POD

2001-10-31

I'm watching Tonight−2 and they are showing the Tokyo Car Show which is currently going on. They of course are showing some of the concept cars. One interesting ideas it the POD.

What makes it interesting is not it's looks but it's features. For example all 4 doors open automatically and slide out in opposite direction giving the most room for getting in.

The seats automatically turn themselves to make it easy to get in. And can turn for 4 person conversation.

Inside each seat has a display for watching TV or browsing the net etc.

The most interesting thing to me though is that the car has moods and can display them. You can't see them well in those pictures but there are multi−color LED grids in the tracks above and below the headlights that for example when it's sad, animated tears will roll down below the headlights or when it's angry diagonal lines tilted down and to the center appear which gives it an semi angry appearance. But, even on top of that there is an LCD grid in front of each headlight so that the headlights can shut their eyes, blink, tilt them in so they look angry etc.

A different car had an interesting idea. The front seat slides from one seat into two. It does this by having the seat built such that every other slat of seat belongs to the other seat so that if there is only one person driving the entire passenger side can be 100% clear making more room to carry stuff. The bad thing, the seat didn't look comfortable at all. I guess you'd need to bring some cushions.

Also it has a cell phone pouch (all cell phones in Japan have the same connector on the bottom), the idea is that you put the phone in the pouch and now the car is networked and you can use the car's LCD display to have a video call or watch net TV etc.

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