At CES 2024, the Exhibition of Failed Ideas offers a warning amid the hype

LAS VEGAS — The annual CES technology spectacle always is stuffed with innovative and often wild ideas. 2024 is no different.

Continental exhibited technology that starts a car using the facial recognition of a driver. Automotive and appliance giant Bosch teamed up with Amazon Web Services for a system that turns on an espresso machine and offers up a fresh latte as a driver reaches home.

Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng promised to deliver its Land Aircraft Carrier flying cars late next year, and BMW demonstrated augmented-reality glasses to display navigation instructions and hazard warnings, among other information, while the car is in motion.

While some of these ideas might ultimately take off, even CES contains a warning and a dose of humility.

Enter its Exhibition of Failed Ideas, tucked in the very back of Las Vegas Convention Center's North Hall, where a simple sea-green display implores the viewer, "Don't let your product end up on this wall."

The exhibit highlights technology and automotive products relegated to history's dustbin. There's the TwitterPeek, a device devoted to sending and receiving tweets, the Microsoft Zune, an mp3 player launched five years after the release of the Apple iPod and a miniature of the Delorean, beset by production delays and quality issues like failing electrical systems.

Over the years, CES has been littered with supposed smash hits that ultimately failed to materialize.

Only two years ago, the Lordstown Endurance, a finalist for North American Truck of the Year honors, went on display in the convention center's West Hall. Now, the bankrupt truck maker might have to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission a $45 million penalty for violating federal securities laws.

In 2020, BYTON unveiled the M-Byte electric SUV's huge 48-inch display screen here. This past July, that company filed for bankruptcy.

Faraday Future revealed the FF 91 at CES in 2017, what the company called "the first of a new species," but in December it got a notice from Nasdaq that it had failed to maintain a minimum closing share price of $1.

Fisker's EMotion impressed conference goers in 2018 with a claim the electric roadster could charge up to 125 miles of range after only nine minutes of being plugged in. That did not happen, the $129,000 car is not in production and, this month, Fisker named its third chief accounting officer since October.

Of course, none of the show's exhibitors would admit that a product is anything less than the next big thing. This is Vegas after all, and Sin City and CES make the perfect couple.

From a company perspective, tapping into the frothy hype machine of CES makes sense. Automakers must win several races at once — the race to affordable and long-range EVs, the race to more advanced driver-assistance technology and lately, the race to include more artificial intelligence-enabled cabin features, from voice assistants to gaming.

Western automakers are also competing with Chinese ones, the latter of which had a dominant presence at the show. The Detroit 3 all skipped CES this year. Meanwhile, the Chinese companies "started with not only a blank sheet of paper, but with a different mindset" that was "very much software-driven," said Harald Wimmer, the global automotive leader at consulting firm PwC.

The stakes are high.

Jack Weast, vice president of Intel automotive, predicts that software-defined vehicles and EVs will follow the same trajectory as smartphones. In 2010, smartphones comprised 19 percent of the global market, and in 2020, they accounted for nearly 80 percent. In 2025, EVs and software-defined vehicles are expected to hit 18 percent of the global market, and by 2035, Intel predicts they will make up 80 percent.

In the mobile phone industry transformation, "some iconic brands that had been around for a very long time were suddenly gone and irrelevant because they failed to make the pivot," Weast said. In automotive, "we believe the pivot is now."

The current reality is enough to make even the most seasoned and well-capitalized company sweat.

Only about a quarter of automakers and Tier 1 suppliers are fully prepared for the outset of software-defined vehicles, according to an AlixPartners survey released last week of 180 senior executives at auto and tech firms.

Still, software-defined vehicles and AI are the talk of the show.

Infotainment and related features, such as in-cabin gaming, video and streaming products, are on display throughout the floor. Meanwhile, less than half of owners want to use embedded or built-in infotainment systems for phone calls, voice recognition and navigation. Most consumers prefer smartphone mirroring, such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, according to J.D. Power's 2023 Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout study from last summer.

Companies large and small showcase shiny vehicle prototypes and technology, and give their swag away on the event floor, while in the presentation halls upstairs the industry's greatest minds wonder aloud whether it will amount to anything substantive.

"OEMs get carried away" in designing new features "due to the engineering DNA and legacy," said Constantin Gall, a managing partner at EY. "But at the end of the day, does anyone really click that option" to install another software-defined feature "and pay another $100, $1,000?"

Automakers live in the tension between ideas that fail and the failure to try to build indispensable technology. Development timelines are shrinking and the pressure is growing. No one wants to be the Delorean, but at one point, even Tesla seemed like a stupid idea.

At CES, you may end up in the Exhibition of Failed Ideas, but you miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take.