Faraday Future’s Stupid New AI-Emotion-Enhanced Van Is A Reminder To Carmakers That Nobody Wants This Kind Of Crap

How the hell is Faraday Future still in business? They’ve only sold 16 cars since 2023. That’s only 16 more new cars than my cat, Tomato, has sold in the same time period, and I’m 99% certain he doesn’t even own a car company. I don’t even think he has money. And yet somehow the company is still getting funding and putting on huge events like the one our own David Tracy went to the other day, where they introduced their new car, the FX Super One, a Chinese market Great Wall van with a big dumb color LCD slapped over the grille.

Faraday Future made a big deal out of how they have given the FX Super One something they call the “EAI F.A.C.E. (Embodied Artificial Intelligence Front AI Communication Ecosystem) System” and even if you try to ignore the way “Ecosystem System” sounds – which, by the way, you can’t – it’s all so deeply and unrelentingly cloying and inane I can’t get it out of my head.

A message needs to be sent to automakers all over the globe about this sort of thing, and that message is stop, stop right now, knock it off, stop, don’t do this, stop, stop, stop.

Listen to this idiotic pile of inanimate crap claim it has emotions and a soul and you will love it:

Who is asking for this? Nobody, that’s who. Nobody wants their car to have some kind of half-assed “personality” that they need to interact with. Have any of the people involved with this product met people? Can you think of literally anyone in your life who has told you that what they’re really missing in their lives is the opportunity to stand in front of their car and chat meaninglessly to some silly algorithm? Nobody wants this.

And it’s not even original! We’ve known that nobody wants this sort of bullshit for years now, because misguided carmakers have been making concept cars that incorporate these very same idiotic ideas, and they’ve usually been better-realized than the Faraday Future screen-tacked-on-someone-else’s-van approach.

Remember back in 2023, when BMW introduced Dee, its virtual personality whatever? I’m going to ask you to watch this video, but I’m also going to apologize up front, because it’s really cloying and pandering and richly, luxuriantly stupid:

This is the same shit that Faraday is showing with their FX Super One, except I suppose it’s a bit more resilient if you accidentally tap the front of the car while parking. But it still has all of the usual hallmarks of Stupid Car AI Tech (SCAT): lots of useless screen displays, lots of useless back-and-forth chatter with the driver, claims of emotion and soul, and so on.

All of this crap really seemed to start back in 2017, when carmakers like Toyota and Honda showed off “emotional” AI cars with external-facing displays and other modern frippery:

Here’s Toyota’s Concept-i specifically, which really leaned into integrated external displays:

External displays simply aren’t a new idea, nor are they something people actually want. I can’t stress this enough: there are plenty of things people want from new cars – efficiency, clever packaging, comfort, economy, performance, cars that aren’t cripplingly expensive to repair, cars that age well, reliability, and so many other things – none of which have anything at all to do with talking to some gimmicky AI “personality” in your car.

If people actually want some sort of AI companion/partner/whatever, they already have AI assistants in their phones that follow them around all day. People who use those are about the most receptive possible people to systems like these. Would they want to deal with another, separate AI system for their car, or would they rather just interact with their existing phone-based AI buddy while in their car?

What, exactly, do the designers of these car-personalities see themselves as actually doing? They don’t make using the car easier. And, when we’re alone, people usually have plenty going on in their heads and don’t want or need to have discussions with their car. You want to keep thinking about your own, well, everything, the actual people in your life, the work you’re doing, the concepts you’re interested in, and none of this is made better by discussing it with the machine you use to get around.

Your toaster doesn’t greet you and ask how your day is, because if it did, you’d probably fling it down some stairs. Cars are very different than toasters, but there’s a similar dynamic at play: you don’t have to fucking socialize with it.

Now, I get that cars are not rational, and we anthropomorphize them all the time. I do this nonstop; my own cars have all sorts of emotional resonance to me, and I feel like they have personalities, but it’s a very different sort of thing than slapping some AI personality simulator onto the car. My old Beetle or little Pao or my new Citroën 2CV all feel like very distinct and different personalities to me, but those personalities are really just how my own personality reacts to the design and engineering of the car, and the result of effects of time spent with the car, and how I perceive and react to the way the car looks and smells and sounds and behaves. These cars have personalities, but those personalities are constructs built out of pieces of my own consciousness that I lend to these otherwise inanimate machines.

The emotional bond between cars and people is very real, and it does not require lines of computer code. In fact, an AI attempt at “personality” is inherently doomed to be creepy, as it’s a sort of uncanny valley of emotion. It’s a pastiche, which deliberately leaves no room for your actual, human, real emotions to take residence within the car, and the result is something forced and artificial.

Think about it this way: you know the Van Gogh painting of sunflowers? This one:

That object is, of course, not a vase of sunflowers. It’s paint on canvas, painted by a brilliant but disturbed man very long ago. And yet it somehow conveys the idea of sunflowers, the almost-delirious joyful exuberance of sunflowers, with all their showy yellowness, better than, say, a carefully-made bouquet of plastic sunflowers.

A bunch of quite accurate plastic sunflowers may technically resemble real sunflowers more than this painting, but they don’t have anywhere near the emotional impact. Plastic sunflowers are just artificial constructs, placeholders for the real thing that don’t really fool anyone, and no one really ever cares about.

That’s what these AI emotion-system-bullshit things are: plastic sunflowers. Your old car, the one you’ve been with for so many years and have shared so many experiences with, and that you can identify by the sound the starter motor makes when you turn the key, and with the distinctive smell you’d know a mile away, that’s the painting of sunflowers. The car may not really have a personality, but it’s sort of a vessel for some of yours.

So let’s get back to the main point here: I have rarely seen something as unwanted or idiotic as the FX Super One and its EAI F.A.C.E. system. It’s baffling and embarrassing and an abject waste of time, money, resources, and the human spirit itself. The only good thing about it is that, based on Faraday Future’s track record of getting things to market, I’ll likely never have to encounter that ill-conceived steaming pile of screen and van out in the world, because I’m skeptical any will actually get made or sold.

Carmakers, let Faraday Future’s misstep be a warning: don’t waste your time with this shit. Nobody is asking for their car to be some annoying companion who won’t fucking shut up when you’re tired and just want to go home from work and maybe listen to some music. Life is already full of phony people who try to rope you into conversations you don’t care about; no one’s car should become that.

Ever.