It’s not just the electric vehicle companies working on advanced, unneeded, and possibly invasive technology. Ford has filed a patent for a system that can read lips when ambient noise is too high for your vehicle to hear you properly.
The patent, filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), is called “Systems and Methods for Hands-Free Communication in Convertible Vehicles,” which is pretty self-explanatory. It reads: “The vehicle may enable a lip reading mode and/or a gesture and facial expression detection mode in order to determine words spoken by a user of the vehicle.”
By activating Advanced Mode, drivers will basically allow their Ford convertible to read their lips, study their facial expressions, and watch their hand gestures to assume what the driver is trying to say when the wind and traffic noises are too loud when driving with the top down. There are currently only two convertibles in Ford’s lineup: the Mustang and Bronco.
This is currently just a patent, and it hasn’t been greenlit. However, drivers are already annoyed with it.
Advanced Mode joins the party: We already have Siri, Gesture Control, and cars telling us to take a break
For some reason, automakers keep trying to complicate buttons. Did anyone even complain about pressing buttons and turning knobs? Was that really some issue in the 2010s that needed to be addressed? I just typed “I hate pressing buttons in my car” on Google to see if any Reddit threads, forums, or op-eds would come up, but only found the opposite: people ragging on touchscreens.
Going from physical buttons to a flat screen was the first step in this largely unwanted timeline. In an attempt to make cars feel more futuristic, automakers started installing large screens and infotainment systems. Tesla is often considered one of the trendsetters who helped start this largely undesirable change. The design felt lazy and soulless, which seems to be the goal of many EVs anyway, and you continue to see drivers demanding more buttons and knobs to this day. Some carmakers have answered the call, with Volkswagen vowing that its future cars will feature button clusters on the steering wheel and the like.
But screens were just the beginning. Since then, modern cars have tried to make things even easier, even though nobody found them difficult to begin with. Many vehicles began offering voice commands, something that had been experimented with back in the early 2000s. When Apple introduced Siri Eyes-Free for CarPlay in 2013, we saw many more cars adopt the feature. In 2017, Ford became the first carmaker to integrate Alexa into its navigation system. From there, many cars got their own voice assistants, with Lamborghini becoming the first brand to integrate Alexa into its controls, including volume adjustment and seat movement. By 2022, around 75% of cars had a voice assistant.
You’d think that would be peak. The ability to just talk to your car seems good enough. But carmakers were not done. For some reason. One of the most useless innovations of all time arrived in BMW vehicles. Gesture Control allows drivers to operate their infotainment system functions without touching anything. To change the volume, navigate, make phone calls, etc., you would just move your hand in front of the center console. But why? How does this help? How is this any better than just touching things? You’re still moving your hand around anyway. In fact, this system is even worse since it often doesn’t work as intended.
“I turned it off five minutes after buying my car. It’s stupid and pointless,” said one Reddit user.
“Soon, true luxury cars will have physical buttons. The insanity has to stop. I’m not buying a new car if it doesn’t have physical controls for at least the stereo and climate control. I’ll buy used cars for the rest of my life if I have to,” added another.
And they were sorta right, as supercar makers like Ferrari continue to boast high-end interiors full of buttons. It almost feels cheap, lazy, and silly to have just a bunch of massive screens around your cabin at this point. It’s not a sign of the future. It’s a sign of the times: almost every car has one; it’s nothing special.
“We believe that, still, the digital interaction has an advantage, but it should be blended in a way that the most used button should be physical, and some of them, like the start/stop, which are iconic, representing part of the history, should be there for this reason,” Ferrari’s Enrico Galliera recently said of the Amalfi.
However, back in Average Joe land, we’re dealing with even more invasive and annoying tech. We have tons of vehicles implementing a Vehicle Monitoring System, which will tell you when your eyes aren’t open enough or your head isn’t in the right position. Eye tracker technology will alert you when you aren’t paying enough attention to the road. Some cars can order you to keep your eyes on the road. Some cars will even tell you to take a break from driving.
And now, Ford wants to read your lips. According to the patent, Advanced Mode can also see if you’re frowning, rolling your eyes, or flipping it off. You’re basically never alone.
While I can see the usefulness of some safety features that help you keep your eyes on the road rather than on a big screen, I think all this tech has gone too far. I mean, why do we even need big screens to begin with? There have been plenty of studies that show it’s dangerous to keep scrolling through menus on your infotainment system instead of just twisting a knob. And what if I don’t want to talk to my car, wave my hands around, or have a car react to my hand gestures or eye movements? What if I just want to enjoy the drive?
Of course, you can shut these things off. Usually. Some of them you have to pay extra for. But it’d be even better if automakers stopped wasting money on these things and just gave us vehicles without them for cheaper. Maybe without all this useless tech, commuter cars would be more affordable. Maybe work on something that actually matters to drivers, like steering wheel feel, handling, comfortable riding positions, and reliability. Or making cars not look like depressing boxes.
