Designing for the Future w/ Ralph Gilles Stellantis' Chief Design Officer - AAH 717

Embraced it right away. So my counterpart in Europe and myself, we have a sub team that just looks into AI and actually is developing AI. Even our IT team came to us and said, 'Hey, this AI thing's here to stay. What can we do to help you?' They set up a captive AI so we can freely populate with our own stuff. We can touch the internet without putting our stuff out on the internet, right? Because the danger is leaking out. You just gave it away. Exactly. So we have our own internal AI system and it's amazing. The kids love it, I love it. We use it like if you have five designers, we use it as a sixth one. It gives you a perspective much quicker. It's making us lazy, I would admit, because the rendering is so good. You could put a sketch in there and say, 'I want it candy apple red,' boom, there it is, literally.

Yes, yeah. We're actually working on a monospace project and we had 10 ideas from our own designers and they are all different. And we just let it go and it created hundreds.

Like a minivan. Next Generation.

So with a Chrysler, it literally filled a wall of the same but different. You're sitting there, why does he have to do that? Anyway, we use AI like that. We use it to mash ideas together. We use it to write essays apparently. No, it's fun, you know.

It made us more efficient. Speed, I would say speed. In the 33 years I've been involved, we can process through so much stuff so much quicker. And now we're experimenting with digital research. We used to build models and take them to clinic, and we're experimenting with, can people look at a design just 2D, very high resolution 2D, and give us useful feedback? That again saves time. We're not the only ones, a lot of people are doing that in other industries. So yeah, speed is just compressing the process.

Oh, George. I forget his last name. His name is George.

It's fun. And those cars are evergreen, they're everlasting. So what can you do with these things? There's a huge community tricking them out and making them electrified. And Mopar is part of that story. Our team, Mark Troel, was involved in that project. So it's at SEMA as we speak. We're debuting it at SEMA show.

I think again, you can't be beholden to it. But our customers like it as much as we do. It's like music, right? There are certain riffs in music that never go out of style. Same with design, if you can use it sparingly and choose it in a way that's our gift. It's our gift from the people that had the brands before. And it's our job to take care of it. If we choose to push it away, that's fine.

It does, exactly. And I think there are spaces in our portfolio for that. But there's certain nameplates like the Wrangler, I would say the Charger is one of those where you can have a little fun. But out of our 108 nameplates that Stellantis has, if we play with that on five cars, what's the harm? The Fiat 500 is not an example of very well-done heritage DNA transfer, I would say.

Depends on the type of vehicle. Sometimes it is a marketing brief from a segment they may already be in. As a legacy company, you may own a segment for a long time, so I want to keep that up. Marketing will tell you, 'We're deficient here based on data, this is what we'd like in our next car.' Sometimes it's literally opening it up to the studios. Now we have the luxury of having studios all over the world. I can have people in Italy sketching on a Ram truck if I want to, and I have done that just to see what happens. I always try to do the upstart design, something you would never have expected. Put that in front of myself and the brands, let's say the evolutionary design, and then another revolutionary. Usually we'll take them to clinic. Sometimes there's one that is so obviously the right one that everybody likes it. But often not. We always have an upstart design in there.

Yeah, I hate them. I used to hate them. We kind of push away from them. But there's always something valuable. But you can't, because you're automatically dealing in the past. Most consumers, especially our own consumers, don't want us to change anything. They tend to like what they have.

Yeah, so I don't mind the criticism.

I wasn't.

I love it. I typically, if I don't agree with them, I tend to do a second model. I'll do the one that they want, call it the Homer Simpson effect. That's the car you really want, I'll do it for you. And then we do the one we believe in, and we keep them alive and put them in front. Usually the right one tends to win. Or we use a clinic as a tiebreaker. More often than not, luckily I have good credibility in the company, so they tend to believe me and work with me. And they are consumers too, so there's always something valid in their criticism. So I try to extract that and improve. I'm a big believer that the auto industry is actually a fashion industry. I think that more and more so. Exactly, Joe, because people love buying new cars. They really do. And when they buy a new car they want everybody to know it's a new one. So you've got to give them something, even if it's an evolution of a design. Those people that don't want anything changed, actually you still got to change something. I think about what would it have been like to be a designer in the '50s. They had new front ends every year. You'd go to the auto show, there's the new front end on the '57, the '58. So there's something there. Will we get back to that? I don't know, because now it's more tech, right? We'll update the tech. It is, but they didn't do all new bodies. I studied what Fisher Body did in the 1950s. They'd come out with an all-new design and then the next year they'd change the front end, then the rear end, then the roof line, and then they'd do another car. So really you had almost four years of the same basic car. And it seems to me that could be done today. We do it in three-year cycles, we have MCAS, midlife cycles. But we tend to change the tech every year. Through customer feedback, we can watch the customer now. The minute you buy the car we can see what features people are using right away. Say, okay, they didn't touch that feature at all, so let's get rid of that and replace it.

Oh my God. Right now they're not using the day mode, the white screen versus black. People tend to stay in the black screen, so we're going to sundown that probably over time. A lot of apps that we have on there that they don't use, I can't even begin to tell you. It's amazing. But that's the beauty of the digital stuff, right? You can tell what they're using or not. So we do that.

Well, I have a brand head. In the case of RAM, I have Mark Troel. These guys live and breathe it, that's all they do. They're the clearinghouse. Even if they get help from other studios around the world, it has to go through them. And they know what makes a RAM a RAM. Before we give those sketch assignments, we have a bit of a séance with those designers and take them through what is a RAM. We educate them a little bit. Most of the time we sit through a workshop saying where we want to take RAM, what's good about RAM, what we want to reinforce. And they get it. Designers are incredibly good at being anthropologists. They know how to understand culture. They understand a product's potential. You'd be surprised, you can take a designer from anywhere in the world, brief them, and they're going to pop out the right thing.

Stuff we didn't use. On Jeep, we have used a lot of their ideas. On RAM so far, not. But I love that they come at it a different way, especially with light signature and stuff like that.

I can't say too much about that. But yes, we are.

There's still laws. There's impact laws. The US is the most stringent. We have to have knee blockers. You have to test unbelted, that's the biggest thing people don't understand. In the US market, you have to test without seat belts at up to 35 miles an hour, where in every other country in the world you're allowed to use seat belts. So in a European-only car, you don't need knee blockers because theoretically your body would never touch the instrument panel. So that pre-describes how you control the car. As the tech gets faster, voice control is very good already. We all love Knight Rider and grew up with sci-fi movies with an AI voice-operated dynamic. Look how good Alexa is at your house. I think cars will be that way in the future, which means less and less input devices in the vehicle, and screens become more display than input.