Millennials drive industry to rethink parts

DETROIT -- Here's a test to see if you're prepared for an auto industry ruled by edgy, hard-to-please millennial consumers.

Mobis, the Hyundai Group-affiliated auto parts giant, developed a technology that was shown last week during the SAE World Congress here: a rear-seat display screen that offers passengers an interactive city map.

So why would a car buyer want an interactive map in the back seat, away from the driver? The answer: He wouldn't. It's a trick question.

Many millennials don't want to buy a car at all, but they might summon Uber for a ride to dinner. And if the driver has no idea where the restaurant is, the passenger in the back seat can call it up on the map and shoot the destination to the driver's console screen.

The example illustrates the auto industry's challenge with millennials, generally those consumers ages 18 to 34. It's a demographic that has the industry reconsidering its approach to parts.

"You can't give those consumers everything they want, because we have to appeal to other demographics, too," said Joseph Steffey, an electronics engineer at Hyundai-Kia America Technical Center near Detroit, who presented the Mobis technology. "But we do need components that appeal to that young, more tech-savvy customer."

For fresh ideas, Toyota asked a team of Clemson University graduate students to design a concept crossover aimed at young consumers. Clemson displayed the concept, dubbed uBox, at the SAE show.

Though Toyota is unlikely to build it, the uBox offers a composite picture of what young people might want in an affordable vehicle, said Johnell Brooks, a Clemson associate professor who helped direct the project.

Inside, the uBox seats have flip-up desk surfaces and can be arranged to create a workspace, helpful for young people considering self-employment. The uBox also has 110-volt plugs inside and out, useful for a proprietor who travels to job sites where power tools or electric equipment might be used.

Carbon fiber interior trim pieces are left unpainted. "This is a generation of people who have expressed a desire for natural looks, for what's real and not decorative," Brooks said.

The car's inexpensive exterior body panels can be easily replaced through 3-D printing, allowing expressive car owners to share designs for replacement parts.

While the uBox is a refreshing what-if scenario, it doesn't solve the industry's immediate headache: young consumers who want better infotainment controls.

In a bid to add more features, automakers have tinkered with an assortment of knobs, touch screens and voice technology. The trick is to do so without alienating baby boomers.

Unlike many older motorists, millennials are comfortable with voice recognition technology. As J.D. Power has chronicled, balky voice recognition systems generate more consumer complaints than anything else in the car.

But young motorists expect to use conversational commands to operate their navigation and audio systems -- just as they do with their mobile phones, said Ned Curic, chief technology officer of Toyota Motor North America.

"They have good experiences with Siri, Google and Cortana, which is very different from the older [voice] technology we used to have in vehicles, which wasn't all that good," Curic said.

Millennials also want to customize their infotainment systems to reflect their choice of apps and social media, he said.

A recent batch of concept cars -- including the BMW i Vision Future Interaction, Acura Precision and VW T-Cross Breeze -- featured dashboards with virtually no conventional knobs.

Traditionalists might shudder, but millennials seem OK with it.

According to a recent IHS Automotive online survey of 4,000 young consumers, respondents preferred touch screens, voice recognition and steering wheel controls. Conventional knobs lagged behind.

Younger motorists tend to be early adopters, but older motorists are trending in the same direction, and it's due to the ubiquity of smartphones, said IHS analyst Brian Rhodes.

Auto technology suppliers are working to ensure that smartphones -- along with popular apps such as Waze, Pandora or Facebook -- can be smoothly integrated into vehicles.

That is a work in progress.

In 2014, as Apple moved deeper into vehicle component technology with the debut of its CarPlay infotainment interface, automakers discovered that their head units, the control boxes in the instrument panels, could not accommodate a motorist's iPhone and a passenger's Android phone at the same time.

So Delphi Automotive has designed a device called a USB dual role hub, which allows more than one device to be plugged into the head unit.

"Your spouse can climb in next to you and listen to music on her Android, and your two kids in the back each watch a different movie on their tablets, and everybody has a great experience," said Mary Gustanski, Delphi's vice president of engineering.

General Motors installed Delphi's device in 2016 models, and other customers will follow in 2017, Gustanski said.

Nuts-and-bolts connectivity issues such as these are more likely to affect a millennial's choice of vehicle than head-up display, gesture control or even horsepower.

"The vehicle is a very important device in their lives, and they want to harmonize it with all their other devices," Toyota's Curic said. "They want that experience to be available in their vehicles."

But automakers should not clutter up their cockpit controls to provide that connectivity.

"Millennials prefer very simple, intuitive controls," Curic said.

"I think it's a path forward for most automakers, and definitely for us. We need a much quieter cabin."