee gives the appearance of not just thinking but feeling emotions too. From the perspective of Western cultural history, BMW is walking straight in to that uncanny valley.

But as Bell goes on to explain, the West's fear of technology finds its counterpoint in the East.

The Eastern Lens

Starting in the Islamic world in 850 A.D., three Persian brothers started publishing drawings for mechanical devices that looked life-like, but acted in surprising and—here's the critical difference—delightful ways. A series of birds, for example, would dispense water from their heads or their mouths so that you might wash your hands and feet before prayer. Now, no bird pours water out of its head—this wasn't about the replication of life—but it demonstrated a role for technology as a means to elevate the mundane in to something positively magical.

A similar approach to technology as a source of wonder emerges in Japan. At the core of its indigenous religion, Shinto, is the belief that inanimate objects can possess kami or an animating spirit. The presence of this animism has been central to Japanese culture since since 300 BCE. It's no wonder that robots have been so readily accepted there.

As far back as the 1600s, karakuri automatons greeted guests by carrying cups of tea across the table. Instead of imitating humans, these mechanised dolls supported them, joyfully, irreverently, and imaginatively inserting themselves in to the most sacred of our rituals.

Perhaps, then, the presence of animism in Chinese religious practices similarly predisposes that culture to an acceptance of avatars, automatons and intelligences in places where Westerners would otherwise find them intrusive.

Considering this, it strikes me that Dee might not be made for us in the West, but for the market in which BMW Group sold over 30% of its total production in 2022 [^3]: China.

Virtual Personal Assistants in China

Since Nomi, Nio's VPA, captured the imagination of Chinese consumers in 2019, we've seen a proliferation of VPAs in Chinese cars. Even Ford is in on the game, creating a VPA for the Chinese-market Mustang Mach-E that doesn't appear anywhere else.

Indeed, to be considered a leading automotive brand in China, your products have to play a role in your customers lives beyond simply getting them from A to B. Providing a friend in the dashboard that can connect you to other digital products and services, or simply entertain you, is all part of the job you're hired to do. If you've ever spent time in China's intense traffic jams, it won't be a surprise that consumers are hungry for entertainment to help them pass the time.

It's also no wonder they're hungry for ever-higher levels of autonomous driving capability. In the short term, manufacturers are catering to customer demand for L3-capable vehicles, those which can drive themselves but require the driver to take over in an emergency. Looking a little further out, the government is pushing for the availability of L4-capable vehicles, which are able to drive themselves entirely, but within a limited set of scenarios, by 2025.

All this means that, within 5 years, it's possible to imagine a scenario in which an urban-dwelling Chinese BMW owner may hardly drive their car at all.

The Ultimate Entertainment Machine

From this perspective, BMW's presentation is illuminating. It celebrates access to content rather than engagement with the road. It invokes the Hollywood studio rather than the race track.

Wan Jun Yong, the emcee for the show, is captivated by Dee's psychedelic fantasy world while the car drives itself. The Ultimate Entertainment Machine makes perfect sense when the Ultimate Driving Machine has no future.

Seen in this light, the i Vision Dee is a bold attempt by BMW to radically reposition itself. It suggests that BMW is willing to cut itself adrift from its heritage, grounded in mechanically-mediated experiences, to make the leap in to a future mediated through augmented and virtual realities.

And this is where I get a little bit worried.

For BMW to pull off this act of creative destruction and reinvention, it requires a mindset and an executional capability radically different from what's driven the brand's success to date.

Yes, they still need to be able to manufacture cars. But they must also become experts in creating worlds or, at the very least, expert collaborators with those who do. If the stilted, cheesy CES presentation is anything to go by, they still have some way to go on that front.

Conclusion

Once upon a time, Chris Bangle, BMW's former design chief, said:

Cars are not a suit of clothes; cars are an avatar. Cars are an expansion of yourself: they take your thoughts, your ideas, your emotions, and they multiply it...

The car greets the driver with their name and their avatar.

The i Vision Dee still fulfils this role, and with a great deal more flexibility than has ever been available before. We can change the colour and graphics of the bodywork by manipulating eInk displays. Stylised versions of ourselves welcome us from the driver’s window as we approach.

Like we do with our social media profiles, we can manipulate the car reflect who we are on a moment-to-moment basis.

But by having Dee, this virtual soulmate designed by BMW, so deeply integrated in to the experience of the car takes things a step further: BMW talks about the car having its own "digital, but human character".

We know, whether from our little excursion through Western and Eastern attitudes to robots and artificial intelligences or the furious (read fearful) reaction to tools like ChatGPT, that this is dangerous territory on which to tread in the West. It places the car on the boundary of the human, making it as human as possible without being human, a position that's prone to provoke anxiety and fear.

So what are we to do?

First, we should heed the lessons of history. Our Western aversion to technology trying to imitate human life has been around for 400 years, so if we can unseat it at all, it will take time and sensitivity to our fears.

But if we are to unseat it, Bell implores us to think about how we might move beyond solving human problems with technology-that-is-almost-human, that is in ways that are likely to land us in the uncanny valley.

Instead, we should think about the ways in which technology can invoke the magical. If we can do that, Bell argues, then we might develop a new narrative around technology that, instead of being defined by fear, is defined by wonder.

And we could all use a little more of that.

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