Hasta La Ideas

We haven’t heard about them lately except when bad things happen, but autonomous vehicles are still pretty much the desired future of transportation. Safety concerns aside, who wouldn’t want to just sit back and relax during an hour-long drive to and from work? Who wouldn’t simply want to enjoy the journey from one state to another without worrying about the traffic or, better yet, your coffee breaks?

This concept for a self-driving vehicle or SDV doesn’t touch on the actual driving itself but on what you can do inside. Why not enjoy a sip of your favorite caffeinated brew while binging on a new TV series? This concept definitely tries to do that by putting a robot on your dashboard, complete with a flexible arm that serves you that coffee and a face on the steering wheel that makes it feel like you’re actually communicating with someone, for better or worse.

Designer: Yu Joung Kim

Even with all the hype around personalized and human-sounding AI in tech today, the AI inside self-driving cars remains oddly distant and impersonal. Of course, car makers are rightfully more focused on making sure autonomous vehicles are safe for both passengers and pedestrians, but those two goals aren’t mutually exclusive. The lack of a human element in many of the concepts they present paints a very cold and impersonal picture that loses its appeal after the novelty of the technology has worn off.

fika, which supposedly means “coffee break” or “tea time” in Swedish, puts a face on those robotic cars, quite literally even. Admittedly, it might be a bit uncomfortable having a virtual face looking back at you from the steering wheel, but it gives the car some personality, turning it into something more like a friend than an appliance. That, however, isn’t the most unique thing about it, which is the fact that it can serve you coffee.

Yes, there’s a coffee machine built inside the dashboard of this car, and it won’t even make you reach for that cup and accidentally spill the hot liquid on yourself. It has a flat flexible arm that reaches up to grab the cup and then carefully hands it to you. Compared to this feat, even the color-changing surface of the dashboard sounds almost uninteresting.

Yes, the concept is equal parts fascinating and disconcerting, but it does touch on one missing aspect in many of those future visions of self-driving cars. They always presume that people inside said vehicles will be traveling with other people, focusing on the social benefits of not having to mind the wheel or the road, while solo travelers are left to fend for themselves and seek their own entertainment. The fika concept not only tries to add a bit of character to an otherwise smart but flat car but can also potentially minimize the coffee stops you have to make and save both time and money along the way.

The post Self-driving car concept puts a robot barista on your dashboard first appeared on Yanko Design.