What £170,000 gets you

This morning I was treated to a ride in a McLaren MP4-12C.  It's a phenomenal car, and so it should be with a basic price tag of over £170,000.

I've enjoyed quick and luxurious cars before, but never something quite in this league.  So before the ride I wondered: Could this car really be 10 times better than my trusty VW Golf Plus?  Or, for that matter, 3 times better than the frighteningly quick Mercedes C65 AMG I experienced a few weeks ago?

In terms of performance, the answer has to be "yes".  Pulling away from the traffic lights gave me at least 10 times more goosebumps than I usually get in my diesel family hatchback.  The engineering effort that has gone into producing such an exciting machine is astonishing - every mechanical element of the car has been carefully considered and then refined some more.  Everything has a purpose.  Everything works beautifully.

Everything except the interfaces inside.

Generally, they are clumsy to use - unpredictable and inaccurate - everything the car itself isn't.  Controls are ultra-lightweight (titanium in some instances) which makes the car a few grams lighter but makes the interfaces a driver frequently touches feel flimsy and sharp.  Displays look futuristic, but feel dated.  Subtle transitions and system feedback are lacking and navigation reflects the system rather than a user's needs.

To be fair, the majority of standard interfaces available are not brilliant, so one can understand why McLaren chose to create their own from scratch.  But in amongst the colossal effort that went into creating one of the best cars on the road today, the user experience went largely unconsidered.  And for £170,000, I'd expect the sat nav to work at least as well as the TomTom stuck to the windscreen of my VW.

BMW, it shouldn't take a Genius...

BMW UK have announced that following a successful pilot, dealerships around the country will soon be populated with a Genius.  One of their main roles will be to explain to customers how to use the technology in their cars.

At first glance, this seems like a copy of Apple's approach.  The key difference being that Apple's products are extraordinarily usable out of the box.  The Apple Genius exists to support users when their Apple product breaks.  The BMW Genius exists - it seems - to show users how to operate their product in the first place.

Whilst BMW  pioneered in car infotainment with iDrive, their offerings have always suffered from poor usability.  To be fair, they are not alone - the majority of today's in-car interfaces are neither user-centric or context-centric.  At best, they are a bit clunky.  At worst, they are are unsafe.

Enter the BMW Genius.  No doubt a big part of their role will be to dazzle potential customers with demonstrations of in-car technology in action.  But it seems they will also be charged with smoothing over the usability cracks of BMW's in-car experience.

130 Geniuses by the end of 2013 will go a long way.  Assuming these are paid just £25,000 a year, that's an annual investment of £3.25million in people alone.  For less than a fifth of that investment, BMW could establish an extensive, global user experience unit tasked with researching and redesigning in-car interfaces.  And when technology is designed around a user, who needs a genius to help them figure it out?