Five Ways Chrysler Portals Forward
CARS.COM — My name is Brian, and I’m a millennial.
That means that Chrysler’s new Portal concept, which debuted at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, was built with me in mind given that the automaker’s reps mentioned the word “millennial” somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 times during the car’s introduction. Why? Millennials love their tech, and Chrysler served that up in a big way in this concept.
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Here are five of the more head-turning technology features found on the Portal and what they mean for the future.
Peek-a-Boo: Facial Recognition With a Purpose
There are cameras everywhere on the Portal, inside and out. They’re there to detect who’s getting into the car and where they’re sitting. Once in, the Portal will load up saved, customized settings for each passenger, including climate preferences, music, lighting, or heated and cooled seat levels. And if you move to a different seat, the system will know and those settings follow you.
Personalized Audio Zones
The rule has always been that the driver chose the tunes. Don’t like my taste in music? Too bad. Creed for all.
Not in the Portal. Remember how it can store music preferences for different passengers? If you don’t like what the driver is playing, it also offers personalized audio zones that allow each occupant the ability to listen to music without needing headphones.
There’s also a microphone located by each seat, which enables passenger-to-passenger communication. Need to tell only one of the kids in the back to simmer down? You can do that.
Sharing Is Caring
The Portal can also function like a rolling social media hub. There’s a camera located on the interior for in-car selfies or in-car karaoke videos a la James Corden. Snap a picture of something everyone should see? No more passing the phone around; with your device connected to the Portal, content can be swiped up onto the screens so everyone can see it. Music and video content can be shared as well.
Outside Communication
In addition to connecting passengers, the Portal is also designed to communicate with the world around it. This can be as simple as the LED strip around the door opening changing color to signal to other drivers and pedestrians that the car is operating autonomously, or on an advanced level with the Portal using its internet connectivity and sensors to “talk” to public infrastructure and other autonomous vehicles.
The example Chrysler provided is of an ambulance approaching from out of sight. Once the sensors detect it, visual and audio cues will alert the driver to the position of the ambulance so that proper maneuvers can be taken.
Beyond that, the Portal can also talk to other places, including restaurants. Everyone in the car can load up their orders to the screen before you hit the drive-thru and then enter payments; no haggling over splitting the bill. And you no longer have to relay that long, customized In-N-Out Burger order through the window — it’s all done individually.
Chrysler touts many of the technologies in the Portal as customization, but what they really offer is ease. Even though many of us use the same devices, if I handed you someone else’s phone, it would be annoying — although the hardware is the same, the setup is foreign to me. I can’t find the apps I want, why is this one in this folder, where is the camera icon, etc.
The aim of the Portal’s technology is to make the passenger feel recognized. When you climb in, it already knows what you like and it’s all laid out for you. I guess that could be a selling point to millennials, as Chrysler insists, but it feels to me like that’d be a great selling point to humans of all ages — affinity for selfies or no.
